Customer Reviews

Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

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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."

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.

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.

This is a meandering, disappointing, misleadingly titled book. Clearly the author wanted to write a book about the Harvard modernists and their era, including exploring "Negro chic" and the homosexual culture of the period. This would be a harder sell as a mass-circulation book, and hence the device of recruiting FOUR SAINTS as a distillation of the world he is interested in.

But the result is that one does not get enough of anything, and too much of what you didn't buy the book for. Chick Austin, Muriel Draper, and the others may have provided physical settings relevant to the gestation of FOUR SAINTS, but they did not CREATE the piece. As such, the lingering over their particular biographies is excessive in a book purportedly devoted to the birth of the opera. Too often we get lists of celebrities present at this gathering or another, complete with fawning descriptions of what they were wearing and how they decorated their rooms -- but this stems from a fan's love of a period, not a chronicling of FOUR SAINTS itself.

Thus while we read through elegant page after page gushing about Mrs. Harrison Williams and Lucius Beebe, by the end we have little idea of what went on on stage in the opera, what more than a few of the lyrics were, or how the music sounded. If it is vital for us to know how Julien Levy founded his art gallery blow by blow, why so little info on black theatre in New York before and after FOUR SAINTS? Why spend a paragraph following up on, say, Alfred Barr after SAINTS but only brief mention of what happened to any of the SAINTS cast members? This is a book about art museums mispackaged as one about the theatre.

This book is a bit of a cynical hoax. You can just feel the editor "shaping" a book about largely forgotten arts administrators and critics, the parties they went to, who they slept with, and how openly, via hanging it all on an opera which fascinates in legend because of combining a black cast with Gertrude Stein's lyrics. In the end, this book is a collection of well-written personality sketches of pictorial artists and their patrons. The author clearly has but subsidiary interest in music or theatre -- fatal in a book purporting to be about an opera.