(See front cover)
In the winter of 1907, Manhattan had its most celebrated operatic scandal. Critics scolded, pulpits seethed. The solemn, stiff-collared directors of the Metropolitan Opera House went into a huddle, sent a word of warning to harried Director Heinrich Conried. The grounds for this protest were moral. Its cause was a new opera which had just been given its Metropolitan premiere. In the opera a necrophilic heroine disrobed before her gloating, drunken stepfather, demanding as the price of her strip tease the head of an imprisoned prophet. To the severed head,...