She's back!

 

After a long time and lengthy travels, in which she visited her birthplace Paris, and New York, and was reunited with old companions as part of the moving and awe-inspiring Steins Collect show, SFMoMA's Mona Lisa is back.

That would be Matisse's Femme au Chapeau, a portrait of Mme Matisse whose wild and vivid colors, still striking 107 years after the painting first shocked the Parisian public, led a derisive critic to christen Matisse and his ilk wild beasts (fauves). Thus the Fauvist School was named. It's odd how many styles (like Gothic or Impressionist) were named by people who were attacking them. Matisse was once asked what color Mme Matisse was actually wearing when she sat for this portrait, and he said, "Black, of course."

This has always been my favorite painting at the museum. Comically, I could not take a picture of it when it was part of the Stein exhibit, but now that it's back in its regular place on the second floor, I can snap away (without flash, of course). Buying this painting, one of the centerpieces of their collection, is described in interesting and not entirely accurate detail by Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.

Sister-in-law Sarah Stein is back, too, from the same trip, and is on the wall opposite, where she silently asserts that it was she and her husband Michael who really understood Matisse. And that is true. Gertrude was more about Picasso.

Due to a planned renovation and expansion, the museum is scheduled to close next spring for about two years. I'm not sure where the collection is going during that time, but I suspect most of it won't be readily on view, so it won't hurt to pay a few more visits in the months that remain.

National Poetry Month: 29

Most of the poems I’ve posted this month have been fairly straightforward in style and vocabulary, even if their implications are subtle and need to be teased out, and even if centuries have passed over some of their words. By contrast this short poem by Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) may seem impenetrable, but let your mind soak in it for a while. There are puns (sweet tea / sweetie, tray sure / treasure, drink pups / drink cups / drink up), there is rhyme ("these are the wets, these are the sets") and verbal echoing (bobbles / bobolink), and metaphors that make perfect though perhaps unexpected sense (“a nail is unison” – indeed, nails do unite whatever is nailed together). A picture might emerge: sweet tea served by a sweetie, perhaps in the ancient light of an afternoon, on silver trays, perhaps with jelly for their treats, and the nice people drinking say “please”; there is a tea pot, and outside trees waving and trembling, maybe pet puppies lapping water: a scene from the Impressionists, done by a cubist. On the other hand – maybe you get a different picture, and maybe the picture isn’t the point at all; maybe it’s just about the sound and rhythm, breaking the words free of their usual associations and combining them in ways that might bring up other associations, or none at all. “It is a silver seller” chimes delightfully in my ear, even if its meaning remains elusive.

You will sometimes read discussions of Stein’s work that I think of as secret-decoder-ring interpretations; i.e., “cow” equals “female orgasm” so “as a wife has a cow” is a coded way of saying . . . well, you get it, which is the problem I have with that style of interpreting Stein: it’s very reductive, and it tends to favor autobiographical readings rather than her imaginative life as an actual poet, that is, someone entranced by words, moving them around to different effect. Even if she meant female orgasm as one of the implications of “cow,” that doesn’t settle the question of why she chose “cow” over all the other words available. The implications of the choices are what's interesting, though indeed her more hermetic works resist ultimate interpretation, and at some point people are simply going to cut their losses on this sort of thing: life is short. (Personally, I think of it as “reading Ulysses but not Finnegans Wake.")

Stein’s poem pushes to a radical extreme the general poetic requirement that you, above all things, slow down and pay attention, letting the words play in your mind. We all slow down for different things; that’s fine. Enjoy what you can.

Susie Asado


Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.
A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.
When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.
This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly.
These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.
Incy is short for incubus.
A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.
Drink pups.
Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail.
What is a nail. A nail is unison.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.


– Gertrude Stein

Perhaps due to the slipperiness of the language (sweet tea, sweetie!) and the elusiveness of its meaning, Stein’s work lends itself very well to musical treatment; the words melt into each other and you hear them differently, and they mean as music means. In fact today’s poem was set by Virgil Thomson as an early experiment in setting Stein, before he started work on their opera 4 Saints in 3 Acts. You can hear the piece on the recording Mostly About Love, sung by soprano Nancy Armstrong with Thomson biographer and New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini on piano.

farewell, my lovelies

Above are postcards of Matisse's Femme au Chapeau and Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein, just two among the many riches of The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, which closes tomorrow (Tuesday September 6) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling on to New York and Paris. Tomorrow is also "free first Tuesday" at the museum, which is always a horrible mob scene, so consider yourself warned.

