A few months after he met her, Virgil Thomson wrote to a friend, “Gertrude Stein has been impressive and unconsciously encouraging. She takes for granted many of the same things that I do.” He had just finished setting to music her early poem “Susie Asado,” but he was not yet satisfied enough to show it to her. He pursued his goal cautiously. “I didn’t want to be pushy or anything but casual about it,” he recalled. “I thought I would just wait and see what happened.” He was especially sensitive to Alice’s coolness toward him. Understanding that friendship and reputation were linked, he did not contact the two women again until he had made his musical debut in Paris. Although he lacked the fame and repertory to sustain a full evening of his own compositions, he was pleased to be included in a special concert devoted to young American composers. Sponsored by the Société Musicale Indépendente, the concert was dominated by students of Nadia Boulanger—including Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Theodore Chanler, and Herbert Elwell—and Thomson successfully lobbied to include his friend and supporter George Antheil. The concert offered Thomson the ideal vehicle for promoting his career: the audience included both musicians and intellectuals, Americans and French. His dissonant Sonate d’Église drew more attention that evening than any other piece. Some in the audience even whistled. “My Church Sonata has had rather a succès de scandale,” he reported. “Musicians, Catholics, and atheists were pleased. The unbelieving were shocked.”
His musical stock on the rise, Thomson sent Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas a postcard. In early December 1926, he sent another note to “Miss Stein” asking if she was in Paris and if he could visit.
Thomson was invited to an intimate Christmas Eve party at 27, rue de Fleurus to honor their visiting friend Sherwood Anderson. In a reluctant bow to “getting modern,” the two women had just installed electric radiators, which, added to a roaring fire, made the atelier toasty warm. Anderson appeared in a stylish scarf, and the small assembled group sang carols, flanked by a Christmas tree and a large cake, decorated with ribbons and blazing with candles. That party was only one of Virgil’s holiday celebrations. He counted two Christmas dinners (“turkeys from Lyon as big as sheep and plum puddings from London and mince pies from a swell nigger-restaurant”),1 an eggnog party, and a dance with the hard-drinking Montparnasse set at Nancy Cunard’s.
This “unrest cure” was followed by several days of the “rest cure” that yielded his most productive periods: “Excepting for the Xmas celebrations now finished and slept off no excitements, no emotion, no drama, no vice,” Thomson reported. “No artists, no snobs, and no thrills. Not even people.… Only simple behaving and quiet working, and not thinking to speak of.”
| | |
Thomson came out of seclusion on New Year’s Day and walked through light rain from rue de Berne to 27, rue de Fleurus. He carried with him his musical composition for soprano and piano, “Susie Asado,” and a note: “Here is a New Year greeting from my own mechanical bird.… It is a beginning.”2 Thomson had long imagined Stein’s words set to music and this first completed song, ninety seconds long, was lyric, playful, and funny.
“Gertrude was wonderful to set to music because there was no temptation to illustrate the words,” Thomson observed. “For the most part you didn’t know what it meant anyway, so you couldn’t make it like birdie babbling by a brook or heavy heavy hangs my heart. My theory being, and I still hold it to be true, you had to set it for the way the grammar went and for the clarity of the words. If you make the words clear for pronunciation, then the meaning will take care of itself.”
When Thomson knocked on the large wooden door with “Susie Asado” in hand, Hélène, the maid, informed him that no one was in. He left the musical manuscript with her. Alice and Gertrude were actually at home (but not At Home), engaged in a task that could not be interrupted: Alice was cutting Gertrude’s hair. Never having done so before, Alice sheared warily and fastidiously all day long. Calmly reading, Gertrude made a discovery that afternoon: “I found that any kind of a book if you read with glasses and somebody is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something. Very regrettable but true.” This activity proved less mundane than it sounds, for it gave rise to the new look that Gertrude would retain for the rest of her life. It also gave rise to Ernest Hemingway’s theory that the haircut marked “a turning point in all sorts of things.”3
Near the end of the marathon session Sherwood Anderson turned up and found his friend looking remarkably different. There was now only a cap of iron-gray hair adorning her monumental skull. Anderson observed that Gertrude now resembled a monk; the two women were pleased. (When Picasso saw the haircut a few days later he sputtered, “And my portrait,” but then gazed at his painting of Stein, recovered his composure, and said, “After all it is all there.”) Others soon applauded Stein’s new appearance—there are many references by correspondents to her looking “beautiful.” Stein looked ever more like an imperial ruler; she had become the modernist patriarch.
