One Sabbath morning 27 years ago the preachers of New York City looked over their congregations to find many of their most prominent parishioners absent. That same morning there was a dress rehearsal of Richard Strauss's Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House. To it had gone many a rich and respectable churchgoer to see how Olive Fremstad would exhibit her fanatical lust for the body of St. John the Baptist. The churchgoers were offended enough by the screaming dissonances and the way Fremstad brought the horrid head up to the footlights, caressed...
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