Modernist Greats, an Offbeat Opera

A title is a title is a title. And as titles go, “Prepare for Saints” fills the bill like a rose to a vase. Steven Watson has written an admirable behind-the-scenes Baedeker to the seven years of preparation leading to the smash 1934 Broadway opening of the opera “Four Saints in Three Acts.” With libretto by Gertrude Stein, score by Virgil Thomson, stage direction by John Houseman, choreography by Frederick Ashton and featuring an all-black cast playing St. Theresa of Avila, St. Ignatius and dozens of other medieval luminaries, the occasion marked the Broadway debut of all four collaborators and created a succes d’estime that translated into newsreels and Vanity Fair features, if not dollars.

Yet the subtitle of Watson’s book, “Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism,” lays a burden on the opera and its creators that Watson never substantiates. “Four Saints in Three Acts,” despite the triumphal attentions paid to it by present-day avant-garde geniuses like Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, has remained not only outside the mainstream of opera, theater and modernism, but in the kind of oxbow lakes populated by the theatrical works of e.e. cummings and the mechanical-musical experiments of George Antheil. The occasional Stein pop-ism “Pigeons on the grass alas,” punctuates a narrative-less libretto that reads with only marginally more meaning than the asylum diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Thomson himself, who counted on the success of “Four Saints” to transform him from a Kansas City misfit into a chic cosmopolitan millionaire, was most bitterly disappointed. His music, including a second opera with Stein, “The Mother of Us All,” failed to raise him to the ranks of the Stravinskys of the generation before him, the Coplands of his contemporaries, or the Bernsteins of his successors. He railed in bitterness until the end of his long life against “the League of Jewish Composers” that kept him from receiving his due.

It was friends such as Thomson’s Harvard contemporaries--the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of New York’s Museum of Modern Art Alfred Barr and the architect Philip Johnson--who helped create a modernist context for the opera in America independent of “Four Saints.” They succeeded at mainstreaming modernism by emphasizing principles of aesthetics, rather than socialism, in modernist theory, thereby allowing “the upper class that supported the Museum of Modern Art to sanction modernist architecture without allying themselves to leftist politics.”

There were also the salonistes, the Askews and the Stettheimers in New York, Stein and Alice Toklas themselves in Paris, who supported Thomson and generated buzz on “Four Saints,” as effectively as any flack created by Bret Easton Ellis. Watson’s biographies and diagrams of the artistic and sexual liaisons of this largely wealthy and homosexual crowd make the most fascinating reading.

If one reads Watson’s accounts carefully, it seems that marketing rather than modernism was the key to the success of “Four Saints.” It was Stein, after all, with her monkish hairdo and her uncompromisingly eclectic personal style who provided “Four Saints” with its central advertising image. Even more, in an irony lost on few writers today, it was the previous year’s success of her best-selling “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” written in Toklas’ straightforward style rather than in Stein’s own voice of adverbial repetition, that rowed Stein herself into the mainstream. A rose is a rose is a Rose.