Word: thomson
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...Harvard Corporation for adoption exhibited a grievous lapse in its humanistic awareness. it failed to understand that the humanity of black folks--and by extension of other systemically ravaged modern peoples such as Tutsi folks, Jewish folks, Armenian folks, etc.--should not be trifled with. --Martin Kilson Thomson Professor of Government
WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF Virgil Thomson's impish opera Four Saints in Three Acts? Composed to a nonsense text by Gertrude Stein, originally sung by a mostly amateur all-black cast and set against a 15,000-sq.-ft. cyclorama backdrop made of cellophane, the work was a sensation at its Hartford, Connecticut, premiere in February 1934 and quickly moved to Broadway for a six-week run. Ever since, music lovers have been debating what, if anything, it means. "Pigeons, on the grass alas," indeed...
...rescue has come Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater artist whose gorgeous new staging of Four Saints at the Houston Grand Opera gives new life to Thomson's hothouse flower. The production, which runs through the end of this week and will be seen this summer at the new Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, is the perfect marriage of director and subject. Stein's wordplay and Thomson's homespun music are direct antecedents of such minimalist classics as Wilson's 1969 The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and the 1976 Wilson--Philip Glass opera Einstein...
With a work as deliberately stylized as Four Saints was at its premiere, the key is to find its essence--a trick made more difficult by the fact that Thomson, who died in 1989, was an even better gadfly than he was a composer. Hiring an all-black cast, for instance, clearly served a symbolic social purpose in 1934 (though Thomson's rationale--"They alone possess the dignity, the poise and the lack of self-consciousness that proper interpretation of this opera demands"--is patronizing, to say the least). If Four Saints is to find its way into the repertory...
Callow's book, which ends in 1942, the year after Kane, follows half a dozen earlier Welles biographies and precedes by a few months yet another, David Thomson's eagerly awaited Rosebud. Callow, a crafty English actor (he played the ebullient, doomed gay man in Four Weddings and a Funeral), excels at what must have been his most frustrating task: analyzing theater work he could not see for himself...