Word: virgil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...love for the commonplace and the heroism of Miss Anthony partly inspired the 1946 creation of The Mother of Us All, there were other historically contributing factors. Gertrude S. and Virgil T. had long been thinking independently about the artistic expression of America's 19th century. They met early in the 1920's, quite naturally in Paris, where Gertrude's flock then and later included Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and Thornton Wilder...
...result of their friendship was the first collaboration--Capital, Capitals. When it opened in 1929, Virgil T. wrote from New York: "Some thought it a good joke, some a bad joke and one or so got quite angry ... The audience's way of taking it proved to me the possibility of having a regular boob success with opera, at least it might run long enough to pay its expenses...
...liaison, Four Saints in Three Acts was presented in Hartford by "The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music." Four Saints met with phenomenal success--in its cellophane settings, biting themes, and all-Negro cast. When informed that some residents of Hartford looked askance at the colored performers, Virgil T. quipped, "Tell the cast to go on whiteface." He chose the Negroes, he said, for their beauty of voice, clarity of enunciation, and fine carriage. Gertrude remained in Paris, despite this word from Virgil...
...Mother of Us All was conceived in 1946 when Virgil T. received a commission from the Alice M. Ditson Fund, New York, to write a new opera. Gertrude immediately set to work on the libretto, though the first pains of her fatal cancer slowed progress. Virgil's only stipulation, in suggesting 19th century Americana as the subject, was that it have "nothing to do with Abraham Lincoln...
...opera which Gertrude S. and Virgil T. produced was considerably more coherent than Four Saints in theme and form. The music is a distillation of rural American harmony--Mid-West gospel hymns, old English ballads brought by settlers, and corn-husking and square dance themes. This rural middle class tone, as opposed to the urban, low-class music of jazz and other contemporary American opera, makes the work distinctive. In its new lyric quality is a dissonance and irony which Four Saints, in all its tour de force, does not capture...