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University of California Press

Prepare for Saints

Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

by Steven Watson (Author)
Price: $36.95 / £31.00
Publication Date: Jul 2000
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 380
ISBN: 9780520223530
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 91 black-and-white images

About the Book

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.

Four Saints was proclaimed the birth of a new art form, a cellophane fantasy, "cubism on stage." It swept the public imagination, inspiring new art and new language, and defied every convention of what an opera should be. Everything about it was revolutionary: Stein's abstract text and Thomson's homespun music, the all-black cast, the costumes, and the combustible sets. Moving from the Wadsworth Atheneum to Broadway, Four Saints was the first popular modernist production. It brought modernism, with all its flamboyant outrage against convention, into the mainstream.

This is the story of how that opera came to be. It involves artists, writers, musicians, salon hostesses, and an underwear manufacturer with an appetite for publicity. The opera's success depended on a handful of Harvard-trained men who shaped America's first museums of modern art. The elaborately intertwined lives of the collaborators provide a window onto the pioneering generation that defined modern taste in America in the 1920s and 1930s.
        
A brilliant cultural historian with a talent for bringing the past to life, Steven Watson spent ten years researching and writing this book, interviewing many of the collaborators and performers. Prepare for Saints is the first book to describe this pivotal moment in American cultural history. It does so with a spirit and irreverence worthy of its subject.

About the Author

Steven Watson is a cultural historian of the American avant-garde. He is the author of Harlem Renaissance (1995), The Birth of the Beat Generation (1995), and Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991).

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Table of Contents

ACT I: CONCEPT
Prologue: Introducing Four Saints in Three Acts
1. The World of 27, Rue de Fleurus
2. Virgil Thomson: Roots in Time and Place
3. Virgil and Gertrude Write an Opera
4. A Transatlantic Love Affair
5. Virgil Thomson Visits America

ACT II: TASTE
6. Young Harvard Moderns
7. A Personal Break, a Commercial Breakthrough
8. Group Snapshot 1932: The Harvard Moderns
9. The World of the Stettheimers
10. High Bohemia and Modernism
11. Modernism Goes Uptown

ACT III: SHOW
12. Negotiations and Exchanges
13. Snapshots: Summer 1933
14. Collaborators: Not the Usual Suspects
15. Rehearsals in Harlem
16. Opening Night
17. Four Saints Goes to Broadway

EPILOGUE
18. Aftermath

Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Reviews

"Mr. Watson does an engaging job of conjuring up the overlapping worlds his subjects inhabited: the feud-ridden expatriate community in Paris where Thomson and Stein met in the 1920's and the trend-setting bohemia of 1930's New York, where Thomson would find the patrons and promoters who would get Four Saints produced."
New York Times
"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."
Publishers Weekly
"It may seem a bit much to credit one operatic extravaganza for America's embrace of Modernism, but Watson makes a compelling argument without overstating his case. Even more importantly, he makes the complex production and the amazing cast of participants and supporters come alive in compulsively readable prose that will engage any reader."
Library Journal
"As a cultural historian, Watson's work goes beyond the scope of libretto and music. Using "Four Saints" as his focus, he combines his commentary on the collaboration between Stein and Thomson with an exploration of the roles of the New York salon hosts and Harvard colleagues who, as friends of Thomson and advocates of modernism, helped make the opera a reality. By this means, he creates a rich portrait of the northeastern avant-garde scene, filled with quirky stories about speakeasies, drunken parties, homosexual rendezvous, and late-night trips to the Hot-Cha Bar and Grill in Harlem. . . . [Watson] tells a compelling story, one that combines the critical eye of hindsight with a sense of nostalgia for a work that, at least in the minds of its collaborators, stood for 'the best part of our lives.'"
American Music
"A wide-ranging account . . . [and] presentation of a pivotal cultural moment."
Kirkus Reviews