There was a loopy sort of ex-citement that surrounded the arrival of Gertrude Stein in Chicago on Nov. 7, 1934, after her first airplane ride.
A crowd of reporters, photographers and society women were at the airport to greet her, and one newspaper announced:
“UNDERSTAND EINSTEIN? Just Try Stein-Stein SHE ARRIVES — SHE ARRIVES — SHE ARRIVES — SHE ARRIVES — ARRIVES.”
Stein, the expatriate American writer known for her idiosyncratic prose, was a darling of U.S. newspapers because her often-impenetrable and frequently repetitious writing style — “A rose is a rose is a rose” — was an easy target. And, since the publication of her “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” a year earlier (strangely readable, given her earlier literary output), she had become an unlikely sort of celebrity.
But it was an even more unlikely turn of events that had brought her to Chicago — the runaway success of an opera she co-wrote with Virgil Thomson, a young composer from the Midwest, called “Four Saints in Three Acts.”
The oddest of triumphs, “Four Saints” was a plotless opera in which the words were English but had little logical meaning. The scenery was made of thousands of square feet of cellophane. And the characters — a couple dozen saints in 16th Century Spain — were portrayed by African-Americans, a group previously excluded from the opera stage in America. Of course, no one else involved in the production had ever done an opera before either.
Yet audiences found themselves astonished and delighted by “Four Saints,” and the restyy of the nation was captivated as well.
Indeed, so much had the opera entered the American mainstream — through a 15-minute national radio broadcast during its opening night and a three-minute segment in the March of Time newsreel, as well as numerous newspaper stories — that one of Stein’s lines (a reference, if you can believe it, to the Holy Ghost) became a catchphrase for the era:
“Pigeons on the grass alas.”
The opera’s success came at a key moment in the history of modernism in America, as Steven Watson noted in his new book about the opera, “Prepare for Saints” (Random House).
The Museum of Modern Art in New York was only five years old. The first retrospective of Picasso’s works in the U.S. just had been held. And, in less than a month, Lincoln Kirstein’s School of American Ballet, a progenitor of the New York City Ballet, would stage its first performance.
But it was the improbable triumph of “Four Saints” that seemed to epitomize the gains modernism had made since 1913, when the avant-garde first exploded on the American scene with the Armory Show of works by Picasso, Matisse and other rule-breakers — an explosion considered as radical by the nation’s arts establishment as an anarchist’s pipebomb. Two decades later, however, with “Four Saints” eagerly accepted and enjoyed, if not understood in any usual way, by general audiences, the avant-garde with its challenges to convention and even logic was part of the mainstream.
Watson, a cultural historian who has previously written about the Harlem Renaissance, the beat poets and key figures in the Armory Show days, said he came to understand the significance of “Four Saints” while researching those earlier books.
“I found this title kept coming up in people’s letters and always with a special tone as if this was a touchstone of their generation,” Watson said during a recent interview in Chicago prior to presenting a talk on the opera at the Art Institute.
Watson, who first saw “Four Saints” in a rare revival in 1986, said he wrote “Prepare for Saints” to acquaint a new generation of Americans with the little-remembered opera. Although considered an American classic by theater historians, “Four Saints” was one-of-a-kind, a work never imitated and, in later years, rarely performed.
But, in 1934, it was the real thing.
“It was something utterly new when something could be utterly new,” Watson said.
– – –
“Four Saints” should have been a flop.
Stein, who had lived in France since shortly after the turn of the century, wrote the libretto at Thomson’s suggestion in 1927, during a period when her work was at its most inaccessible. (Edmund Wilson described Stein’s writing as “registering the vibration of a psychological country like some human seismograph whose charts we haven’t the training to read.”)
Here’s how the libretto opens: “To know to know to love her so. Four saints prepare for saints. It makes it well fish. Four saints it makes it well fish. Four saints prepare for saints it makes it well well fish it makes it well fish prepare for saints.”
The rest of the work is in a similar vein.
Nonetheless, Thomson, also an American expatriate in Paris, was pleased when Stein sent him the work. “Thank you for the saints. For each and every and all,” he wrote to her.
Years later, Thomson explained that the impenetrability of Stein’s text was actually helpful. It eliminated the temptation to illustrate the words since, as Thomson acknowledged, he had no idea what most of the phrases meant. Stein’s verbal complexity also forced him to eschew musical complexity in favor of seeming simplicity.
“Thomson decided to set to music everything Stein had written, including her stage directions,” Watson wrote. “He turned Saint (Teresa) into two figures so that he could write duets. . . . He assigned lines to lesser characters and created a small, mobile chorus and a larger stationary one, as well as two lay figures, the Commere and Compere, to comment from the sidelines.”
Stein liked what Thomson came up with, but, as often happened in her relations with the young men who flocked to her Paris apartment, feuded with the composer on a matter unrelated to the opera. For two full years, the collaborators didn’t communicate.
Still, Thomson was untiring in working to get the opera on stage, enlisting a coterie of fellow Harvard graduates, including Chick Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford, Conn.
It was at the Wadsworth in February 1934 that Austin not only exhibited the first retrospective of Picasso’s works in the U.S. but also was host for the opening performance of “Four Saints in Three Acts” in the museum’s new space, the first architecturally modern wing in an American museum.
