Mark Morris Dance Group :: Morris' FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS

FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS (Music by Virgil Thomson with Libretto by Gertrude Stein)

By way of delightful processions, sevillanas, and redolent folk dancing, the deliverance to heaven of the Spanish saints Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola comes to life in Mark Morris' Four Saints in Three Acts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Mar 1-3.

Production by Mark Morris

Sets by Maira Kalman

Costumes by Elizabeth Kurtzman

Lighting by Michael Chybowski

Choreography by Mark Morris

READ THE LIBRETTO

ESSAY by Stephanie Jordan

Three performances only
March 1-3, 2012

LIMITED AVAILABILITY

Brooklyn Academy of Music Tickets 718.636.4100

FOUR SAINTS IN THREE ACTS at BAM | MMDG Music Ensemble and Trinity Choir | Stefan Asbury, conductor
Yulia van Doren, St Teresa I
Laura Mercado Wright, St Teresa II
Zach Finkelstein, St Chavez/ St Stephen_
Timothy McDevitt, St Plan
Douglas Williams, Compere
Michael Kelly, St Ignatius
Clarissa Lyons, St Settlement
Danya Katok, Commere

ABOUT FOUR SAINTS

The Mark Morris Dance Group/English National Opera production of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts was directed and choreographed by Mark Morris. Its world premiere in 2000 at the London Coliseum and US premiere that same year at Zellerbach Hall at Cal Performances, Berkeley, were met with great enthusiasm. With illustrator and author Maira Kalman’s luminous sets, Morris’ Four Saints was grand, ebullient, and spiritually resonant.

"It was early in 1927 that Gertrude Stein and I conceived the idea of writing an opera together. Naturally, the theme had to be one that interested us both. 'Something' from the lives of the saints' was my proposal; that it should take place in Spain was hers. She then chose (and I agreed) two Spanish saints, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola. The fact that these two, historically, never knew each other did not seem to either of us an inconvenience."
-Virgil Thomson, 1954

"As it happened there is on the Boulevard Raspail a place where they make photographs which have always held my attention. They take a photograph of a young girl dressed in the costume of her ordinary life and little by little in successive photographs they change it to a nun and this is done for the family when the nun is dead and in memoriam. For years I had stood and looked at these when I was walking and finally when I was writing St Teresa in looking at these photographs I saw how St Teresa existed from the life of an ordinary young lady to that of a nun. Then in another window this time on the Rue de Rennes there was a rather large porcelain group and it was of a young soldier giving alms to a beggar and taking off his helmet and his armour and leaving them in the charge of another. It was somehow just what the young Saint Ignatius did and anyway it looked like him as I had known about him and so he too became actual not as actual as St Teresa in the photographs but still actual so the Four Saints got written."
-Gertrude Stein, 1934

"Four Saints in Three Acts is both an opera and a choreographic spectacle. Imaginary but characteristic incidents from the lives of the saints constitute its action. Its scene is laid in sixteenth-century Spain. Its principal characters are Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and their respective confidants, Saint Settlement and Saint Chavez – both of these last without historical prototypes. These are the four saints referred to in the title. Other characters are a Compère and Commère, a small chorus of names saints – Saint Pilar, Saint Ferdinand and others – and a larger chorus of unnamed saints. Saint Teresa, for reasons of musical convenience, is represented by two singers dressed exactly alike. This device of the composer has no hidden significance and is not anywhere indicated in the poet’s text, though Miss Stein found it thoroughly acceptable. The Compère and Commère, who speak to the audience and to each other about the progress of the opera, have also, as characters, been introduced by the composer. One should not try to interpret too literally the words of this opera, nor should one fall into the opposite error of thinking that they mean nothing at all. On the contrary, they mean many things at once.”
-from the scenario by Marice Grosser, 1948

DIGITAL MEDIA

PRESS ARTICLES

"Prepare for Saints Flying High, Climbing Mountains, Coming Down" (Village Voice) READ ARTICLE

"One of the happiest places I know is sitting in the audience of a Mark Morris performance." - Dance Magazine review of Four Saints in Three Acts READ ARTICLE

Collaborations and Four Saints - by Lloyd Schwartz for the Boston Phoenix READ ARTICLE

"Come all, ye madcaps, here’s Gertrude Stein." -New York Observer READ ARTICLE

"Happy, vacuous absurdity, danced with great beauty and precision." -Critical Dance READ ARTICLE

"Just the right sweetness and sense of airy space." - Jennifer Dunning for The New York Times READ ARTICLE

RESOURCES

Virgil Thomson was an American composer, conductor, and music critic whose forward-looking ideas stimulated new lines of thought among contemporary musicians.

Born on November 25, 1896 in Kansas City, Missouri, Thomson studied at Harvard University and later in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, a noted teacher of musical composition. There he was influenced by early 20th-century French composers, especially the group known as Les Six, whose most prominent members were Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, and Francis Poulenc. Thomson wrote in a variety of styles, including Gregorian chant, variations on Baptist hymns, and neoclassicism, often combining traditional forms with contemporary techniques, marked by careful craftsmanship. The greatest influence on him was that of Erik Satie, and it found expression in clarity, simplicity, and humour. His operas are among his best-known works; Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) and The Mother of Us All (1947), the latter based on the life of Susan B. Anthony, boast libretti by Thomson's close friend Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde American writer. A later opera was Lord Byron (1968), which combined and unified Thomson's various compositional styles. His instrumental music includes two symphonies, several symphonic poems, and concerti for cello and flute (composed 1950 and 1954, respectively). Thomson composed songs, choral works, chamber music, piano pieces, and film music, including the scores for Pare Lorentz's pioneering documentaries The River (1936) and The Plow that Broke the Plains (1937) and for Robert Flaherty's Louisiana Story (the film score of which won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 1949). He was music critic for the New York Herald Tribune (1940–54) and published several collections of penetrating, perceptive critical articles. His autobiography, Virgil Thomson, was published in 1966. Among his other books are Music Revisited, 1940–54 (1967), American Music Since 1910 (1971), and Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson (1988). He died on September 30, 1989 in New York City.
© Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

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Gertrude Stein was an imaginative, influential writer in the 20th century and a patron of the arts. She and her brother established a famous literary and artistic salon, hosting writers from around the world. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Stein is a book about the life of her companion.

Born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and a daughter of a wealthy merchant, she spent her early years in Europe with her family. The Steins later settled in Oakland, California. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1898 with a bachelor’s degree. While at the college, Stein studied psychology under William James (and would remain greatly influenced by his ideas). She went on to study medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. In 1903, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris to be with her brother, Leo, where they began collecting Postimpressionist paintings, thereby helping several leading artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Leo moved to Florence, Italy, in 1912, taking many of the paintings with him. Gertrude remained in Paris with her assistant Alice B. Toklas, who she met in 1909. Toklas and Stein would become lifelong companions. Gertrude Stein had been writing for several years and began to publish her innovative works, Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (written 1906–11; published 1925), and Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914). Intended to employ the techniques of abstraction and Cubism in prose, much of her work was virtually unintelligible to even educated readers. Gertrude Stein made a successful lecture tour of the United States in 1934, but returned to France, where she spent World War II. In addition to her other novels and memoirs, she wrote librettos to two operas by Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947). Although critical opinion is divided on her various writings, the imprint of her strong, witty personality survives, as does her influence on contemporary literature. Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
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