Thomson composed the opera sitting at his piano and chanting until something happened. ‘Speech alone lacks music’s forward thrust,’ he said. He wanted to carry listeners along on a magic carpet. His music infused an emotional logic into the script and made sense of what was certainly not nonsense. It became a piece of moods rather than literary meaning, humorous in the sense of joyful, a kaleidoscope of an opera with allusion to time, place, narrative but nothing specific.
He wrote for a flute, a piccolo, an oboe, two saxophones, a clarinet, a bassoon, a trumpet, trombone, accordion, celesta, glockenspiel ‘and lots of other battery’, four violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass. He had been a church organist so there were church-style cadences and hymn-style tunes for Gertrude’s words such as: ‘There can be no peace on earth with calm.’ While composition was in progress, Gertrude went with Jean Cocteau to Thomson’s ‘narrow room in the hotel Jacob’ to hear him accompany himself on the piano and sing the opera in different voices. Cocteau described the work as solid, ‘like a table that stands on its legs, a door one can open and close’.
By 25 August 1933, Virgil Thomson had finished two acts of Four Saints in Three Acts. He wrote to the composer Aaron Copland that in three more weeks he would have it finished. The time for production seemed right because of the popularity of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. He asked the English impresario C.B. Cochran to consider staging it. Cochran declined.
‘Chick’ Austin – Arthur Everett Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut – agreed to produce it under the auspices of the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music and to raise all necessary funds. He planned to stage it at the Atheneum to coincide with the opening there of Picasso’s first solo exhibition in America. Art prices had rocketed. In 1929 a group of collectors opened the Museum of Modern Art. As the Depression set in, stocks and bonds declined and the buying of Picasso, Braque and Matisse became investments of rising profit.
Virgil Thomson chose a friend, Frederick Ashton, as the choreographer. Ashton was thirty and had worked with Marie Rambert and C.B. Cochran. John Houseman was the producer. Though a playwright, he had not then had a play staged. Later he ran the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles. Abe Feder, just out of college, was lighting designer; Alexander Smallens, Leopold Stokowski’s assistant, was the conductor. Thomson asked the artist Florine Stettheimer to design the sets and costumes. She wrote in her diary:
He makes the words by Gertrude Stein come alive and flutter and in sound have a meaning. He wants me to do the visual part of the opera.
This commission was her sole stage endeavour. She oversaw the execution of her designs. She lived with her invalid mother and two sisters in an apartment in the Alwyn Court Building on West 58th Street and 7th Avenue. Like the Steins, the Stettheimers were German-American Jews. Florine Stettheimer’s work was admired by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the artists Marcel Duchamp and Pavel Tchelitchew, but she seldom showed her bright figurative paintings outside of her home. Thomson described her apartment as ‘very high camp’. It was itself like a set design with gold and marble, red velvet curtains, plumes and lace.
She made detailed maquettes for Four Saints. She used cellophane, beads, gilt and drapes. There was a proscenium arch fashioned of lace, a cellophane backdrop and cyclorama, which created ‘waves of light’ and ‘a great curtain of jewels’, a sea wall of shells, palm trees with fronds of white tarlatan, an arch threaded with crystal beads, a stone lion, costumes of black chiffon with black ostrich plumes. St Teresa was to go on a picnic in the second act in a cart drawn by a live white donkey, taking with her a tent of white gauze with a gold fringe. It was Florine’s idea to have a maypole dance in one of the Act Twos.
She did a painting, now in the Chicago Art Institute, of Thomson singing and playing Four Saints on a piano surrounded by birds, bright palms and banners of St Virgil, St Gertrude, St Teresa, St Ignatius. And she added a Florine St.
She designed 200 costumes. The opera ran for 100 minutes.
an African-American cast
Virgil Thomson decided on an all-black cast. He praised the dignity, poise, diction and articulation of black performers and thought they were less likely to be fazed by the apparent senselessness of Gertrude’s script than white singers inured to traditional operatic form.
So his buoyant music was sung by an all African-American cast, brought together by Eva Jessye, the first African-American woman to gain international recognition as a professional choral conductor. She described Four Saints as a musical breakthrough for African-American singers:
quite a departure, because up to that time the only opportunities involved things like ‘Swanee River,’ or ‘That’s Why Darkies Are Born,’ or ‘Old Black Joe.’ They called that ‘our music,’ and thought we could sing those things only by the gift of God… With this opera we had to step on fresh ground, something foreign to our nature completely.
A performance of Virgil Thomson’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts © Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy
The Harlem cast liked the opera. Rehearsals in the basement at St Philip’s Church on Harlem’s 137th Street were fun. Ashton was popular. He helped performers learn music and movement simultaneously. He found the whole process ‘frightfully exhausting’ because they were not professional dancers, so it was hard for any scene to be the same twice running. He had difficulty finding six black dancers with ballet training, so a swimmer and a basketball player made up the numbers. He described his choreography as a ‘mix of snake hips and Gothic’. Singers