Hemingway linked her haircut to the onset of menopause and the beginning of her new “patriotism” about homosexuality. In Hemingway’s retrospective interpretation, Stein began to believe that only homosexuals were capable of creativity, and he claimed that she tried to convince him that he was a latent homosexual. “She lost all sense of taste when she had the menopause,” he wrote after she died. “Suddenly she couldn’t tell a good picture from a bad one, a good writer from a bad one, it all went phtt.”4
Meanwhile, on that first day of 1927, Hélène delivered Thomson’s musical manuscript. Alice, who could read music without the aid of a piano, announced her pleasure in the song and Gertrude was gratified at seeing her words set to music for the first time. She immediately dispatched a letter to Thomson:
I like its looks immensely and want to frame it and Miss Toklas who knows more than looks says the things in it please her a lot and when can I know a little other than its looks but I am completely satisfied with its looks, the sad part was that we were at home but we were denying ourselves to everyone having been xhausted by the week’s activities but you would have been the xception you and the Susie, you or the Susie, do come in soon we will certainly be in Thursday afternoon any other time it is luck but may luck always be with you and a happy New Year to you
always
Gertrude Stein.
It was Stein’s first letter to Thomson and signaled an opening of the friendship. Stein also wrote a more private reaction to that day. During the winter of 1926–27 she was making frequent entries in a notebook that she later titled A Diary. “I like to be told not to go to the door. It is very nice to have words and music and to see them at the same time when by accident it is where they need it best. Most and best.” In this brief passage we learn both that Alice told Stein not to go to the door and that Stein seemed genuinely and immediately open to the idea of music enhancing her words.
| | |
Setting Stein’s words to music freed Thomson’s musical development from the dictates of Nadia Boulanger, from conventions learned at Harvard, and from the fashion of dissonant modernism. “I had no sooner put to music after this recipe one short Stein text,” Thomson recalled, “than I knew I had opened a door.”
That door was both musical and social, for his gift of “Susie Asado” provided the catalyst for his new friendship. When Gertrude Stein’s petits bleus contained warm messages from “Alice” (no longer “Miss Toklas”), he interpreted it as a most hopeful sign that he would be admitted to the inner circle. As snatches from Gertrude’s “A Diary” indicate, Virgil became a regular visitor that January and February: “the day before Virgil was asked and the day before Virgil was asked,” and later, “Everyday a little greeting from Virgil.”5 Even Hélène, the maid, wondered why Virgil was asked to stay for dinner so frequently. By the end of February he set another Stein text, “Preciosilla,” to music, perhaps as a means of ensuring his place in Stein’s affections in preparation for the most important question: Would she write an opera libretto that he could set to music?
Thomson proposed the opera at a moment when Stein was especially open to the prospects of collaboration. In her notebooks of 1927, Stein wrote, “Collaborators collaborators tell how in union there is strength.”6 Is it a rhetorical command? A statement of confident faith? A means of seeking self-assurance? Around the time she wrote this, she discussed the possibility of collaborating with Pablo Picasso on A Birthday Book, to be published by the art dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler. With Sherwood Anderson she had discussed the possibility of creating a joint volume about Ulysses S. Grant, and her statement about collaboration includes puns on “U.S.” Grant in “union.” Both potential collaborators were old friends, and both possessed a brighter public profile than Stein. Stein’s six-year bond with Anderson—shortly after Sylvia Beach had introduced them, Anderson had written an appreciative preface to Geography and Plays in 1922—was especially useful at this moment. His novel Dark Laughter, although of negligible literary value, had recently gone through eight printings in its first nine months. At this point in the career of Stein, who had stacks of manuscripts sitting in a large armoire, joining forces might increase the chance of seeing those manuscripts published. Yet neither of these two projects ever moved beyond the planning stages.
A few months earlier, Kahnweiler had commissioned and published a limited edition of Stein’s A Book Concluding with As A Wife Has A Cow. A Love Story, with four lithographs by Juan Gris. (One couldn’t say “illustrated by” Gris, for his work was conceived independently.) From 1923 to May 1927, Gris and Stein developed an increasing intimacy, but only on the page. They did not meet once during the entire collaborative process. Nonetheless, the experience was positive for Stein, who declared it “perfect.”
An opera was a different story. “She was not by nature what we would call musical,” Thomson observed. “She used to say music is for adolescents.”7 The composer, not Stein, would be the one to gain by the association, and members of her inner circle were not universally fond of Thomson. His waspish wit could be bullying, his unmitigated self-confidence exhausting. Alice was observed “darting little poisoned arrows whenever she could.” Years later she tartly remarked that “the young Virgil showed sweetness and light only in his music.”8 Pavel Tchelitchew, a reigning favorite in Stein’s court, dismissed him as a “malin” (smart aleck), while his lover, pianist Allen Tanner, judged his music superficial. But Gertrude defended Thomson. “He frosts his music with a thin layer of banal sounds to put people off, but what’s underneath is very pure and special,” she said. “You can say what you want, you will hear of Virgil Thomson yet.”
