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

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).

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*

"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." -- Michiko Kakutani, * 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 *

Virtuoso literary journalist Watson's Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991) set the standard for books seeking to accessibly summarize complex literary and artistic movements, blending time lines, lexicons of period argot, unfamiliar photos and accounts from the newspapers of the day. Here, Watson applies the same formula to a definitive moment in Modernist history: the collaboration of Gertrude Stein and composer Virgil Thompson on the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts, the first large-scale, homegrown avant-garde theatrical production to surface on the cultural radar (revived two years ago in Houston and New York by Robert Wilson). Coming a year after Brenda Wineapple's Sister Brother laid bare the finally explosive relationship between Gertrude and Leo Stein, Watson's book shows how the galaxy of talent that orbited around the Stein/Toklas household at 27 rue de Fleurus joined forces with a group of echt-Harvard tastemakers who saw a good thing and ran with it, mounting the incomparably lovely but plotless opera with an all-black cast, gracing it with innovative sets by the still under-appreciated Florine Stettheimer and promoting it with the sort of PR machine unknown in the art world at that time. 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. (Feb.) FYI: Watson has also written, directed and coproduced the documentary Prepare for Saints: The Making of a Modern Opera, hosted by Jessye Norman, to be aired on PBS in February.