Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

Author:Nancy Milford [Milford, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary
ISBN: 9781588360946
Google: rLaotcZRzqgC
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 21

That February, after attending a concert of Deems Taylor’s “Portrait of a Lady,” Millay wrote a letter to the anonymous music editor of the New York World, who had criticized it roundly. He’d said the audience had been so enthusiastic, it must have been packed with the composer’s relatives, which Edna hotly denied: “Sir, I was a member of that audience. I heard with close attention and deep pleasure an unusually good program unusually well performed.” Last night’s audience, she wrote, far from being composed of Mr. Taylor’s relatives, “was made up of discerning and honestly delighted strangers.” The joke was that Taylor was the music editor, a job he quit at the end of the season in order to compose.

Deems Taylor and Mary Kennedy had first met Edna in Paris, when they had been on their honeymoon in the early summer of 1922, just before she had fled to Shillingstone.

When the Metropolitan Opera Company commissioned Deems to write an American opera, Mary suggested that Edna Millay write the libretto. “I thought she was extraordinary. She had something to say that I wanted to hear. And I knew that from her first poems.” However, there was a snag: “She had written just this one act of The Casket of Glass—which turned about the Snow White fairy tale of the beautiful girl who when she takes an apple which is poisoned and it lodges in her throat—well, it was one of the classic versions of Snow White. And it could not be done. There was one entire scene where the heroine had to sing with her face covered with a cloth! And that was impossible for a singer.”

So Edna abandoned it. And then all three waited.

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