Music: Revival of Reggie

The perennial U.S. wedding hymn, Oh, Promise Me, comes, as younger people often fail to realize, from Robin Hood, an operetta of the Mauve Decade. Robin Hood was revived last week on Broadway after 12 years, in the spirit of its original Chicago production by “The Bostonians” in 1890.

The revival provided some of the rank est dialogue, by the late, hard-working Harry B. Smith, to be heard on Broadway since Robin Hood last played there.

A: You wouldn’t harm a poor mendicant monk? B: Certainly I would, if he came monking around my wife.

The revival also proved, to those who had never known it, that Robin Hood’s composer, the late Henry Louis Reginald de Koven, was a good deal more than a convenient rhyme for Beethoven — he was one of the deftest and most ingratiating composers outside the heavyweight class.

The occasion gave oldtimers a chance to consider what a remarkable fellow Reggie was in many ways.

The dazzlingly elegant De Koven wrote 20 operettas and two grand operas. So little faith did The Bostonians have in Robin Hood that they spent exactly $109.50 on its Chicago premiere. Wrote one of its early critics: “It is always well to drown the first litter of pups. Therefore, it may be proper to forgive Messrs.

Smith and De Koven.” But Robin Hood’s success mounted so fast that The Bostonians alone gave it 4,250 performances, and netted De Koven and his librettist over a million dollars.

Pillowed Unease. Reginald de Koven did not need the money. A graduate of Oxford and a famous cotillion leader in the salons of Florence and Paris, he boasted an ancestry that included three colonial governors, a wife who was the daughter of U.S. Senator Charles B. Farwell, Chicago dry-goods tycoon. Reggie wore a monocle from the age of 15. When he built his Tudor mansion on Manhattan’s Park Ave nue between 85th and 86th Streets (it still stands), he dressed himself as Sir Walter Raleigh and gave a mammoth housewarming, serving up a boar’s head on a platter.

This Gilbert & Sullivan admirer and pupil of Franz (Poet & Peasant) von Suppe suffered from withering attacks of gout. In his later years, doctors limited his alcoholic consumption to vintage Moselle.

He often composed lying in bed on a flood of pillows, cursing elegantly at the gout but sticking to his scores for 16 hours at a stretch. His popular songs had titles like How Do I Love Thee, Spring’s First Kiss, I Love Thee So, Can I Forget. He wrote concert reviews for many years on the old New York World and Journal. In 1920, attending a supper in his honor, 60-year-old Reginald de Koven was stricken with apoplexy. He died a few minutes later.