Reginald DeKoven

He was born Henry Louis Reginald DeKoven, April 3, 1859, in Middletown, Connecticut. When he was still a child, DeKoven’s family moved to England. After graduating from St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1879, he studied music in European conservatories with many leading tutors of the day, including Franz von Suppé and Frederick Delibes. Returning to America in 1882, he worked for a Chicago brokerage firm, then opened a profitable dry-goods store.

With the financial stability he now enjoyed, he composed an opera, The Begum (1888). The librettist for this was Harry B. Smith and they collaborated again on Don Quixote (1889). His masterpiece Robin Hood (1891) was written for the touring comic opera troupe The Bostonians and was the first great American comic opera. With this work and the song “Oh Promise Me” DeKoven reached immortality, the show became a standard in the US through the 1960s. The next three decades saw DeKoven writing numerous operas and operettas, many of them with Smith, including The Fencing Master, Rob Roy, The Highwayman, Maid Marian, Red Feather and The Beauty Spot. De Koven was music critic for Chicago’s Evening Post, Harper’s Weekly and the New York World. In addition to his operettas, De Koven also composed piano sonatas and other classical works, and was founder and first conductor of the Washington, D.C., Symphony Orchestra. DeKoven died January 16, 1920 in Chicago.