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

Jim and I hosted a dinner party after Christmas for several of our friends who are involved in the Los Angeles music scene. Two of the guests mentioned that they were working on mounting a production of the Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. We were all excited by the idea and encouraging. One of the men mentioned that he had enjoyed this book, from 2000, about the creation of the opera and its first production, in 1934, in Hartford, Connecticut, before it transferred to Broadway later that year (and also toured several months later to Chicago). I found a copy at the library and also enjoyed it very much. I only know the opera from a recording I listened to in the music library at Cal Arts in the early 1980s. I’ve never seen a production.

Watson focuses on the development and first performance of Four Saints in Three Acts, but uses that story as thread to tell a larger story of the inauguration of the modernist style in the United States. A surprising number of people involved in the opera added their own contributions to modernism in the arts in the US, from Lincoln Kirstein, who founded a ballet school with George Balanchine that became the New York City Ballet in 1934, to Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (founded 1929). Many of the principal players in the opera story, in the United States, knew each other at Harvard. Many more socialized together in the New York scene of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein accomplished the actual creation of the libretto and music in Paris. The idea for an opera came from Thomson. He proposed the project to Stein early in 1927, after having only met her a few months earlier, and with an earlier setting of a Stein text (“Susie Asado”) as a sort of calling card. Together they settled on a theme of artistic creation, with Stein making the analogy to the lives of saints, who associate with a transcendent realm and then communicate their experience to the rest of us. Stein’s choosing of Spanish saints, Saint Teresa and Saint Ingnatius in particular, resulted from her fond associations with that country from her friendships with Picasso and Juan Gris, and from a trip she had taken there with Alice B. Toklas in 1912.

Stein worked on her libretto in the spring of 1927, delivered it to Thomson in June. He completed the music on July 19, 1928. That part of the creation story, the easy part perhaps, brings Steven Watson to page 53. The rest of the book, to page 321 (with another 50 pages of notes, bibliography, acknowledgments and an index) tells the story of getting the opera produced, which occurs on February 6, 1934 at the Hartford Wadsworth Atheneum. Thomson travels back and forth between New York and Paris. He plays the piano score and sings the parts at salons of taste-makers and would be patrons. His boyfriend, Maurice Grosser, creates a presentable scenario from Stein’s abstract text. It’s Thomson’s inspiration to use an all black cast, centered around a choir, and recruited from the Harlem club scene. Choreography for the two short incorporated ballets as well as stylized stage movement throughout comes from Frederic Ashton. The sets are designed by one of a trio of sister socialites in New York, Florine Stettheimer. The Wadworth Atheneum has the premiere because its new curator, Chick Austin, was intent on promoting modernism (the first performance took place in conjunction with a show of Picasso works). The opera then transferred to a Broadway theater, where its success was surely helped by the fact that Stein’s reputation had recently exploded with the best-selling success of her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (pub. 1933). Other than that, Stein does nothing to produce the opera and doesn’t attend the premiere, although she does see it later that year in Chicago while she is on a U.S. speaking tour. On Broadway, the opera was booked for two weeks, was extended for two weeks, and then transferred to a different theater and ran another two weeks.

It’s a fascinating story and a fascinating book. I’m glad my friends turned me onto it, and I wish them success with a new production of the opera.