Hellfire raged at New York's Metropolitan Opera House one afternoon last week as a preacher named Wrestling Bradford wrestled with his lustful soul and lost. From Quincy, Mass. in Puritan times Librettist Richard Leroy Stokes and Composer Howard Hanson had borrowed him for the chief character in their opera, Merry Mount.
Wrestling Bradford should have married Plentiful Tewke. Her father, Praise-God Tewke, told him so in the first act, set in front of a log-cabin church. But Plentiful (Contralto Gladys Swarthout) wanted to take a maiden's time and Wrestling was impatient. Pretty Marigold...