The King's Henchman

The King's Henchman is an opera in three acts composed by Deems Taylor to an English language libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The libretto is based on both legend and historical figures documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle including Edgar the Peaceful, Elfrida of Devon, and Dunstan.

However, the competition for the 1927 season had thrown up no winner, and Otto Kahn, chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Taylor directly with the offer of a commission.

[2] At the suggestion of his wife, Taylor approached the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry two years earlier.

Taylor left the choice of story to her, and she initially started working on a setting of the fairy tale Snow White with the provisional title The Casket of Glass.

She decided to base the story on figures in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a subject that had fascinated her when she was in college, and began working on it in November 1925, first in Maine, and then in New Mexico at the home of Arthur Ficke.

The large-scale production (twenty-two individual roles plus a chorus) was directed by Wilhelm von Wymetal with sets designed by Joseph Urban.

Cincinnati Opera staged the work in 1936, and in 1937 it was toured with the Federal Music Project, but despite its great success at the time, The King's Henchman soon fell out of the repertory and is now all but forgotten.