By March, Gertrude agreed to collaborate. But how would she and Virgil Thomson agree on a subject? Thomson recalled that they divided the task in an apparently balanced way: Virgil suggested the opera’s theme, and Gertrude chose its setting and dramatis personae.
Thomson proposed the theme of “the working artist’s life, which is to say, the life we both were living.” Although he never intended the opera to be a twentieth-century La Bohème, he wanted to take off from an experience that was common to both librettist and composer. Stein embraced the theme and endowed it with religious reverberations; she believed that the purity of the artist’s devotion to art reflected the immaculate conditions of the religious life, that genius was analogous to sainthood, and that artists and writers expressed contemporary spirituality before it appeared in the society at large.
Determining how to embody that theme proved more difficult. As Thomson recalled, he ticked off some historical precedents in music: “I thought we ought to start where opera started, Italian opera seria, which has a serious mythological subject with a tragic ending. After Wagner had covered the field of German and Scandinavian mythology, we’d best stay out of that. But history exists in our mind as mythology—after all, the difference between Little Red Riding Hood and George Washington isn’t all that great.” Since American history fascinated Stein, she suggested that the opera be built around George Washington: Thomson vetoed the idea on the grounds that eighteenth-century characters in wigs all look alike. “Eventually we had come to saints,” Thomson recalled. “Spanish saints might be just fine.”
“In American religion there are no saints and no shrines,” Stein pointed out. “There is no Heaven, because there is only ‘up.’ ”9 She repeatedly described Four Saints as an opera about Spain and the Spanish landscape. The opera’s geography was not literal, but Spain provided Stein with a field of associations, a rich interior landscape. Spain signified her two dearest friends, Picasso and Gris, who were emblematically modern. “Cubism is a purely Spanish conception and only Spaniards can be cubists,” she wrote. Since Stein always considered her own writing a manifestation related to Cubism, writing about Spain became a way of writing about herself.
Stein also saw a comparison between America and Spain. “Americans,” she wrote, “are like Spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal they are cruel.”
Finally, Spain recalled the golden summer of 1912, when she and Alice had traveled through Spain, visiting Madrid, Avila, Toledo, and Barcelona. In the church of Saint Teresa at Avila they had seen a chapel covered in beaten gold and ornamented in coral. In a nearby shop they had found pastries arranged and mounted in caramel and meringue to resemble the cathedral. This fantasy landscape so fascinated Alice that she announced, “I am enraptured with Avila and I propose staying.” Stein decided to feature Saint Thérèse as the opera’s central figure. Saint Thérèse is simultaneously an evocation of Alice and of Stein, the mystic bride of Jesus transformed into the bride of Art. (“Thérèse” was one of Gertrude’s nicknames for Alice, which explains Stein’s decision to use the French spelling.)
Saint Thérèse would be matched with Saint Ignatius Loyola, although the two had lived in different centuries and thus had obviously never met. Thomson was uneasy about the lack of historical connection and at one point suggested, “Let’s scrap Loyola and find a real rival.”10 But he soon overcame his qualms about historical inexactness, thanks in part to his “joke theory” that good things came in twos. The idea of “complementary pairing” appeared in his letters of the time and much later in his autobiography.11 That spring of 1927, Thomson gave his fullest expression to the dualities that ruled Paris:
Bérard, Joyce, and Antheil stand for representation, depiction, emotion, the “true to life” effect. Their shapes are borrowed. Tchelitcheff, and Gertrude and I represent play, construction, interest centered in the material, nonsense, magic, and automatic writing. Between the tabloid newspaper and Mother Goose. Between culture and anarchy. The law and the prophets. Kant and Spinoza. Duty and pleasure. The stage and the home.
