Music: Tables Turned

As the curtain went up, ten masked men, in white gloves and spats, gestured grotesquely around a green baize table. To the impious tango rhythms of two pianos in the pit, the diplomats on stage wrangled and jumped on the table, their arguments increasing in fury until one of the peacemakers fired a toy pistol. That brought war—in which death was represented by a goose-stepping skeleton—into the scene. When all who accompanied Death—soldiers in battle and women at home—were dead, the false-faced peacemakers gathered again at their green table and waved their arms and fought, as foolishly as before.

Last week German-born...