This crisp and accessible work offers both a penetrating reconstruction of the 1934 American productions of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's modernist opera Four Saints in Three Acts and a delightful study of an unprecedented artistic collaboration--involving not only Stein and Thomson, but a large cast of supporting characters. From arbiters of taste like Carl Van Vechten to the society hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan to the plucky, well-connected band of Harvard-trained art professionals who eventually set "the course of 'official' modernist culture in America's most prestigious institutions for nearly half a century," Steven Watson tracks the improbable development of an audience for a quintessentially American opera that happened to be set in Spain, peopled by nuns and saints, and staged with an all-black cast performing an incoherent story in front of combustible sets. Along the way, Watson illuminates the larger history of modernism in Paris and New York between the wars, as well as many smaller histories, like the growth of museums in America and the influence of high bohemia on the worlds of fashion and design. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
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.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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. (LJ 1/99) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Jim Holt
The story of how Four Saints came to the stage is full of racy drama, and Steven Watson tells it engagingly.


The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...Watson weaves together biography, cultural history and plain old gossip to create a smart, lively but sometimes skin-deep narrative focused around personalities and anecdotes.... For the lay reader ... Watson does an engaging job of conjuring up the overlapping worlds his subjects inhabited.


From Kirkus Reviews
A somewhat lite but always engaging account of the modernist movements development in America, as seen through the prism of a great American opera. Modernism first arrived in the US via the highly influential and controversial Armory show of 1913, but didnt gain mainstream appeal until the late 1920s and early 1930swhen it was picked up and promoted by a group of young Harvard graduates who styled themselves ``The Friends'' or ``The Family.'' Including the architect Philip Johnson, museum curator Chick Austin, and balletomane Lincoln Kirstein, ``The Family'' consisted of a brotherhood of wealthy, well-connected, largely homosexual boy geniuses whose support and patronage of fellow alum Virgil Thomson led to the 1933 staging of his opera Four Saints in Three Acts on Broadway. Watson (The Birth of the Beat Generation, 1995, etc.) argues that Four Saints helped to foster mass American acceptance of modernist modalities. Certainly, the opera brought together a glittering assemblage of collaborators. Gertrude Stein wrote the lyrics, Frederick Ashton choreographed, John Houseman directed, and Florine Stettheimer created the set and costumes. Watson provides brief biographies of all concerned. But he focuses on the tumultuous relationship of Stein and Thomson. She was 22 years older, prickly, less famous than she wished to be, while Thomson was a promising unknown. Even with his powerful allies, it took nearly six years to get the opera produced. The ruptures and reconciliations with Stein made things even more difficult. The opera is rarely revived today, but the beauty of its staging, the novelty of its all-black cast, and its general newness made it a landmark when it opened. Despite the operas success and its influence, Thomson and Stein only collaborated once more (on the lesser-known The Mother of Us All). The occasional shallows of his wide-ranging account are surpassed by the depth of Watsons presentation of a pivotal cultural moment. (100 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Charles Michener - New York Observer

...Prepare for Saints is a useful and briskly entertaining document, showing step by step how a 'Who's Who' of groundbreaking American musicians, writers, artists, designers and patrons coalesced in a shining moment, the likes of which has never been repeated.

Jim Holt - New York Times Book Review

The story...is full of racy drama, and Steven Watson tells it engagingly....[He] manages to work into his narrative just about everyone and everthing that made early-20th-century culture so interesting....[T]he efforts of Thompson's handpicked team added up not to a wrenching modernist catharsis but to a kind of happening...

Book Magazine

There's someting in this book to interest almost everyone...

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal