Gertrude Stein is hot this cold San Francisco summer. Besides being featured in two major art shows, where works collected by Stein and her family in Paris during the early days of the 20th century are on display, now an avant garde opera written by Stein and composer Virgil Thompson is set to open on Thursday, August 18 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Stein — famous for a number of things including writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — grew up in Oakland, California and moved to France when painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were starting their careers. The art and music scene was flourishing, and Stein was a catalyst in bringing modern art to the world’s attention. But she wanted to be more than a collector and a hostess in a popular Paris salon. She wanted to create art and be regarded as an important artist herself.
In 1926 Stein was invited by a young, little-known composer — Thompson — to work with him on an opera. He asked her to write the libretto for what would become Four Saints in Three Acts. It took seven years before the project came to fruition, not in Paris where it was begun, but in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934, in a basement theatre. What was shocking and “modern” in those days was that the whole cast was black. The opera quickly moved to New York, where it played on Broadway for 70 performances, a long, successful run in the thirties, especially for an opera.
Florine Stettheimer’s set for Act 1 of the 1934 production of Four Saints in Three Acts; Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare books and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven; photo: Harold Swahn
In San Francisco, I attended a rehearsal the other day for the new production of Four Saints in Three Acts, and I was surprised that the most of the cast this time is not black. That was a device Stein and Thompson used 70 years ago to shock people and appear avant garde; today nobody would be shocked, I was told.
Stein, who was Jewish and lesbian, was obsessed by the Catholic Church’s saints and filled her opera with them, not just the four of the title, but dozens. The idea seems to be that artists’ total commitment to art is comparable to sainthood. And as for the “four acts,” one quickly loses that idea, as an operatic announcer keeps proclaiming new acts and scenes. It’s almost a joke. And like much of Stein’s hard-to-understand writing, the opera singers repeat phrases and names, including the word “saint.” It’s as though the cubism of Picasso were translated to the written (or sung) page. It takes a little getting used to.