Prepare for Saints

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. "Prepare for Saints" is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account of how that revolutionary opera was born.

"Mr. Watson does an engaging job of conjuring up the overlapping worlds his subjects inhabited: the feud-ridden expatriate community in Paris where Thomson and Stein met in the 1920's and the trend-setting bohemia of 1930's New York, where Thomson would find the patrons and promoters who would get Four Saints produced.", "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.", "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.", "As a cultural historian, Watson's work goes beyond the scope of libretto and music. Using "Four Saints" as his focus, he combines his commentary on the collaboration between Stein and Thomson with an exploration of the roles of the New York salon hosts and Harvard colleagues who, as friends of Thomson and advocates of modernism, helped make the opera a reality. By this means, he creates a rich portrait of the northeastern avant-garde scene, filled with quirky stories about speakeasies, drunken parties, homosexual rendezvous, and late-night trips to the Hot-Cha Bar and Grill in Harlem. . . . [Watson] tells a compelling story, one that combines the critical eye of hindsight with a sense of nostalgia for a work that, at least in the minds of its collaborators, stood for 'the best part of our lives.'", "A wide-ranging account . . . [and] presentation of a pivotal cultural moment."

Steven Watson is a cultural historian of the American avant-garde. He is the author of Harlem Renaissance (1995), The Birth of the Beat Generation (1995), and Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (1991).