Early in 1927 composer Virgil Thomson and his fellow Parisian expatriate Gertrude Stein decided to collaborate on an opera. After pondering a variety of topics, the pair settled on the lives of saints. “Not just any saints,” Thomson wrote in his reminiscences, “ours turned out to be baroque and Spanish, a solution that delighted Gertrude, for she loved Spain, and that was far from displeasing me, since mass-market Catholic art was still baroque.”
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Seven years later, Four Saints in Three Acts was mounted on Broadway by the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. The production, conducted by Alexander Smallens and choreographed by Frederick Ashton, caused a sensation. Stein’s libretto, filled with tongue twisters, nonsensical ditties, alliteration, and other wordplay, is beguilingly surreal. But the opera has no plot to speak of: its action is a cavalcade of highly stylized vignettes. Incidents, imaginary and otherwise, from the devotional lives of Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Ignatius of Loyola are intertwined kaleidoscopically with doings of fictional characters named Saint Settlement and Saint Chavez. On the sideline, characters called Commere and Compere–substitutes for Stein and Thomson–comment on the action, turning the opera into a Pirandellian meditation on art. In contrast with the abstractness of the narrative and its setting is a folksy score rooted in the Southern Baptist hymns of Thomson’s Missouri childhood.
One startling–and controversial–feature of the 1934 premiere was the all-black cast. Stein and Thomson didn’t intend this landmark casting, explains Stone. “It was during auditions that Thomson was struck by the way black singers enunciated. Virgil told me he felt their clear diction and deep resonance and physical carriages would make the spiritual side of his music more deeply felt. So even though the opera doesn’t require an all-black cast–like Porgy and Bess or The Emperor Jones–we are honoring the tradition.”
Stone believes that Lattimore shows the promise of becoming a “world-class” singer. “There’s a special personality in her voice and stage presence that demands attention. She’s about to bloom. I can’t wait to hear her in Verdi roles.”