Forget Labor Day: the closing of this exhibit marks the end of my summer. (Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, the excellent exhibit down the street from SFMOMA at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, also closes September 6.) I've framed the cards with some of the admission tickets from my 21 visits. That membership sure paid for itself this year, and for a few more years besides. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my lunch hours now. Just eat lunch, I guess.

My post about the exhibit is here, my background post on the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera 4 Saints in 3 Acts is here, and my post on Ensemble Parallele's performance of a shortened version of 4 Saints, held in conjunction with this exhibit, is here.

Thus ends the summer of Stein. @Gertrude: We'll always have Paris.

Gertrude Stein is cooler than you will ever be

Her very close friend Marion Walker pleaded with her [to complete her medical degree at Johns Hopkins], she said, but Gertrude Gertrude remember the cause of women, and Gertrude Stein said, you don’t know what it is to be bored.
– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Consider the creation of Gertrude Stein, that insouciant and magnificent monument of Modernism, that icon of lesbian swank (back when Paris was the dream capital of the Amazons: Natalie Barney’s salon! The Princess de Polignac and her musical evenings!), back when Paris was the shining scene for advanced American artists, Stein the permanent poet composing and composing and always so much being what she was, sitting at her desk among the famous paintings she had bought when no one had heard of her friends Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

That collection has been reunited this summer at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will shortly travel on to New York and Paris. I’ve been making lunch-hour visits to the show, once (or twice) a week since it opened. I’ve always had a Gertrude Stein thing.

I started reading her (3 Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Everybody’s Autobiography, other things then available in random paperbacks) when I was probably 12 or so. My favorite painting at SFMOMA has always been the Matisse Femme au Chapeau from the Stein collection. I was thrilled when I managed to find an unabridged copy of The Making of Americans (back before there was an Internet to provide these things more easily) and I even read the entire thing during a gray January in Boston, propped in bed recovering from eye surgery.

On my one trip to Paris many years ago I made a point of seeking out 27 rue de Fleurus (as if I were one of the American doughboys and then later GIs who dropped in on Gertrude and Alice), even though it is not open to the public. There was a plaque on the wall, which was enough for me. I spent a sunny autumn afternoon at Pere Lachaise cemetery, about an hour of which was devoted to looking for the grave shared by Gertrude and Alice. A caretaker in a beat-up shed in a corner near the entrance (his dim shed contrasting oddly with the elaborate tombs and monuments of the celebrated dead for which the cemetery is renowned) sold poorly mimeographed guides, but I was not interested in finding Jim Morrison like the other Americans there that afternoon, I wanted Stein and Toklas, and their touching joint headstone – Gertrude on the front, Alice on the back – was incorrectly marked on the map.)

Earlier this summer, prompted by this exhibit, I re-read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which is delightfully entertaining and disproves her own quip to Hemingway, quoted therein: “Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” Even her score-settling seems good-natured, particularly when she talks about Hemingway, who by contrast tried to trash her with smarmy, nasty gossip in his own Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. Well, what else is someone like him going to do after borrowing liberally from her style but turn around and trash her? Gertrude at least knew how to do it without making herself look like the one you'd prefer to avoid.

(the Gertrude Stein, with Alice perched on the handle, from the 1970s)

Then I re-read Everybody’s Autobiography, which is written much more in the usual Stein style, and thereby demonstrates how cleverly Stein captured Toklas’s tone (or, at least, created a tone very different from her own, which has become for us the tone of Alice B Toklas). It’s a bit more disjointed and general than the earlier book, but I guess that’s suitable when you’re writing about Everybody rather than one person, and I think Gertrude knew that the glory days were in the first book.

After the Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was published, various writers and painters objected to Gertrude’s version of events (including Matisse, who among other things disliked the characterization of his wife as having a horsey face, and who pointedly said that he thought Mme Sarah Stein was the truly artistically sensitive member of the family – but by then Gertrude was all about Picasso anyway). People get hurt and tossed aside and reality for what it’s worth obscured. The flip side of Gertrude’s persistence and triumph is that lots of nuance and complexity, especially other people’s nuance and complexity, gets smoothed over. It all inevitably gets smoothed over anyway as time passes and memories fade. Gertrude remains imperturbable in our memory of her salon, because she's the one who wrote the most memorably, but there’s sometimes a certain cruel indifference in her attitude (none the less cruel for being comic and probably justified).

Mrs. Van Vechten came. She too was a very tall woman, it would appear that a great many tall ones go to Wellesley, and she too was good-looking. Mrs. Van Vechten told the story of the tragedy of her married life but Gertrude Stein was not particularly interested.
– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

As in Aesop’s fable of the painter and the lion, it’s useful as always to remember who is telling the story, and to consider why. So I followed up The Autobiography of Alice B with Brenda Wineapple’s joint biography, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, which is absorbing and fair-minded and helps remind you that one of Gertrude Stein’s greatest creations was Gertrude Stein. I don’t mean that to sound dismissive of her: what about her wasn’t subject to ridicule and discouragement? Her Jewishness, her sexuality, her intellectual interests, her cultural tastes, her style, even her weight, all were sneered at, in various ways and at various times. Yet she persisted and even triumphed. Good for her.

You could have had a real-life equivalent of reading a disinterested biography by walking from SFMOMA across the street to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which had a fascinating exhibit about Stein and her circle and her times. There are even (appropriately for the librettist of 4 Saints in 3 Acts) relics, including one of Gertrude’s embroidered vests, which was given to Virgil Thomson by Alice (given when Gertrude was gone and Virgil was no longer a threat to Alice but instead a helpful friend and a living link to the glory days long gone with Gertrude). The vest is surprisingly small. Gertrude’s weight was almost always mentioned in descriptions of her, and the CJM exhibit shows how her heft was used to create imperial (yet also motherly) images of her, so the vest size was almost a physical shock. (The exhibit closes September 6, just like the SFMOMA exhibit, but there’s a book available, which I haven’t seen yet.)

I read an interesting biography of Natalie Barney several years ago (Wild Heart by Suzanne Rodriguez). As artistic entertainment for one of her famous gatherings, Barney invited a young American dancer, then unknown, named Isadora Duncan, who brought along an accompanist: a shy young French pianist, then unknown, named Maurice Ravel. This is the sort of thing that makes me roll my eyes in historical novels (“Why, ‘tis my old friend Master Shakespeare! Come, Will, and quaff a flagon of ale with us!”) but in reality the celebrated and accomplished must start somewhere in obscurity and service, so of course it was Isadora Duncan accompanied by Maurice Ravel. Paris was like that, we like to think, and it stays that way in American dreams even though now most of it is like any big city in the world, packed with too many people and overpriced bad art and insistent advertising and the same stores and the stench of cars and cigarettes and the noise of sludgy American pop songs.

The lifestyle porn component of the exhibit is discreet but unmissable; scattered throughout there are old black-and-white photos, blown up so that they occupy entire walls, of the various Steins in their various living and dining rooms, sitting casually amid their Matisses and Picassos – things they bought because they liked them and were friends with the artists and could afford this strange and unpopular new work. (And we like to think that we would have bought what Gertrude and Leo bought, or Sarah and Michael, or that at least we would have been welcome guests at their Saturday nights.) There are quite a few paintings of the young Allan Stein, Sarah and Michael’s son, and you grow familiar with his furrowed eyebrows. There are casual friendly notes from Matisse, Picasso, and others, decorated with witty little sketches. On any visit you can hear visitors sighing in envy or wishing for just one of those paintings to hang on their own walls, or just one painter friend (let alone two) who would turn out to be the cataclysmic artistic force of the century.

(Sadly for my imaginary visit to early modern Paris, I have to admit that Gertrude tended to dominate people and to demand fealty, and though it seems she had the character and intelligence to justify her claims, and I think I would have liked her in person, people like that tend to be suspicious or dismissive of me; I think maybe there’s something too withheld about me, and I suspect Gertrude would not have asked me back. But she is gone and I have her books.)

Leo and Gertrude initially lived together at the address they made famous, 27 rue de Fleurus. He helped interest her in art, though later after they grew apart she eliminated his role in her version of the story. They were so very close, intellectually and emotionally, that the refined aesthetes in their circle, pausing in their connoisseur’s appreciation of the newly stylish Italian primitives, could titter nastily over the occasional rumor of incest. He kept on talking and she started writing. She became known for her heft and he went on long fasts, seeking relief from his delicate stomach. She found Alice B Toklas and cubism (in Picasso’s painting and in her writing) and he found Nina of Montparnasse, a street-singer/street-walker who seemed deeply and genuinely attached to him.


You can see the influence of Japanese prints throughout the exhibit, in the flat arrangement of space and the profusion of patterns that clash harmoniously and even in the popularity of scenes of intimate and domestic life. There’s a beautiful Picasso from his blue period, Soup, in which the young mother’s dark chignon and stooped posture as she offers a steaming bowl to her skipping daughter look very Japanese, and indeed Sarah and Michael displayed it with Asian instead of other modern art.

