Prepare for Saints

Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism
1. Auflage 2000
ISBN: 978-0-520-22353-0
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 380 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

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 revolutionary: 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.

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Watson, Steven

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Opernmusik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

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).