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

Watson, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520223535 ISBN 13: 9780520223530

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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

From the Publisher

"Like the Seven Wonders of the World, Four Saints in Three Acts is a one-shot deal, coming from nowhere, producing no offspring, and remaining today -- after seventy years -- one of a kind. It has even been argued that Four Saints is America's first and only opera. What Steven Watson stresses, in this sociological biography of a work of art, is that Four Saints represents not just a joining of words with music, but of well-heeled all-white bohemians with all black semi-professional vocalists. For myself, who am old enough to have known many of the participants, the effect is of intense nostalgia by association."
-- Ned Rorem, composer and author of The Paris and New York Diaries

"This heroic, path-breaking generation vitally shaped the tastes of this century. Steven Watson has set America's modernists down in these pages with vivid accuracy."
-- Philip Johnson

"The indispensible guide to the indispensible American opera. Steven Watson fords modernist waters, low and high, with intrepidity, charm, and skill. He tells a good story, and he brings Gertrude Stein back to life."
-- Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat

"A stylish, engaging and knowing history of a great artistic collaboration that continues to change our minds."
-- Tim Page, Pulitzer prize-winning music critic for the Washington Post

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0520223535
• ISBN 13: 9780520223530
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 386