Word: puritanize
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Hellfire raged at New York's Metropolitan Opera House one afternoon last week as a preacher named Wrestling Bradford wrestled with his lustful soul and lost. From Quincy, Mass. in Puritan times Librettist Richard Leroy Stokes and Composer Howard Hanson had borrowed him for the chief character in their opera, Merry Mount...
...giddy Cavaliers. They were bent on building a Maypole, dancing on the Holy Sabbath, an offense not half so shocking to Wrestling Bradford as the fact that Marigold intended to marry Sir Gower Lackland (Tenor Edward Johnson). The wedding was half over when Wrestling strode grimly in, leading his Puritan fanatics. Sir Gower was killed, Marigold arrested. Wrestling fell asleep in the forest to dream of the fiery netherworld, of dancers with slippery hips, of Marigold for whom he signs the devil's book, has the devil's mark seered into his forehead...
Merry Mount started off with a promising overture, stanch and hymnal. After that the orchestra seemed capable of only the most commonplace description. The Hell scene was noisy but unexciting. Bradford's passion for Marigold was expressed by a theme startlingly like "Limehouse Blues." The Puritan chorus had the richest music but it sang so often, intoned so many ''Amens" that at times the opera seemed more like a cantata, more suitable for a concert performance such as it received last spring in Ann Arbor (TIME...
...Where did a Puritan pastor dream of dancers and hell fire...
...hundred years ago, Harvard was founded "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity." We can all agree that these few admirable words still describe our aims, although the methods of advancing learning and the modes of perpetuating it have changed greatly in the course of three centuries. Our Puritan ancestors thought of education and theology as inseparably connected. It is hard for us to recapture their point of view; today, learning has become secular. Indeed, the universities are now the residuary legatees of many of the spiritual values which were guarded by the church three centuries ago. Our responsibilities...