“Nothing more Satanic or artistic has been seen on the German stage,” wrote one critic of the premiere of Salome in Ganz, Austria in 1891. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross describes the unveiling of Richard Strauss’ opera—which climaxed, like Oscar Wilde’s source play and the New Testament chapter before it, with the bloody decapitation of John the Baptist—as a primal scene for 20th-century music: a Grand Guignol collision of ripe classicism and atonal modernity that left geniuses and punters alike stupefied.

By Kiva Reardon The story of the wrongful conviction and incarceration of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and Jason Baldwin—better known as the West Memphis Three—was conveyed in such compelling, gritty detail over the course of the three-part HBO documentary Paradise Lost (1996/2000/2011) that one may conceivably feel sorry for anyone attempting to relate it…