Virgil Thomson: Blessed Saints

Four Saints gets my vote for the best American opera. It's a collaboration between two of the most original voices of the century: Thomson and Gertrude Stein, both of whom wanted to break out of the traditional mold of sentimental operatic narrative.

They broke a lot of new ground. As Stein wrote in Everybody's Autobiography, the opera (like a Seinfeld episode) is about nothing. "A real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something." The major characters in the opera are St. Teresa and St. Ignatius, although there are actually more than four saints and more than three acts.

It's a heavenly work in which the musical jokes perfectly match the verbal ones. Mock hymn tunes and Gregorian chants, mock Baroque and Gilbert & Sullivan, mock minstrel show and vaudeville all create an atmosphere of endearing but unsentimental sweetness. Passages like St. Ignatius's vision of the Holy Ghost ("Pigeons on the grass alas") are made infinitely more poignant by the way the words make far more than strictly logical sense.

The first performance, produced by the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, took place at the Hartford Atheneum in 1934, though Stein completed the text in 1927 and Thomson completed the score in 1928. Thomson's friend Maurice Grosser created a workable ex-post-facto scenario. The production was choreographed by Frederick Ashton and staged by John Houseman. New York artist Florine Stettheimer created transparent scenery out of cellophane. Most daring of all for the time, the original cast, most of whom appear on this recording, consisted entirely of black performers. Soprano Beatrice Robinson-Wayne as St. Teresa and baritone Edward Matthews as St. Ignatius were especially eloquent.

After Hartford, Four Saints ran for six weeks on Broadway -- unprecedented for an opera. When George Gershwin saw it, he was so impressed with the conductor, Alexander Smallens, and the Eva Jessye Negro Choir that he hired them for Porgy and Bess. Thomson's notes to this recording refer to a thoroughly happy collaboration, but in fact he and Stein fell out afterward and were not on speaking terms at the time of the premiere. Stein finally saw the production in Chicago.

To complete the CD, there's a wonderful 1946 performance of Thomson's suite from his score to Pare Lorentz's dust-bowl documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. Thomson's sense of American heroism includes Sunday School doxology and honky-tonk sleaze. It's irresistible. I want everyone I love to have a copy.

-- Lloyd Schwartz