Reginald De Koven (April 3, 1859 – January 16, 1920) was a prolific composer (particularly of comic operas), often working with lyricist Lamb Harry B. Smith. Among his works include Robin Hood (1890), Rob Roy (1894), The Golden Butterfly (1908), and Rip Van Winkle (1919).
He was elected to The Lambs 8 July 1892.
He was born Henry Louis Reginald De Koven, 3 April 1859, in Middletown, Connecticut. When he was still a child, De Koven’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). After the very successful Robin Hood (1891), the next three decades saw De Koven 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. His career spanned the period during which American musical theatre remained heavily indebted to the European tradition of operetta.
Important though he was as a composer of music for the American theatre, De Koven’s work was subsequently overshadowed by his successors who wrote in a new style. Few of his operas and operettas have been revived and his reputation rests on the considerable success he enjoyed in his lifetime. Curiously, and almost without parallel before or since, a song written by De Koven with Clement Scott for Robin Hood, found favour in the sacred world. This song, ‘Oh, Promise Me’, has continued to be performed throughout America and the UK, often in churches with perhaps most of its performers and admirers unaware of its secular origins. Oddly, and a mite awkwardly and unsuitably, De Koven’s name also lives on in the lyric of a Hoagy Carmichael song, “The Old Music Master,” wherein it is rhymed with Beethoven. 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.
In 1903 he and two other Lambs achieved a lasting tribute. The 1903 Lyric Theatre was constructed for three composers: John Phillip Sousa, Victor Herbert and Reginald De Koven. Look up at the busts shown on the second floor of the facade to see carved sculptures of De Koven, of W. S. Gilbert, and Arthur Sullivan.
De Koven died 16 January 1920, in Chicago.