Then the way you showed your interest in advanced art changed from having a taste for Japanese prints to having a taste for African masks. These changes happen subtly and we all have our stopping points. Leo found he could not tolerate cubism, or Gertrude’s writing, both of which he considered childish nonsense. Gertrude and Leo were probably too close to survive together no matter what other paths they took.

There are things that were once considered daringly, even shockingly, modern but are now seen as romantic reminders of a lovely bygone day: La Traviata and Impressionist paintings of train stations are examples of those things. Cubism, setting aside its reputation as important art one should like, still looks intractably modern, determinedly “difficult” in design and almost perversely restricted in palette to drab shades of rust brown, gray, white, and black. This was around the time that Pound pointed out that literature is news that stays news.

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
– Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude is in the exhibit, as it needs to be. The two became friends as she sat for sitting after sitting (I think she said over eighty of them). He was unhappy with the face and painted it out and then she and Leo left to spend the summer in Italy (because people could do things like that then – not have a steady job and buy paintings and live in Paris and then spend the summer in Spain or Italy – was everything just cheaper then?). While she was gone he painted the face from memory. When he was told that Gertrude didn’t look like that he replied, “She will.”

And if Gertrude had not created a Gertrude for us then Picasso’s famous portrait would become our Gertrude (like all those blurred society women of the time who now exist for us only as brushstrokes by John Singer Sargent). In the exhibit there is a small self-portrait by Picasso, done around the same time, hanging right next to the larger portrait of Stein. When I saw them together I realized for the first time that the face he painted for Stein is basically his face.

I thought it was sly of the curators to hang the pictures this way, but in a later room there’s a picture of Stein at her desk, with her portrait behind her, and the same Picasso self-portrait hanging right by it – so perhaps the curators were sly, and perhaps Picasso was sly, and perhaps Gertrude, who in her will mentioned specifically only one painting from the famous collection, this portrait, bequeathing it to the most prestigious American museum, the Metropolitan in New York – perhaps Gertrude was the slyest of all.

A possibly more touching painting is Picasso’s tiny Hommage a Gertrude, probably a gift for her name day (the feast of St Gertrude seems to have shifted to and from several dates in mid-November, so I don't know when exactly he paid this particular homage), with angels trumpeting and holding baskets of rich fruits, done in his distinctive style. It's both baroque and modern, grand and intimate. Gertrude hung it over her bed.

It’s the Matisses that have really dazzled me in this show. I’ve always liked color, so I think I probably would have responded to Matisse before he became beloved. His greens astonish me. Even paintings that I think, at first glance, are dominated by other colors turn out to have greens threaded through them in surprising, vivid ways.

Making weekly lunchtime trips to the exhibit enables me to handle the crowds by darting in and out of convenient openings. There are Cezanne bathers scattered through the show (one of them surprisingly tucked into the gallery devoted otherwise to paintings by Matisse’s pupils). There’s one small one that is almost always free for viewing, hanging right between one big room (with the Femme au chapeau and the portrait of Stein and Picasso's mysterious and authoritative Boy with a Horse and his lovely rose period portrait of a naked Fernande, his mistress at the time) and another big room (with mostly Matisses from Sarah and Michael’s collection, including the vibrant Young Sailor and the sheer mysteriously balanced perfection of Pink Onions).

I found myself tending to linger in front of the same canvases over and over – for instance, the lush and poetic Blue Nude, now in Baltimore and a long-time favorite of mine (previously seen here a few years ago in an exhibit of Matisse’s sculpture; and indeed next to it in this show there is a small Matisse sculpture of a naked woman in the same pose as the Blue Nude, and next to that sculpture is a still life that includes a painted representation of the sculpture).

But the painting that really knocked me out was Matisse's Fontainebleau Forest (Autumn Landscape). I found myself staring at it longer and longer each visit, surprised more and more deeply at how the vivid colors shaped and shaded the view, colors harmoniously contrasting and rhyming and flickering into a sense of unseen but rustling life in the clearing and the trees and the sky over a forest in fall. This painting is currently in a private collection, so I will probably never get to see it again. My memory will have to come to the aid of the small picture in the hefty catalogue.

I feel very fortunate to have been able to visit this exhibit as often as I did. The collection was dispersed even during the lifetime of its collectors, and by then they knew they had been lucky enough to be in the right time and at the right place and in the right circumstances and that their earlier days would become legend. The colors and shapes on these canvases forced the world to see differently. We take that way of seeing for granted now. So much gets lost and forgotten along the way. The canvases remain, to be looked at, and the books, to be read.

Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
(Silence)
My long life, my long life.
– Gertrude Stein

The Mother of Us All

when this you see remember me

I was at the Thursday and Saturday night performances of 4 Saints in 3 Acts, sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (in conjunction with their exhibit The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde), held at the attractive small theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts right across the street, and performed by the fabulous Ensemble Parallele.

It’s a bit misleading to describe the evening as a performance of 4 Saints in 3 Acts; this was an “Opera Installation” (I’m only surprised that its art-museum origin didn’t result in its being called “The 4 Saints Project”) so what we actually had was an abbreviated version of 4 Saints, preceded by a new composition called A Heavenly Act, a setting by Luciano Chessa of parts of Stein’s text cut from the reduced Saints. The idea of continuing the avant-garde performance tradition association with 4 Saints is not in itself a bad one, but they would have been better off leaving 4 Saints alone – Ensemble Parallele’s performance being, as expected given their track record, of such quality that I wished they were performing the entire opera – and maybe commissioning a new setting of some of Stein’s other texts.

On Thursday we were allowed to go directly into the event we had paid for; last night, however, we had to start with not one but two (one for Yerba Buena and one for SFMOMA) pointless and boring speeches from museum functionaries. They blathered on and on about their “installations” and “projects” and “background” for the piece, all of which (and more) is already easily available on-line or in the program. Gentlemen, let me tell you about a wonderful invention called the Internet. Anyone who is interested in what your organizations are doing, based on their viewing of the performance you are delaying for your own ego-gratification, can look it up later on the Internet. If we’ve spent up to $85 on tickets, there’s a good chance we already know what we’re going to be seeing, and if we don’t, that’s a deliberate choice that should be respected.

These tedious speeches were not only exasperating. I think the one from the SFMOMA guy was actually destructive, since he announced at one point that it was “OK to laugh” (then he added, as a condescending afterthought, that it was “OK to cry” as well; thanks, but I really don’t need to be told what makes me laugh or cry), which a large portion of the audience took as official permission to regard the opera as just silliness and hijinks; no matter what the words and music and movement evoked of beauty or passion or melancholy delicate poetry, there was continuing inane laughter that had not been there Thursday night when we had no little speeches. (And even the comic parts of the opera are really more evocative of witty smiles than guffaws; this isn’t Deputy Dawg.) Since the newly created scenario for 4 Saints involved the mercy killing (of St Teresa 1 by St Ignatius), a major operation (St Ignatius as the doctor), a trial for the life of St Ignatius, and his execution in an electric chair (the silly old women behind me chortling constantly throughout), the laughter was a pretty clear indication that people weren’t open to what they were seeing, but to what they had been told they should see. Why is a curator of modern art trying to direct our responses anyway? Why not trust the work of art and trust the audience and let us have our own reactions and our own opinions?

I liked Chessa’s music even more on the second hearing, though I would have preferred to hear it when I wasn’t waiting for 4 Saints. His piece opens with mistier shadier slow undulations, which contrast nicely with Thomson’s crisper tunes, and he elegantly references Thomson’s music, and though it’s beautifully done (as if he were an architect incorporating echoes of an attached older building into a new one), the very fact of doing so means this work is not in the tradition of 4 Saints, which was (and, wonderfully, remains) bold and eccentric and original.

There is a video projection by Kalup Linzy, consisting mostly of clouds and gauzy angels in smoky black-and-white, which was all quite lovely but not at all original or challenging in the way of the original. Linzy is black, and the program connects his role in this production with the famous use of an all-black cast in the original 4 Saints, but audience expectations are no longer challenged by seeing black singers in an opera; this is a good thing for both art and society, but it’s another way in which this production does not – could not – generate the frisson of the original. In fact it’s difficult to think of a more universal symbol of The Lovely than soft-focus angels and clouds. Nothing wrong with that, but just another source of frustration when I’m waiting for 4 Saints.

A Heavenly Act is very dark, at least on stage; the music covers a wider spectrum. The chorus mostly wears black cowls, and the lighting is low. The music suddenly changes to a stylish waltz, which evoked a raffish but elegant hotel ballroom of the 1920s with potted palms; the waltz grows increasingly frantic and moves towards a gospel number, sung by Linzy with angel wings (and a microphone) and in dark robes of the sort of black that looks green, but unfortunately he doesn’t have the voice or presence to carry off a gospel number – you can hear in the music that it was meant to be an exuberant explosion, but you can’t hear it in the performance. (And, again, gospel numbers on stage are not only not novelties, they’ve become a bit of a Broadway cliché.)

