Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Prepare for Saints is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account of how that revolutionary opera was born.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
This crisp and accessible work offers both a penetrating reconstruction of the 1934 American productions of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's modernist opera Four Saints in Three Acts and a delightful study of an unprecedented artistic collaboration--involving not only Stein and Thomson, but a large cast of supporting characters. From arbiters of taste like Carl Van Vechten to the society hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan to the plucky, well-connected band of Harvard-trained art professionals who eventually set "the course of 'official' modernist culture in America's most prestigious institutions for nearly half a century," Steven Watson tracks the improbable development of an audience for a quintessentially American opera that happened to be set in Spain, peopled by nuns and saints, and staged with an all-black cast performing an incoherent story in front of combustible sets. Along the way, Watson illuminates the larger history of modernism in Paris and New York between the wars, as well as many smaller histories, like the growth of museums in America and the influence of high bohemia on the worlds of fashion and design. --Regina Marler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Virtuoso literary journalist Watson's Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991) set the standard for books seeking to accessibly summarize complex literary and artistic movements, blending time lines, lexicons of period argot, unfamiliar photos and accounts from the newspapers of the day. Here, Watson applies the same formula to a definitive moment in Modernist history: the collaboration of Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thompson on the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, the first large-scale, homegrown avant-garde theatrical production to surface on the cultural radar (revived two years ago in Houston and New York by Robert Wilson). Coming a year after Brenda Wineapple's Sister Brother laid bare the finally explosive relationship between Gertrude and Leo Stein, Watson's book shows how the galaxy of talent that orbited around the Stein/Toklas household at 27 rue de Fleurus joined forces with a group of echt-Harvard tastemakers who saw a good thing and ran with it, mounting the incomparably lovely but plotless opera with an all-black cast, gracing it with innovative sets by the still under-appreciated Florine Stettheimer and promoting it with the sort of PR machine unknown in the art world at that time. Watson doesn't miss an angle on the story of how these forces came together and eventually took the show from its Hartford, Conn., premier to a smash Broadway run: Thompson's odyssey from small-town America to cosmopolitan composer; Stein's brilliant writing and imperious holding of court; the involvement of Philip Johnson and the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. Most refreshingly, Watson details the inseparability of African-American artists and culture from the opera, from the sexual stereotypes of the era and from modernism at large. (Feb.) FYI: Watson has also written, directed and coproduced the documentary Prepare for Saints: The Making of a Modern Opera, hosted by Jessye Norman, to be aired on PBS in February.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating cultural history,
By A Customer
This review is from: Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (Hardcover)
I came to this book hoping to learn about the creation and production of Stein's opera, and I was not disappointed. I thought the book delivered that information, and more. Watson writes well, and he tells a fascinating story of the complicated network of interpersonal relationships that were finally led this unlikely opera into production. I think Watson understands the nature of Stein's as well as anybody, although the focus of the book was not on the way the opera was written. He manages to express the way that all the participants were inspired by Stein's words in different ways, the "miracle" of their all having "to create and all of them did."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Entertaining, Informative Read!,
By
This review is from: Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (Paperback)
Many history books about opera and opera composers waste page after precious page clumsily describing the author's personal opinions about great music.Instead of forcing irrelevant musical analysis down the throats of his readers, Steven Watson paints an engaging portrait of Virgil Thomson's network of friends, lovers, colleagues, and patrons. Watson's approach highlights the deeply collaborative aspect of theater and music, and his choice to focus on artists as well as musicians and poets is refreshing. (Too often, the analysis of a play or an opera focuses too heavily on the written word or note while devaluing the artistic importance of stage design, costumes, and lights.) Also refreshing: the large variety of women who appear in various roles throughout the book, as well as Watson's complete lack of hysteria when alluding to the romantic lives of his gay and lesbian subjects. A previous reviewer points out that Watson's book largely ignores black theater traditions and fails to follow up adequately on the lives of the black actors who created Four Saints in Three Acts. I agree: I wish that Watson's care in describing the social influences that shaped Lincoln Kirstein and Chick Austin had extended to Eva Jessye and Beatrice Robinson-Wayne. Perhaps there is room for another book on the subject.
7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
More gossip than information,
By A Customer
This review is from: Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (Hardcover)
For those who know little or nothing about the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thompson opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," this book will provide some basic information. Those searching for any kind of in depth analysis either of the libretto or the music will be disappointed, as I was. Long on the sexual preferences of the members of the 1930's modernist elite, short on any discussion of a landmark work of art. Listen to the original cast album instead.
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