The Canterbury Pilgrims
Opera in four acts by Reginald de Koven. Book by Percy Mackaye. Produced for the first time on any stage at the Metropolitan Opera House, March 8, 1917, with the following cast:
| Chaucer | Johannes Sembach | |
| The Wife of Bath | Margaret Ober | |
| The Prioress | Edith Mason | |
| The Squire | Paul Althouse | |
| King Richard II | Albert Reiss | |
| Johanna | Marie Sundelius | |
| The Friar | Max Bloch | |
| Joannes | Pietro Audisio | |
| Man of Law | Robert Leonhardt | |
| The Miller | Basil Ruysdael | |
| The Host | Giulio Rossi | |
| The Herald | Riccardo Tegani | |
| Two Girls | } | Marie Tiffany |
| } | Minnie Egener | |
| The Pardoner | Julius Bayer | |
| The Summoner | Carl Schlegel | |
| The Shipman | Mario Laurenti | |
| The Cook | Pompilio Malatesta | |
Conductor, Bodanzky.
The time is April, 1387; the place, England. Chaucer, first poet-laureate of England, travelling incognito with pilgrims from London to Canterbury, encounters Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, a woman of the lower middle class, buxom, canny, and full of fun, who has had five husbands, and is looking for a sixth. She promptly falls in love with Chaucer who, instead of returning her sprightly attentions, conceives a high, serious, poetic affection for the Prioress. She is a gentlewoman, who, according to the custom of the time, is both ecclesiastical and secular, having taken no vows.
The Wife of Bath, however, is determined to win her man. Devising a plan for this, she wagers that she will be able to get from the Prioress the brooch, bearing the inscription “Amor Vincit Omnia,” that this lady wears upon her wrist. Should Alisoun win, Chaucer is bound by compact to marry her. After much plotting and by means of a disguise, the Wife of Bath wins her bet, and Chaucer ruefully contemplates the prospect of marrying her. In his plight he appeals to King Richard II, who announces that the Wife of Bath may marry a sixth time if she chooses, but only on condition that her prospective bridegroom be a miller. A devoted miller, who has long courted her, joyfully accepts the honour, and the opera ends with a reconciliation between Chaucer and the Prioress.
Mr. Mackaye in speaking of his libretto at the time of the production of the opera had this to say:
“In writing ‘The Canterbury Pilgrims’ one of my chief incentives was to portray, for a modern audience, one of the greatest poets of all times in relation to a group of his own characters. As a romancer of prolific imagination and dramatic insight, Chaucer stands shoulder to shoulder with Shakespeare. For English speech he achieved what Dante did for Italian, raising a local dialect to a world language.
“Yet the fourteenth-century speech of Chaucer is just archaic enough to make it difficult to understand in modern times. Consequently his works are little known today, except by students of English literature.
“To make it more popularly known I prepared a few years ago (with Professor J.S.P. Tatlock) ‘The Modern Readers’ Chaucer’; and I wrote for Mr. E.H. Sothern in 1903 my play ‘The Canterbury Pilgrims,’ which since then has been acted at many American universities by the Coburn Players, and in book form is used by many Chaucer classes.
“In the spring of 1914, at the suggestion of Mr. De Koven, I remodelled the play in the form of opera, condensing its plot and characters to the more simple essentials appropriate to operatic production. Thus focussed, the story depicts Chaucer—the humorous, democratic, lovable poet of Richard Second’s court—placed between two contrasted feminine characters, the Prioress, a shy, religious-minded gentlewoman, who has retired from the world, but has as yet taken no vows; and the Wife of Bath, a merry, sensual, quick-witted hoyden of the lower middle class, hunting for a sixth husband. These three, with many other types of old England, are pilgrims, en route from London to the shrine of Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury.
“Becoming jealous of the Prioress, the Wife of Bath makes a bet with Chaucer concerning the gentlewoman’s behaviour—a bet which she wins by a trick in the third act, only to lose it in the fourth.
“The work is a comedy in blank verse of various metres, interspersed with rhythmed lyrics. For the first time, I believe, in drama of any language, it inaugurates on the stage the character of the famous first poet-laureate of England—the ‘Father of English Literature.’”
Mr. De Koven also tells how he came to compose the music:
“I have often been asked the question why I have never before now written a work in the larger operatic form, and my answer has always been that I was waiting until I could find a really good book. For an opera libretto that successfully meets the requirements of a lyric work of this class, which is primarily for and of the stage, in the way of dramatic interest, development and climax, a poetic knowledge of the possibilities and limitations of the English language when sung, and those visual and picturesque qualities in the story which alone can make the unreal conditions of opera, per se, either plausible or intelligible, is about as rare as the proverbial white crow—as many gifted composers have found to their cost.
“All these requirements are, I think, fulfilled in the really charming libretto which Mr. Mackaye has written in ‘The Canterbury Pilgrims,’ which came to me unsought as it were. As a member of a committee for choosing plays to be used in settlement work on the East Side, my wife read Mr. Mackaye’s earlier play of the same name, and told me she thought it contained excellent operatic material. Agreeing with her, I went to Mr. Mackaye and suggested the idea to him. He agreed with me and soon afterwards, early in 1914, we set to work. To adapt a play of over 17,000 words for operatic purposes by merely cutting it was manifestly impossible. Entire reconstruction, both in structure and language, was necessary, and this Mr. Mackaye has so successfully accomplished that in my judgment his libretto, as an artistic whole, is far superior to his earlier play.
“I took the first act with me when I went abroad in March, 1914, and the entire opera, begun October 10, 1914, was finished on December 21, 1915, during which time I lived at Vevey, Switzerland, amid, and yet far from, wars and rumours of wars.
“As to my part of the work, the characters of Mr. Mackaye’s story, whose essentially old English atmosphere appealed to me strongly from the first, naturally suggested Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ as a model in a sense. But Verdi abjured the leit motif or motto theme, and I had always felt that Wagner’s theory, applied in some form, was the true basis of construction for all musico-dramatic work. Yet again it always seemed to me that, save in the hands of a consummate master, the leit motif, pushed to its logical development, was only too apt to become tiresome, obscure, and ineffective. So, after much consideration, I bethought me of the very way in which Massenet in ‘Manon’ had used a limited number of what might be called recurrent themes—such as the one for ‘Des Grieux’—and made up my mind to try what could be done along these simpler and more plastic lines.
“So, without attempting to describe pictorially in music, swords, tarnhelms, or dragons, or to weave music into an intricate contrapuntal work, I have in ‘The Canterbury Pilgrims,’ while following closely the spirit and meaning of Mr. Mackaye’s poetic text, attributed a number of saliently melodic themes to the characters, incidents, and even material objects of the story, and when these recur in or are suggested by the text the attributive themes recur with them, so that, as I hope, they may be readily recognizable by the untechnical opera-goer and aid him in following this story and action.
“Just a word in regard to the English language as a medium for opera and song. As Mr. Gatti says that a typical operatic audience in Italy, knowing their own language and generally familiar with both text and story of their operas, only expect to understand about half the words as sung, owing to the very conditions of opera itself, may it not be fairly said that American audiences who go to hear operas in English, expecting to understand every word, expect the impossible, and should be more reasonable in their demands?
“Again, I have always contended and maintained that the English language, properly used, is an entirely singable language, and as so far during the rehearsals of ‘The Canterbury Pilgrims’ none of the artists has seemed to find any great difficulty in singing in English beyond that inherent to a certain lack of familiarity with the language itself, it looks as if my contention stands at least a fair chance of being admitted.”