Prepare for saints
Subtitle: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the mainstreaming of American modernism
By: Steven Watson
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 371
ISBN-13: 9780679441397
Subjects: Four saints in three acts; Moderne; Modernism (Aesthetics)
Description: Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when 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. Saints was proclaimed the birth of a new art form, a cellophane fantasy, "cubism on stage." It swept the public imagination and defied every convention of what an opera should be. Moving 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. 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.--From publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 349-353) and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Introducing Four Saints in Three Acts --; title: The World of 27, Rue de Fleurus --; title: Virgil Thomson: Roots in Time and Place --; title: Virgil and Gertrude Write an Opera --; title: A Transatlantic Love Affair --; title: Virgil Thomson Visits America --; title: Young Harvard Moderns --; title: A Personal Break, a Commercial Breakthrough --; title: Group Snapshot 1923: The Harvard Moderns --; title: The World of the Stettheimers --; title: High Bohemia and Modernism --; title: Modernism Goes Uptown --; title: Negotiations and Exchanges --; title: Snapshots: Summer 1933 --; title: Collaborators: Not the Usual Suspects --; title: Rehearsals in Harlem --; title: Opening Night --; title: Four Saints Goes to Broadway --; title: Aftermath.