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Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism
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 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.
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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.
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 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.
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý
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.
386 pages, Paperback
First published July 16, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 30, 2015
An amazing book! There's a huge cast of eccentric characters here from the New York arts scene of the day, which are considered just as much Stein and Thompson themselves.
It might move a little slow for some people who are only interested in reading about the Opera's production, which doesn't really get going until the last 70 pages of the book, but it builds up anticipation so when that part finally does come, you feel like you're a part of it, and understand a lot of the peripheral circumstances. By the end I felt like I was involved in the production myself, and had something at stake in it, which is what makes the book so great, and inspiring.
The book is also very accessible to people without very much knowledge about modernism or opera (I have neither), and definitely written for a general audience.
It might move a little slow for some people who are only interested in reading about the Opera's production, which doesn't really get going until the last 70 pages of the book, but it builds up anticipation so when that part finally does come, you feel like you're a part of it, and understand a lot of the peripheral circumstances. By the end I felt like I was involved in the production myself, and had something at stake in it, which is what makes the book so great, and inspiring.
The book is also very accessible to people without very much knowledge about modernism or opera (I have neither), and definitely written for a general audience.
November 16, 2011
This is a fun but intriguing look at cafe society and the revolution in the arts that took place after WWI. Harlem, uptown, downtown. The glittering stars and the injection of the African-American spirit coupled with the avant-garde catapulted the country into the twentieth century. It doesn't hurt that it makes mention of my Uncle Nate as well. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I learned a lot.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
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