Two years ago when tall, sleek Richard Leroy Stokes was writing stinging musical criticisms for the late New York Evening World, an idea came to him for an opera. Each time the Metropolitan mounted the work of a U. S. composer, people complained because its subject was not native. The opera Critic Stokes had in mind would be set in colonial Quincy, Mass. Its characters would be Puritans, Cavaliers, Indians; its themes, bigotry and a parson's conflict with his lustful soul. Critic Stokes asked Rochester's Howard Hanson if he would please write...
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