Four Saints in Three Acts - Year - 1989

History

About "Four Saints . . . "

When the Music Department began plans for the 1989 Festival of American Music it seemed fitting that an opera or piece of music theater by a native composer should be included. While many American composers have written for the operatic stage, there was always the Thomson/Stein collaborations that stood apart from the rest. UCLA Opera had mounted a very successful production of The Mother of Us All here in 1965, but the earlier, more famous Four Saints in Three Acts had not been performed in the Los Angeles area for some time.

Now, Four Saints is one of those operas that most people know about but few have ever seen. The 1934 premiere was a glittering critical success sponsored by a group called the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music at the Hartford Atheneum. It later moved to Broadway for 60 performances and was seen by everyone from Toscanini to Gershwin. Four Saints was the first real success of American producer/director John Jouseman, featuring movement by Frederick Ashton, the voices of an all-Negro cast of singers, and the famous cellophane sets of Florine Stettheimer. Virgil Thomson’s music was called a “sow’s-ear” by critic Theodore Chanler, and composer Roger Sessions thought that Thomson had not made maximum use of the orchestral resources, but Aaron Copland loved the fresh orchestral sound. Most of all, it was Miss Stein’s unique use of language that surprised and mystified everyone.

After World War I many artists actively rejected the reality and artistic forms that were popular before the war. In the visual arts, cubists, futurists, constructionists, dadaists and surrealists were all breaking down traditional forms and experimenting with new ideas that still define a twentieth-century reality for us all. In language, poets like Guillaume Apollinaire and Edith Sitwell were playing with words and sounds in an abstract manner, but it was Gertrude Stein who best manipulated words, language, syntax, and reasonless rhyme into a new kind of abstract art. Linear development of plot or structure was not the only way of establishing meaning(s) of their own - meanings that differed with each listener, that could reach hidden places. While it is an oversimplification, Stein uses words in much the same ways her friend Picasso used form, breaking up the recognizable and, therefore, easily accepted reality into other patterns and new shapes. It was a painter, Maurice Grosser, that gave a structured scenario for the first performance of Four Saints, but he counseled other directors to devise their own, hoping they would find this deeply fanciful work a stimulus to their own imagination. Since I have been concerned with clear story-telling, having no story to tell was both exhilarating and frightening.

Hearing this language is far different than reading it. There are secrets on the page that only my cast can know because many words sound the same and yet can mean different things )to, two, too . . . for example). But to intone these words of Gerturde Stein is to give them life. Like a magical spell, Miss Stein’s words have power off the page. In this way, the enourmous contribution of Virgil Thomson is often underestimated. By his careful and sensitive setting of the poetry, he breathes life to the words to let them work their magic. Never in the history of opera has so abstract a text been set so clearly to music. This is also the great frustration of the piece. While you can clearly understand the words, you can’t understand a meaning of the words. Logic doesn’t apply.

As I watched my cast agonize over the difficult memorization of the text, I also saw some fun and games with their attitudes toward a libretto that I had never seen before. The limited harmonies and rhythmic patterns of the score made purely musical rehearsals agony for the orchestra. Only with the singers and Miss Stein’s words does any rehearsal become possible. (I wonder with the repetitive musical structure now found in the operas of minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and John Adams how the orchestra survives.)

With the support of my colleagues Samuel Krachmalnick and Donn Weiss as well as my designers Robert Demann and Russell Pyle, and my wonderful and patient student cast, I have devised an entertainment designed to divert and amuse. For the duration of the opera, I invute you to leave 1989 behind and come to a different place, a place populated with Saints who say, sings, and do the most marvelous things. - John Hall