Throughout the first act, the words are mostly unintelligible. Stein, careful guardian of her own genius, would not like this. And I don’t think Thomson would either; famously (or notoriously, since people now tend to find his attitude patronizing), he decided to use black singers because of the clarity and beauty of their elocution. The libretto of 4 Saints is one of Stein’s, uh, more deeply hermetic texts (which means you’ll either find it evocative and poetic, as I do, or incoherent gibberish; personally, I admire Stein for continuing to walk the far edge; her difficulties remain difficult, which is part of their point; they haven’t been glossed and smoothed into a standard reading), but – and this is part of Thomson’s genius – it really does make sense, certainly poetic and emotional sense, when it’s sung. The form and shape of the music help form and shape the words and their possible meanings and echoes (and they build, which is why it's problematic to perform only part of this opera). Things live on the stage in a way they don’t on the page (which is why theater, despite its inconveniences and never-ending problems, and stupid giggling audiences, lasts).

Surtitles were not used for either part. I think this is a defensible idea for several reasons: the lack of surtitles has the effect of both forcing you to pay closer attention to the words and relieving you from needing to follow the libretto word by word. (I realize these two effects sound contradictory, but the dual effect is true; and if you dislike paradox and obscurity, 4 Saints is not the opera for you.) The opera is a balancing act between words and music and they need to join in performance; surtitles can emphasize the words in a way that obscures the emotional clarity provided by music and action (as when you buy a used book and any underlined or highlighted words jump out at you, even if you have no idea why they were underlined or highlighted).

As I said, I would have enjoyed A Heavenly Act on its own; as it was, I found it much too long (almost 40 minutes of a 90-minute performance), since I was eager for 4 Saints. I would happily buy a ticket if someone wanted to do a similar “installation” to one of the over-produced staples of the repertory, but 4 Saints is done so rarely that the evening led to a sense of frustration rather than adventure. The original is itself only around 90 minutes, and performing the whole thing doesn’t require anything that isn’t also needed for the short version (which, by the way, was never intended as a substitute performing version or final revision, no matter what SFMOMA is implying; Thomson made a short version, based on the hour he was given for a radio broadcast, and a record executive told him he would record that hour; Thomson refers to the recording in a letter to Alice B Toklas after Stein's death as "excerpts" of the opera).

As previously noted, 4 Saints is one of my all-time favorite operas, and I have never had the chance to see a full-length production; given that, my frustration with this evening was maybe to be expected, but it was a bit of a perverse tease to sell me a ticket for 4 Saints and then spend so much time on something which, while quite lovely, is not 4 Saints.

The overall excellence of Ensemble Parallele’s performance added to the frustration (especially since I felt on Thursday night that a few moments, particularly in the beginning, would have benefited from some of the rehearsal time that was no doubt spent on A Heavenly Act; there were some glitches on Saturday but on the whole the performance seemed more confident, though I shouldn't leave the impression that either night was overall anything but superb). I’ve sketched out their new scenario above, and director Brian Staufenbiel did a wonderful job staging the opera, using the words and music as the key to the action, so that sometimes it all made excellent (and even surprising and new) sense, and other times it created a wonderful disjunction between sense and scene (as in the trial, when the arbitrary-seeming phrases made a satirical point about the workings of earthly justice versus the higher morality of St Ignatius’s actions). There are elegant and witty dances (choreography by Michael Mohammed) when the music calls for them.

The set is also elegant and witty, with a bed, tables, and some chairs, all in white and on wheels, with touches of silver (as in the silver masks that line the top part of the bed, where a canopy would hang, which echo the silver faces of the white-clad cast). There are some touches of yellow and pale blue; St Teresa 1 is all in buttery yellow, and St Ignatius in brilliant red. (Set design by Staufenbiel and costumes by Christine Cook.) As noted, the rest of the cast is in white, except for the non-singing supernumaries, who are silver-faced policemen (click here for photos and a backstage report from evil supernumary SFMike), and the Compere and Commere (respectively John Bischoff and Wendy Hillhouse), who are in grand and slightly tatty Napoleonic finery, a witty reference to the Parisian milieu of Stein and Thomson.

Nicole Paiement, conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Parallele, had a wonderful touch with the music; hearing it after being so used to the recording was like seeing a familiar fresco cleaned and restored to its original fresh brilliance of color. The cast (many of them still students at, or newly graduated from, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music) was strong throughout. I particularly liked the purity of Heidi Moss’s St Teresa 1 and Kristen Choi’s St Teresa 2; Choi seemed to connect directly to the emotional truth and lyric beauty of each of her lines. The St Ignatius of Eugene Brancoveanu dominated the proceedings with his flowing baritone, large and deep; he was particularly fine – vibrant and sensitive and pointed – in Pigeons on the grass, alas, which is the Nessun Dorma of avant-garde opera.