Within Thomson’s broad thematic conception Gertrude was able to find an arena of her own interest. On March 26, 1927, she wrote to Thomson that she had “begun Beginning of Studies for an opera to be sung.… I think it should be late eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century saints. Four saints in three acts. And others.”
| | |
In Spain in 1913, Gertrude Stein had begun to write plays, and even at that time her conception of theater subverted nearly everything one expected from an evening at the theater. There was no story to follow. Lines were often unassigned, a character could be animate (a person) or inanimate (a city, a telephone). There was no sequential time, only the continuous present. As she wrote shortly before beginning the opera, “Never describe as a narrative something that has happened.”12 A play could be a list, a group of objects, sentences.13
At the time she began Four Saints, she had not written a play for four years and had not attended the theater for much longer—and she had never written “an opera to be sung.” She drew from early memories of live performances in the theater, the opera house, and the circus. As a child she had attended “twenty-five-cent” operas, and during her Radcliffe years she had briefly immersed herself in Wagner. But she had subsequently “concluded that music was made for adolescents and not for adults … and besides I knew all the opera anyway by that time I did not care any more for opera.” In the theater she had seen everything from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Buffalo Bill’s traveling show to Sarah Bernhardt playing Camille, and she recalled the comfort of hearing Bernhardt declaiming words with no recognizable meaning. It was not the verbal content she recalled but the atmosphere: theater was “like a circus that is the general movement and light and air which any theater has, and a great deal of glitter in the light and a great deal of height in the air.”14
Stein conceptualized theater as the creation of experience through word constructions, not representations of past experience, anecdote, or plot. She likened Four Saints to a landscape, where many elements are presented simultaneously, stretching to the horizon without a center. One discovered it piece by piece rather than following a predetermined path. In 1934, Stein wrote, “In Four Saints I made the Saints the landscape. All the saints that I made and I made a number of them because after all a great many pieces of things are in a landscape all these saints together made my landscape.”15 Like the elements of a landscape, she wrote, saints do not do anything; they just are.
Stein began the libretto in March 1927 in a notebook entitled “Avia,” and the first line—“To know to know to love her so”—invokes not only Saint Thérèse but also Alice. This magical touchstone allowed her to overcome her anxiety enough to write (an early line reads, “Come panic come. Come close”).16 Her usually prolific production began at a crawl. She called it “A Narrative of Prepare for Saints.” After a month she had completed only five pages of printed text and had been unable to bring the central saints onstage together. Her writing progressed more quickly when Thomson left Paris for a trip to the south of France. Working alone at night, she completed her part of the opera without contact with her collaborator. She filled five notebooks, with about eight lines written on each page, and after Alice typed them up, she sent Thomson the text in mid-June. On June 17, Thomson wrote her, “Thank you for the saints. For each and ever and all.”17
| | |
That April, while Stein was writing her libretto, Thomson was setting to music her three-thousand-word piece “Capital Capitals.” Far more ambitious than his setting of “Susie Asado,” it functioned as a sort of tryout for composing the opera, and he proudly reported to Stein that “the capitals sound like exactly one million dollars, one full twelfth of a dozen, no less.”18 Linked to Stein’s, his career gathered force. That spring, transition offered to publish Thomson’s settings of Stein. The Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre suggested that a performance would be the perfect divertissement artistique for her Grande Semaine party on June 21.
Virgil had drilled four male soloists in the antiphonal music for “Capital Capitals” and asked Stein to be present at the rehearsals (“I do need your moral effect on the singers”).19 The duchesse held her costume party in the garden behind her eighteenth-century gatehouse, with a quartet of hunting horns hidden behind the bushes announcing the guests’ arrivals along paths lit by blue cup candles and Chinese lanterns in the trees. Thomson described the guests: “All French people at the duchesse’s. More dukes than you could see for the ambassadors. Not the Princesse crowd. Cocteau came to see me more or less as their representative, I presume.” Virgil and the soloists performed “Capital Capitals” promptly at 11:30; the performance lasted exactly twenty minutes. As one of the singers had not shown up, Virgil sang the part while playing the piano. The music was vaguely interdenominationally sacred; it reminded actress Fania Marinoff of a Jewish synagogue, caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias of a Mexican church, and Jean Cocteau of the Catholic liturgy. Cocteau commented, “At last a table that stands on four legs, a door that really opens and shuts.”
Gertrude and Alice had delayed their departure for Belley in the south of France for a month. Stein reported to Thomson that the wait had been worthwhile: “We are happy about your music, and it means a lot to me that I like the variations and the children as much as the Capitals. We are both happy about it this Alice and I are.”20
When Virgil Thomson received Stein’s libretto in June 1927, he turned the text over and over in his head. “Anything can be set to music,” he later asserted. “A text may be in prose or in verse or in some style in between.… It can also be as clear as a love-call, as obscure as the transcript of a mystical state, as abstract as an exercise for vocal practice.” That said, Thomson was overwhelmed by the magnitude of his task. Since Stein had not consistently assigned parts to individual singers, the libretto looked to him like “one compact mass of words.”21 With her words unlinked to their usual place in sentences, their sense meaning gone, without narrative shape or links to identifiable emotion, he was forced to rely on sound and rhythm. He later wrote that the text added up “to a quite impressive obscurity.” Essential to the collaboration was Thomson’s absolute respect for that obscurity: “The two things you never asked Gertrude, ever, were about her being a lesbian and what her writing meant.”
