Alfred G. Robyn

Alfred George Robyn (April 29, 1860 – October 18, 1935) was an American composer, organist, conductor, and music educator born in Saint Louis. His Broadway credits include the musicals The Yankee Tourist, All for the Ladies, and Pretty Mrs. Smith, as well as the comic operas Princess Beggar and The Yankee Consul. Though his compositional output spanned fourteen operas, two oratorios, a Symphony in D minor, the symphonic poem Pompeii, a piano concerto, a piano quintet, numerous solo piano works, and more than two hundred songs, Robyn is chiefly remembered for his contributions to light opera and the Broadway musical stage, many of them created in collaboration with lyricist and playwright Henry Blossom.

Robyn came from a distinguished musical family. His father, William Robyn (1814–1905), was a German-born composer, organist, and conductor who founded Saint Louis's first orchestra, the St. Louis Polyhymnia Society, in 1845, established the music department at Saint Louis University in 1838, and organized both the St. Louis Brass Band and the St. Louis German Vocal Association in 1839. Alfred's uncle, Henry Robyn, was a cellist, composer, and music educator. Trained by his father from an early age, Alfred proved to be a child prodigy whose first public performance, in a piano trio, took place when he was nine years old. By age ten he was assisting his father as a church organist, and at eleven he was engaged as organist at the Church of St. John in Saint Louis. He remained active as a concert pianist, both as a soloist and chamber musician, throughout this period. In 1877, at seventeen, he toured the United States as accompanist for soprano Emma Abbott and her company of performers.

Returning to Saint Louis, Robyn became music director of the Olympic Theatre, where he conducted the world premiere of Wayman C. McCreery's opera L'Afrique on May 16, 1881. In 1883 he joined the St. Louis Public Schools as a music educator, a position he held for the next twenty-five years while continuing to compose and perform. During the 1890s he performed as a member of the Beethoven Trio Club, and in 1894 he took on the conductorship of the Apollo Club orchestra in Saint Louis, a role he maintained into the first decade of the twentieth century. Around the turn of the century he organized a concert series of instrumental music at the Odeon Theatre, which included organ recitals featuring Robyn himself in 1900 and 1901. In 1909 Saint Louis University awarded him an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contributions to the city's musical life.

Robyn's first composition of note was the song "A Lady's 'No' Means 'Yes'" (lyrics by George Cooper), written in 1878 for the Emma Abbott troupe's lead tenor, Will H. Stanley. His first opera, Manette, with a libretto by Harriet Pittman, premiered at the Pickwick Theatre in Saint Louis on August 20, 1883, and received a more elaborate production at the Standard Theatre in Saint Louis in 1885, where it was positively received, though subsequent touring productions met with less success. His second stage work, the comic opera Beans and Buttons (1885), also premiered at the Pickwick Theatre with a libretto by William H. Lepere, who likewise supplied the text for Robyn's third opera, Jacinta, or The Maid of Manzanillo, which opened at Saint Louis's Grand Opera House on May 23, 1893. Jacinta was subsequently toured by the Louise Beaudet Opera Bouffe Company to Philadelphia and New York City in 1894, where it received mixed critical notices. Robyn's first composition to reach the New York stage was the song "It Was A Dream," inserted into the 1885 revival of F.C. Burnand and Michael Connolly's burlesque Ixion; or, The Man at the Wheel at the Comedy Theatre. He also contributed songs to the original Broadway productions of A Chinese Honeymoon (1902) and The Sultan of Sulu (1902), and provided incidental music to Hal Reid's The Gypsy Girl (1905, Star Theatre), which starred a young Mary Pickford.

Robyn's most celebrated stage work, The Yankee Consul, premiered on September 21, 1903, at the Tremont Theatre in Boston, produced by opera impresario Henry Wilson Savage. A comic opera in two acts with a libretto by Henry Blossom, the work served as a starring vehicle for Raymond Hitchcock in the role of Abijah Booze. The production transferred to Broadway in 1904, where Hitchcock's performance again drew critical praise. The work occupied an ambiguous position between comic opera and musical comedy; its published score's title page described it as a "musical comedy," while the interior of the score labeled it a "comic opera in two acts." A review in Life by theatre critic James Stetson Metcalfe concluded that the comic opera designation was the more fitting of the two, noting that the music was tuneful and written on good, if conventional, models, and predicting that some of its airs would become popular. The Yankee Consul is considered Robyn's best-known work.

His subsequent Broadway credits included Princess Beggar, a comedy opera in two acts with a libretto by Edward Paulton that opened on Broadway at the Casino Theatre on January 7, 1907, following its out-of-town premiere in Utica, New York, on January 18, 1906. Later that same year The Yankee Tourist, a musical in three acts with lyrics by Wallace Irwin and a book by Richard Harding Davis based on Davis's 1906 play The Galloper, opened at the Astor Theatre on August 12, 1907. All for the Ladies followed in 1912, and Pretty Mrs. Smith in 1914.

After relocating to New York City, Robyn worked as an organist accompanying silent films at the Rialto Theatre, beginning in June 1915. He remained there until 1924, when he moved to the Roxy Theatre in the same capacity. He continued working as an organist in New York City until his death on October 18, 1935, at Saint Luke's Hospital, from peritonitis, at the age of seventy-five.