What was there was all so good! Please, why not do the whole thing?

they wept because "they didn't know something so beautiful could be done in America"

In conjunction with their amazing reunion of the Stein collection this summer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is sponsoring a revival/restaging/partial revision of the Gertude Stein/Virgil Thomson modernist milestone, 4 Saints in 3 Acts, by the fabulous Ensemble Parallele. It runs this Thursday, 18 August, through Sunday, 21 August, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Get your tickets here.

4 Saints in 3 Acts, one of the few operas whose librettist is always given equal billing with the composer, has always been one of my all-time favorite operas. I have been fascinated by it since I first heard about it, probably when I was around 13 and reading something by or about Gertrude Stein. It was one of the first operas I bought (on cassette; this was before CDs) and listening to it is one of the few things that can reliably make me happy, even after all these years.

This is a somewhat arbitrary list of related materials, for anyone equally fascinated by this Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson collaboration:

Thomson, who was a music critic for many years at the New York Herald Tribune, is one of those musicians like Berlioz whose writing is almost as entertaining as his music. He wrote quite a lot about 4 Saints, its genesis and reception. His autobiography and his selected writings are vivid and provocative, though as with all autobiographies you might want to check what he says against a more disinterested source, particularly the Tommasini biography mentioned below. Actually, the Virgil Thomson Reader I have seems to be different from the one linked to above, and is now I guess out of print. I read the Reader and the autobiography so long ago that I should probably re-read them.

Stein wrote less about the aftermath of 4 Saints, perhaps because she and Thomson had been quarrelling at the time of the premiere and she didn't even see it until her tour of the USA, when it happened to be staged in Chicago when she was there. She mentions it in passing in several places in Everybody's Autobiography, the sort-of sequel to her surprise (and surprising) best-seller, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. She did enjoy the extra celebrity brought to her by the opera's unexpected success.

A few years ago I bought a used copy of the 1934 first printing of the text, which is the classic "slim volume of verse." It has an introduction by Stein's friend and defender, Carl van Vechten, who suggests that in both words and action 4 Saints is no more obscure and convoluted than Ponchielli's La Gioconda. Whoever owned this copy earlier wrote on the flyleaf in pencil "Nobody knows the Opera I seen, nobody knows but Gertrude" with the initials F.P.A. below, who is either the newspaperman Franklin P. Adams (how do I even know that name?) or the pencilling quipster him- or herself. You can find both the Autobiography and the text of 4 Saints in Volume 1 of the Library of America's two-volume Gertrude Stein collection.

About a year ago Oxford published the collected letters (to each other) of Stein and Thomson, under the title Composition as Conversation. It's thoroughly and helpfully annotated, and quite entertaining, though I'm only about half-way through it since letters, like lyric poetry, need space around them and do not benefit from cramming. It's always fascinating to see how much of a writer's style is simply a natural extension of personality and how much gets into the finished product. For some letters are a completely different thing from their "real" writing. Not surprisingly Stein is not one of these, though she can be fairly direct and matter-of-fact. Thomson usually resists the powerful rhythms of her style and manages to keep on sounding like himself.

Anthony Tommasini's biography of the composer (Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle) is affectionate but not uncritical, and pretty much indispensible if you're interested in Thomson and his times. The discussion of 4 Saints is particularly insightful on the work's staging and cultural milieu.

Steven Watson's Prepare for Saints is entirely about the first production of the opera. Some of the Amazon reviews seem particularly clueless about this book, commenting that it's full of gossip instead of whatever it was that reader was looking for; but it's not a literary study of the text or a musicological study of the opera; it's a cultural history, so, yeah, there's a lot of what you might call the higher gossip about who was quarrelling with whom and who was sleeping with whom and who snubbed whom and how somehow art gets produced while all the rest is going on. It's a thorough and very interesting book.

Incidentally Watson is speaking at the Contemporary Jewish Museum about 4 Saints this Thursday before the premiere of the new production, but I see by their website that it's sold out. But the CJM's Gertude Stein exhibit is also worth a visit or two, and includes some brief footage of the Mark Morris Dance Group production of 4 Saints, last staged here around six years ago. (As far as I know a film of Mark Morris's production is not publicly available; I assume the footage they use is from the MMDG's archives.)

