A Manhattan audience, looking unseasonably plushy, last week cooed and
clapped its way through the revival of a cockeyed opera—Four Saints in
Three Acts. The author of its words, expatriate Gertrude Stein, is
still expatriate in Occupied France. The author of its music,
Expatriate Virgil Thomson, now repatriated in Manhattan, supervised the
second showing. At the original production in Hartford, Conn., people actually
wept at the Cellophane scenery, the lovely costumes, the adroit stage
business, and Harlem Negroes singing Miss Stein's screwball words about
St. Therese, St. Ignatius, some 30 other saints. Last week the audience
controlled itself better. That first performance, thought Composer Thomson, had been “too
perfect”; it scared off any second attempts. To prove that the
opera could be done in simple oratorio form, this spring he reassembled
the original cast, drilled them at length, stormed when they failed to
articulate to his satisfaction such Steinese as “He asked for a
different magpie.”With Mr. Thomson at the piano, Four Saints was
presented in dress rehearsal at one of the Museum of Modern Art's
“Coffee Concerts” . Last week a small orchestra sat on the Town Hall stage, with most of the
principal saints in evening dress, the chorus in monkish robes. After
seven years Virgil Thomson's tunes still sounded engaging, well-made,
occasionally trivial. The most charming aria was still that sung by St.
Ignatius: “Pigeons on the grass alas. Short longer grass short
longer shorter yellow grass,” etc. But Four Saints in Three Acts
still owed a lot to its original Cellophane. Virgil Garnett Gaines Thomson, 44, is a chub-cheeked, baldish, chirrupy,
witty, exquisitely cultivated native of Kansas City. A piano-prodigious
only son, he went to the same high school as
Playwight-Critic Richard Lockridge, Contralto Gladys Swarthout, Actor
William Powell. Virgil Thomson went to Harvard, where he wore kid
gloves to scull on the River Charles, and played the organ in Boston's
King's Chapel. He spent a year after graduation on a grant from the
Juilliard Foundation, then went to Paris, to go hungry. “I hope,” he
declared, “I shall never again have to earn an honest penny.” He
remained in Paris until last year, managed to live in a
canary-yellow-walled apartment, had his clothes made by Couturire
Lanvin, ate exquisite little dinners, went to bed for days
at a time when he felt bored. He still calls Paris his home. As a composer, Virgil Thomson helped invent Neo-Romanticism, which is
described in the current Modern Music as “a melodious simplicity, accepting
all the known tricks of the
trade, with a friendly nod to dissonance or any other musical
Nance.”
