The organization of this book reflects its genesis. My thoughts on theatrical scandals were initially triggered by the public uproar in the fall of 2006 occasioned by the cancellation of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. As I followed the controversy during a stay in that city, my thoughts led me in several directions. I began to ruminate on the emergence and dominant, even domineering, role of Regietheater (“director's theater”) in the late twentieth century and to wonder whether its justification on the basis of the venerable principle of “freedom of art” was real or imagined, logical or spurious. At the same time I was wondering about the historical and social conditions necessary before scandal on stage could occur. Why do we hear so rarely of “scandal” — at least in the modern sense of the outcry emerging from the aesthetic conflict between tradition and innovation or from the ethical clash between competing systems of belief and value — before the eighteenth century? Those speculations led me, finally, to ask if “scandal” in those senses could perhaps mask a deeper intention on the part of the author and signal a socially revealing reaction on the part of the audience. Could scandal in fact be a response to the effective use of the theater as a moral institution in Schiller's famous sense of the term? And if so, is that function still valid today?