Four Saints in Three Acts
Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein

Despite the incredible circumstances surrounding the Great Depression in the 1930s, artists continued to make and create work. In fact, it's this combination of circumstances – economic, political, and social – that makes the premiere of this opera even more astounding. Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts opened on Broadway with an all-Black cast in 1934. That’s one year before the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess took to the Broadway stage, and also a year before any federal programs were established to keep artists employed through the Depression. The cast of Four Saints was led by noted choral director Eva Jessye, who would later serve as music director for Porgy and Bess. The premiere production included sets and costumes designed by Florine Stettheimer. Her innovative use of cellophane wowed audiences then and remains striking today.

Two Spanish saints (St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits, and St. Teresa of Ávila, a mystic) commune in a garden with other saints, real and fictional. There isn’t a narrative or plot to parse out here; Stein was far more interested in the sounds and patterns of language itself rather than its meanings. Thomson always admired Stein’s spontaneity and flow with language, and when setting this libretto to music, he found himself recalling the sounds of his upbringing in Southern Baptist Missouri. He incorporated folk and blues idioms, but was also inspired by parade marches, children’s songs, and silent film music. He wrote a truly “American” opera. Thomson himself actually advises against textual analysis, writing, “Do not try to understand the words of this opera literally nor seek in the music of it undue reference to modern Spain. If, through the poet’s liberties with logic and the composer’s constant use of the plainest musical language, something is evoked of the inner gayety and the strength of lives consecrated to a non-material end, the authors will consider their labors rewarded.”

So, why an opera about saints, you ask? Thomson answered this question directly. “Simply because we viewed a saint’s life as related to our own. In all times the consecrated artist has tended to live surrounded by younger artists and to guide them into the ways of spontaneity. And thus to characterize one’s gift is indeed to invite ‘inspiration’ and just possibly, through art, make ‘miracles.’ Just like the saints.” So this community of saints became a metaphor for the creative community he was part of with Gertrude Stein while living in Paris in the late 1920s.

In 2011, a production of the oratorio version by Opera Parallèle and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art conquered the topic of euthanasia and attitudes towards death, inspired by the then-recent death of Jack Kevorkian. For a 2016 youth production by Victorian Opera (Australia), audiences donned 3D glasses to see the saints’ garden come to life in projections. Stein’s malleable text keeps the opera fresh today and invites a variety of stagings. Scholar Steven Watson notes, “Overlaying a narrative on Stein’s nonlinear words is consistent with the original production; as [Maurice] Grosser, who created the tableaux for the 1934 production, wrote, ‘any practicable interpretation of the text is legitimate.’”

Stein wrote, “Collaborators tell how in union there is strength,” and in a time of division and discord, images of unity may be exactly what we need.

Extras:

Review of the 2001 BAM performance: https://www.villagevoice.com/2001/03/20/prepare-for-saints/ 

On the opera’s premiere in Connecticut, Lucius Beebe of the Herald Tribune remarked, “…the field was strewn with murdered unities, decapitated conventions, smashed top hats… and Chandon magnums.”

The piece returned to Broadway in 1952 with a young Leontyne Price making her professional stage debut.