Also recruited by Thomson were a hodge-podge of artsy and would-be artsy folks, most of whom had little on their resumes:
– John Houseman, a former grain futures trader who had never directed any theatrical production, was brought in to direct the opera. (Later, Houseman would help Orson Welles found the Mercury Theatre and have a distinguished career in movies, plays, television and radio. Near the end of his life, he won wide fame as Professor Kingsfield in “The Paper Chase” and as the no-nonsense spokesman for the Smith, Barney investment house: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.”)
– Frederick Ashton, a 27-year-old choreographer with a couple of works to his credit, was hired to orchestrate the movements of the opera’s saints. (Later, in a career that spanned a half-century, Ashton would be acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest ballet choreographers.)
– Florine Stettheimer, a reclusive painter who had never participated in a stage production, was given the job of designing the costumes and scenery. (In doing “Four Saints,” Stettheimer became the first painter of some renown to carry out such designs for an American stage production, just as Picasso had done earlier in France for the ballet.)
Yet, it was Thomson’s decision to employ African-Americans for the opera’s cast of 30 or so saints that most flew in the face of convention. Blacks were not unknown in the American theater, but they were segregated, for the most part, to minstrel shows.
The idea of an African-American cast for “Four Saints” came to Thomson during a visit to a Harlem hot spot called Hot-Cha when he heard the nightclub’s host, Jimmie Daniels, sing “I’ve Got the World on a String.”
“It suddenly hit me,” Thomson said later, “that he was singing so clearly and I could understand everything he said. He wasn’t just vocalizing and adding a few consonants here and there, he was singing the words.”
An African-American choir under director Eva Jessye, a hard taskmaster, was hired, as were soloists, and, in the basement of a Harlem church, rehearsals for the opera began.
“It was everyone’s first time,” Thomson said later in life. “You see, in order to get something original and good, you have to get somebody when he is young. . . . And everybody worked free, except the cast. When you’re not paid, you always do a good job, you’re responsible, and there is no front office that can fire you.
“Or put his finger in your pie.”
– – –
“Four Saints in Three Acts” was one of the first theater productions to benefit from a public-relations blitz, and there’s no question that the wealthy crowds who traveled to Hartford for the opera’s opening were there because it was the place to be.
Yet, what that first audience found, beyond the hoopla, was a theatrical event that, for all its strangeness, was strangely enjoyable.
“When the final curtain fell,” Watson wrote, “many found themselves caught between tears and wild applause. Later they found that they could no more explain their extravagant reactions than they could the opera they had just seen.”
There were 12 curtain calls after the first act alone. (The opera, despite its title, had four acts.) And, during the intermission, wrote one society reporter, “Everyone thought something and was earnestly trying to express it.”
It was Thomson’s music that tied everything together and made the production work — music that was as melodious as most serious music of the era was dissonant, and as accessible as Stein’s words were unfathomable.
In his 1997 biography of the composer, Anthony Tommasini wrote of the opera: “Passages of neo-baroque recitative; bits of made-up hymns, chanteys, parlor dances, fanfares — Thomson’s music is a beguiling jumble of materials. Yet the continuity and integrity of the musical line is never in doubt, and the tone, though humorous, is serene and sincere.”
The performance Stein saw in Chicago was the only one she ever attended, and she loved it: “I am completely satisfied with it. Before it was inside me and now it is outside me.”
Yet, in the aftermath of the triumphs in Hartford, New York and Chicago, there were two ironies.
One was that despite the opera’s popularity, “Four Saints” wasn’t the big break that Thomson had envisioned for himself as a composer. True, he had his later successes, including an even more highly praised, if less odd, second opera written with Stein, “The Mother of Us All,” about Susan B. Anthony, and his music for the 1948 film “Louisiana Story,” the only movie score to win a Pulitzer Prize. But, perhaps because Thomson’s music, so American, seemed so simple, it never caught on with U.S. orchestras.
The second irony is that, even so, Thomson became one of the most influential figures in American music over the last half of the 20th Century — as a critic. Thomson’s tart and trenchant reviews in the New York Herald Tribune between 1940 and 1954 “set standards that American music critics still are struggling to measure up to,” the Chicago Tribune’s John Von Rhein once wrote.
Of course, the ultimate irony was the creative triumph and triumphant popularity of “Four Saints.” Even Watson, after years of researching the opera, has a hard time putting his finger on why everything clicked so well.
But click it did.
“There was,” he said, “a sense of delight that was unconnected to anything people were used to.
“It was unmoored delight.”
SOME LIKED IT, SOME DIDN’T
Although considered an American classic, “Four Saints in Three Acts” has always been something of an anomaly. People generally like it, but they’re often not sure why.
That’s evident from the following selection of commentary about the opera since its opening in 1934:
“A delicate and joyous work all around.” — poet Wallace Stevens, February, 1934.
“It’s drivel, of course, but the most beguiling, fascinating twaddle one can possibly imagine.” — Variety, February, 1934.
“As melodious as `Pinafore’ and as rhythmically flexible as a Gregorian chant.” — a New York critic, February, 1934.
“Refreshing as a new dessert.” — George Gershwin, February, 1934.
“The opera to end all operas.” — another New York critic, February, 1934.
“Just about the time you became convinced that you and the rest of the world have gone mildly insane, you suddenly wake up to the fact that you are present at an amusing and diverting entertainment.” — Edward Moore, Chicago Tribune critic, November, 1934.
“A meditation on the joy of life.” — Robert Wilson, when he restaged the work in 1996.
“A one-shot deal, coming from nowhere, producing no offspring, and remaining today — after 70 years — one of a kind.” — composer Ned Rorem, 1999.
