Return engagements.(Viewpoint)(Metropolitan Opera's fisrt production of Salome, 1907)(Brief Article)

In its edition of February 9, 1907, Harper's Weekly, one of the most influential journals of its era, captured the slightly ludicrous drama of the day's biggest story in classical music with a bull's-eye cartoon by W. A. Rogers. The Metropolitan Opera's cancellation of its production of Salome after just a single performance--the company and U.S. premiere of the work--on the orders of wealthy Met box-holders who were offended by the opera's musical and dramatic content, offered Rogers an irresistible subject. In his sketch, the lissome, veiled figure of Salome, Princess of Judea, is cast from the Metropolitan Opera House and into the stygian darkness beyond by a stout, bespectacled gentleman, identified only as "Knickerbocker," in Rogers's day not a member of a professional basketball team but a popular slang term for the descendants of the Dutch settlers who populated Manhattan in the early seventeenth century. For it was the Knickerbockers, stout pillars ...