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

Copyright 1998 by Steven Watson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

All acknowledgments of illustration sources appear on page 371.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watson, Steven.

Prepare for saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the mainstreaming of American modernism / Steven Watson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82273-4
1. Thomson, Virgil, 1896 Four saints in three acts. 2. Stein, Gertrude, 18741946. 3. Modernism (Aesthetics)United StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.
ML410.T452W37 1998
782.1dc21 98-17496

Random House website address: www.randomhouse.com

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I n early February 1934, a red velvet curtain slowly parted in the Wadsworth Atheneums intimate subterranean theater. After a long drumroll, the stage began to fill with black singers draped in richly colored vestments. Artfully posed beneath feathered trees and beaded arches, the ersatz sixteenth-century saints began to sing:

To know to know to love her so

Four saints prepare for saints.

It makes well fish.

Four saints it makes well fish.

The 299 members of the audience who heard these words to the orchestras vigorous oompah rhythm could use no conventional measure to evaluate what they were seeing and hearing. Even the operas title, Four Saints in Three Acts, was misleading: there were more than a dozen saints and four acts. Nor did anything that followed the opening chorus offer more than a hint of meaning. The libretto told no coherent story, the staging and costumes were deeply eccentric, and most of the lines made no apparent sense. The cellophane set, brilliantly lit to evoke a sky hung with rock crystal, defied comparison to anything the audience had ever seen. The music was too nave, too simple, and too American for an opera. Yet when the final curtain fell, 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.

After its move to Broadway two weeks later, it became difficult to recapture the novelty of that evening. Variety reported that the opera had appeared in more newspaper columns than any production in the past decade. Nationally broadcast over Columbia Radio, the phrase pigeons in the grass alas entered popular vocabulary. Along Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman and Elizabeth Arden rushed Four Saints motifs into their Easter store windows, and Gimbels advertised a new line of patterned linen tablecloths called Instead of, After a While, and Have to Have, phrases taken from the libretto. Against all odds, Four Saints in Three Acts became the longest-running opera in Broadway history and Americas most legendary, and unlikely, performance collaboration.

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Gertrude Stein wrote the libretto, and Virgil Thomson set her words to music. Florine Stettheimer designed its fantastic sets and costumes, John Houseman made his debut as theater director, and Frederick Ashton sailed from London to choreograph dancers whom he recruited from Harlems Savoy Ballroom. Chick Austin, director of Hartfords Wadsworth Atheneum, produced the opera to christen the first architecturally modern wing in an American museum.

For some the opera was a onetime brush with modernism; for others a vehicle for long-overdue recognition. For all involved it remained a touchstone. Chick Austins wife, Helen, called it the great period. Thirteen years after the operas premiere, high-bohemian hostess Constance The elaborately intertwined lives of the collaborators provide a window onto the brilliant generation that defined modern taste and stylishness in the early years of the Depression.

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The eldest of the collaborators, sixty-three-year-old Florine Stettheimer, became the first American painter to participate in a stage production, extending Sergei Diaghilevs practice of inviting artists to design sets and costumes. The opera offered Stettheimer a chancethe only chance in her lifeto see her work realized on a lavish scale.

Four Saints opened six months after the publication of Gertrude Steins The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein had always desired la gloire, and, at sixty, she had finally been transformed from an object of ridicule into a best-selling author. Yet, as the waves of publicity for Autobiography and Four Saints engulfed her throughout the operas runs in Hartford and New York, Stein couldnt write. She had at last found fame in her native land, but lost her literary identity.

Virgil Thomson used the operas success to storm the citadel of Americas musical establishmentwhat he called the German-American musical complexwhich had excluded him. Thomsons music did not fit the dissonant vogue of the contemporary avant-garde, and those who championed modern music had largely ignored him. He would look back on the opera as a pivotal moment in his career.

For the black cast, the opera was a landmark event. Never before had African Americans been cast in a work that did not depict black life. Never before had they been paid for rehearsals. And never before had an all-black cast performed in an opera before white audiences.

For thirty-three-year-old impresario and museum director Chick Austin, the night of the operas premiere was the pinnacle of his career. With Four Saints he inaugurated the worlds first architecturally modern museum wing and simultaneously staged Americas first Pablo Picasso museum retrospective. Friends and colleagues called him the three-ring-circus master of modernism. He wedded stylishness and modern museum practice, daring and caprice, and in the process transformed Hartford into the New Athens.

Director John Houseman referred to the opera as the womb of my career.when Thomson invited him to join the team in the midst of the Depression, he was broke. In a stuffy Harlem church basement and in the sleek offices of the Hartford museum he absorbed enough hands-on experience to become a producer. He would demonstrate his resourcefulness on stage and in film for the next fifty years.

For the youngest of the collaborators, choreographer Frederick Ashton, the opera began as a lark, a chance for a free ticket from London to New York. Accustomed to classically trained ballet dancers, he found that working with the black cast becameon both sidesa process of cultural and corporal transmission. Ashton borrowed for his new choreography from classical ballet and the religious rituals of his childhood in Peru. As Thomson put it, He knew how nuns moved.

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Four Saints in Three Acts was both an outrage against theatrical convention and a product of its stylish times. Its success epitomized the mainstreaming of modernism. Unlike Americas first brush with modernism, the Armory Show in 1913conceived, organized, and installed by disenfranchised artiststhe success of Four Saints was the calculated work of a new generation of cultural tastemakers. The constellation that drove the opera forwardmuseum professionals, high-bohemian society, and commercial producersplayed little role in the avant-gardes pioneering era in the 1910s. But when the Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929, critic Lloyd Goodrich observed, Modernism today has reached a stage much more subtle and difficult than in the old crusading days when black was black and white was white. By the mid-1930s, modernism entered realms formerly considered