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Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of
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Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism Paperback - 2000 - 1st Edition

by Steven Watson

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From the publisher

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.

Four Saints was proclaimed the birth of a new art form, a cellophane fantasy, "cubism on stage." It swept the public imagination, inspiring new art and new language, and defied every convention of what an opera should be. Everything about it was revolutionary: Stein's abstract text and Thomson's homespun music, the all-black cast, the costumes, and the combustible sets. Moving from the Wadsworth Atheneum to Broadway, Four Saints was the first popular modernist production. It brought modernism, with all its flamboyant outrage against convention, into the mainstream.

This is the story of how that opera came to be. It involves artists, writers, musicians, salon hostesses, and an underwear manufacturer with an appetite for publicity. The opera's success depended on a handful of Harvard-trained men who shaped America's first museums of modern art. The elaborately intertwined lives of the collaborators provide a window onto the pioneering generation that defined modern taste in America in the 1920s and 1930s.

A brilliant cultural historian with a talent for bringing the past to life, Steven Watson spent ten years researching and writing this book, interviewing many of the collaborators and performers. Prepare for Saints is the first book to describe this pivotal moment in American cultural history. It does so with a spirit and irreverence worthy of its subject.

Details

  • Title Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism
  • Author Steven Watson
  • Binding Paperback
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 380
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley
  • Publication date 2000-07-16
  • Features Bibliography, Index, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780520223530 / 0520223535
  • Weight 1.3 lbs (0.59 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.02 x 6.02 x 0.97 in (22.91 x 15.29 x 2.46 cm)
  • Themes
    • Chronological Period: 1920's
  • Category Performing Arts
  • Library of Congress subjects Stein, Gertrude, Modernism (Aesthetics) - United States
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 99087188
  • Dewey Decimal Code 782.1

About the author

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).
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Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism
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Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

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PREPARE FOR SAINTS: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

by Steven Watson

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