The name Chick Austin kept recurring in all these accounts; he was the director of the Hartford Atheneum who first managed to get the opera staged and who helped make it a sensation. He has his own excellent biography by Eugene Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. If you wonder how museums went from the personal fiefs of rich collectors and connoisseurs to public, academically-inclined institutions, or if you wonder how modern art (that is, modern painting, not necessarily modern music) became widely seen (whether you like it or not) as the major art of our time, then you should read this book. It made me regret that I never went down to Hartford in the years I lived in Boston. It's fascinating to see how influential were many of Austin's personal interests and tastes (in baroque art, in circuses and movies and other "low" forms of art, in Picasso and other modernists, and even in the museum as a place not just for paintings but also for theater and for parties). Gaddis's even-handed approach to Austin's bisexuality is a model for such discussions: he doesn't brush it aside, but he doesn't dwell on it at the expense of Austin's more important achievements, and he doesn't naively insist, as many would these days, that Austin was "really" gay. Austin was married with children but had a number of male companions both before and during his marriage; he seemed to value both types of relationship, though at the end of his life he abruptly dumped his long-time male companion and returned permanently to his wife, announcing he never wanted to see the friend again. (I've forgotten the man's name, which I guess is rather Chick Austin of me, but he ended up working in a men's clothing store in Florida.)

Well, sexuality is sort of an unavoidable undercurrent in discussions of 4 Saints, among other things. I think it was in Tommasini's biography that I read that the original cast used to refer to the creators among themselves as "Mr Stein and Miss Thomson." Since a number of the (male) performers were sleeping with various of the (male) collaborators, I assume this was a somewhat affectionate gesture, even if they didn't use the nicknames in front of Thomson. There's a provocative and intriguing discussion of sexuality and 4 Saints in Nadine Hubbs's The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. It's about how a small group of mostly gay (and mostly Jewish) modern composers helped create what we think of as the American sound, thereby making themselves the voices of a society that wasn't particularly sympathetic to gays, Jews, or modernists. Hubbs's style can be a bit heavy with the academic-ese, but she doesn't substitute theory for thought and observation, and the book is well worth the time if you're interested in the subject.

After all that reading and theorizing, let's not forget the music and singing:

Capital Capitals, a Stein/Thomson work which preceded 4 Saints and is a sort of dry-run experiment by Thomson in setting Stein, is available on a couple of recordings. You can find its premiere recording, with Thomson on piano, in one (Modern American Vocal Works) where it's paired with Thomson's Stabat Mater (with Jennie Tourel), along with classic recordings of Copland's Old American Songs (featuring William Warfield with Copland on piano) and Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 (with Eleanor Steber) and Hermit Songs (featuring Leontyne Price with Barber on the piano). Capital Capitals is also available on an all-Thomson disc (Mostly About Love, which features Anthony Tommasini on the piano) along with a number of shorter vocal selections, including some others with texts by Stein. It's been a while since I've listened to these recordings but I remember liking them a lot.

The famous final Stein/Thomson collaboration, The Mother of Us All, is available in a recording from Santa Fe, conducted by Raymond Leppard. Again, it's been a while since I've heard this one, and I suppose I should have given it another listen before bringing it up, but right now I'm kind of buried under newly-purchased yet unlistened-to CDs, among other things, and I've always preferred 4 Saints as more poetical anyway, so I didn't. You get to have the joy of discovery, and of forming your own opinion! You can sometimes find copies of the Columbia University premiere floating around, but I think it wasn't ever officially released.

And, of course, there are recordings of 4 Saints itself. Even without the added interest that comes from being conducted by the composer himself and from including many of the original singers, Thomson's own recording is bouncy and tangy and, though I really hate using this word in a context like this, essential. It is also, unfortunately, only about half of the opera, so it's sort of 2 Saints in 1.5 Acts. What's really unfortunate is that this abridgement (insisted upon by a record executive; since CDs can have longer running times they've filled the rest of the CD with Stokowski conducting Thomson's The Plow That Broke the Plains) has often been taken as an alternative performing edition. (To continue with unfortunate things, the upcoming performances are abridged, though I understand that was not Ensemble Parallele's idea.) C'mon, people, the whole thing is only about an hour and a half! There is one very good complete recording, which is the one I first bought on cassette long ago, though my cassettes were replaced, also long ago, by CDs. But it too seems to have fallen out of print, though like some of the CDs mentioned earlier used copies are available at prices ranging from the reasonable to the outrageous, and I keep hoping for another one anyway (possibly Naxos's American Opera Classics series will come through for me), because, as previously noted, I can't get enough of this opera.

The photograph at the top is a detail from The Cathedrals of Broadway in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, painted by Florine Stettheimer, who is best known for her original designs (fanciful, colorful, and staged with cellophane) for the 4 Saints premiere.