Music: Thais without Modesty

Thaïs Without Modesty

A provincial city got an operatic shock last week unequaled since Geraldine Farrar, as Zaza, in Atlanta before the War, changed her clothes onstage. At Cincinnati's famed Zoo Opera, Soprano Leonora Corona was singing the Bravura title role in Massenet's Thaïs. A fair-sized audience, not overtaxed by the explicit music, followed the Monk Athanaël out of his desert retreat toward Alexandria, where he piously hoped to reform the beauteous and notorious Courtesan Thaïs. Act I ended innocently enough.

In Act II Thaïs appeared, began trying to unsettle the holy man's...

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