User:DeRossitt/Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism is a 1998 book by cultural historian Steven Watson.

Overview
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Reception
Kara Anne Gardner in American Music: As a cultural historian, Watson's work goes beyond the scope of libretto and music. Using Four Saints as his focus, he combines his commentary on the collaboration between Stein and Thomson with an exploration of the roles of the New York salon hosts and Harvard colleagues who, as friends of Thomson and advocates of modernism, helped make the opera a reality. By this means, he creates a rich portrait of the northeastern avant-garde scene, filled with quirky stories about speakeasies, drunken parties, homosexual rendezvous, and late-night trips to the Hot-Cha Bar and Grill in Harlem. The final production of the opera—including dance, costumes, and elaborate scenery— grew out of the mixture of social upheaval and optimism that especially characterized Depression-era New York.

Still, he tells a compelling story, bines the critical eye of hindsight with a sense of nostalgia at least in the minds of its collaborators, stood for "the best part of our lives."

Kirkus Reviews: A somewhat lite but always engaging account of the modernist movement’s development in America, as seen through the prism of a great American opera.... Watson (The Birth of the Beat Generation, 1995, etc.) argues that Four Saints helped to foster mass American acceptance of modernist modalities.... The occasional shallows of his wide-ranging account are surpassed by the depth of Watson’s presentation of a pivotal cultural moment.

Bob Watson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Despite Watson’s intriguing portrait of a lively New York avant-garde emerging as the Depression took hold, his failure to make the Stein-Thomson opera come alive diminishes his otherwise fine work.

Jim Holt in the New York Times: Prepare for Saints is a terrific book, as far as it goes. So fascinating are the details, so colorful the characters, that the author might almost be forgiven for keeping silent on one question about Four Saints in Three Acts: Was the thing any good? It's an important question. If, as Watson's subtitle suggests, this opera was crucial to the mainstreaming of American modernism, one would like to have some assurance that the right kind of modernism got mainstreamed. And what's striking about Four Saints is its rejection of the modernism of complexity -- the modernism of Picasso, Schoenberg and Joyce -- in favor of the modernism of simplicity.

Dan Blue in the San Francisco Chronicle: Watson tells this quintessential American tale with humor, deft plotting and a keen eye for character. Particularly in the book's final third, when the opera becomes Broadway-bound, "Prepare for Saints" is difficult to put down. At the same time, it raises larger questions than it answers. Watson suggests but never really tells how the Hartford production was financed, and he sidesteps such issues as whether art should aspire to a larger audience and the role of PR. Nonetheless, "Prepare for Saints" is ultimately a joyous book because it celebrates a joyous art and the liberating effect it had on its audience. Many works describe the lives of artists, but this one is about their acolytes, the second tier of socialites and patrons who had the leverage to pass their values on to others.