Prepare for Saints

Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Saints was proclaimed the birth of a new art form, a cellophane fantasy, "cubism on stage." It swept the public imagination and defied every convention of what an opera should be. Moving to Broadway, Four Saints was the first popular modernist production. It brought modernism, with all its flamboyant outrage against convention, into the mainstream. This is the story of how that opera came to be. The elaborately intertwined lives of the collaborators provide a window onto the pioneering generation that defined modern taste in America in the 1920s and 1930s.--From publisher description.