| | |
Stein’s subsequent comments about the opera allow one to track some of her associations. Lines about her two lead saints, for example, were inspired by things she saw in a store window: still photographs of a girl becoming a nun evoked Saint Thérèse, while a figurine represented Saint Ignatius. Repeatedly asked to explain the opera’s most quoted passage—“Pigeons on the grass alas”—Stein responded straightforwardly:
That is simple I was walking in the gardens of the Luxembourg in Paris it was the end of summer the grass was yellow I was sorry that it was the end of summer and I saw the big fat pigeons in the yellow grass and I said to myself, pigeons on the yellow grass, alas, and I kept on writing pigeons on the grass, alas, short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass pigeons on the grass pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass, alas pigeons on the grass, and I kept on writing until I had emptied myself of the emotion. If a mother is full of her emotion toward a child in the bath the mother will talk and talk and talk until the emotion is over and that’s the way a writer is about an emotion.22
She described a passage about “a magpie in the sky” as a vision of the Holy Ghost. The magpies in Avila looked as if they were standing stationary and flat against the sky, she explained, so that they resembled the bird that symbolizes the Holy Ghost in Annunciation pictures.
After years spent studying Stein’s texts, scholar Ulla Dydo wrote of the opera, “Spain and Picasso and Gris and mortality and visions and art and singing, the saint’s death to the world and the life in Christ—it all comes simply and essentially together.”23 However richly Stein’s themes and references resonated in her own mind, her system of signification was private; Edmund Wilson described her writing as “registering the vibration of a psychological country like some human seismograph whose charts we haven’t the training to read.”24 (Even the word portrait that Stein did of Thomson yielded scant meaning to its subject, both at the time it was written and fifty-five years later, when he was questioned by his biographer.)25
Thomson decided to set to music everything Stein had written, including her stage directions. He turned Saint Thérèse into two figures so that he could write duets, and he changed the two-syllable Thérèse to Teresa so that he could gain an extra syllable. Stein graciously allowed this, although it altered the rhythm. Thereafter it was Saint Teresa. He assigned lines to lesser characters and created a small, mobile chorus and a larger stationary one, as well as two lay figures, the Commère and Compère, to comment from the sidelines like end men. At the time he received the libretto, Thomson was between flats and consequently had no piano; he improvised the opera in his head. “The saints are singing,” he wrote Stein two months before he began composing at the piano. “Gaily praising their maker and trying not to be too catty to one another.”26
| | |
Without the narrative and significance usually provided by a libretto, Thomson depended purely on the sounds of Stein’s words. He looked to musical traditions that stretched back to medieval times, when the desire to merge words and music had produced liturgical chants tied to the rhythms of Latin. Opera, a later secular version, had first been sung in Italian around 1580, in French by the middle seventeenth century, in German by the late eighteenth, and in Russian by the middle nineteenth. But opera music had not yet been written that comfortably fit the rhythms of English, although a number of composers had attempted it (pace Handel). Thomson observed, “It is as if we bore it, all of us, an unrequited love.”27 Thomson saw his task clearly defined: to set spoken American language to music.
On November 1, 1927, Thomson moved into a new flat at 17, quai Voltaire, and rented a piano. The next day he began a regular schedule of composing. Five flights up, Thomson’s octagonal flat had all the charms of a bohemian garret without forgoing luxurious living. North light flooded through his high windows onto the golden tan carpet and mahogany Louis-Philippe furniture, and from his window he enjoyed a view of the Louvre, the Opéra, the Sacré-Coeur, and, below him, a small piece of the Seine. In the morning he improvised at the piano; he took a break at noon while his neighbor practiced the violin, and bathed and shaved. Afternoons were spent running errands and walking the city streets, returning at five for more composing and dinner. He went to bed early, rose early, and began his routine all over again.
The day Thomson began composing, he wrote a letter to Briggs Buchanan proclaiming his feeling that Parisian modernism had come to a dead end. What Thomson saw as a dull season ahead had its bright side, however; a crack in the modernist orthodoxy made possible a new generational approach. Thomson was not the only one to believe it was time for something new—the previous January, shortly before Thomson had proposed the opera collaboration to Stein, Jean Cocteau had informed him that a new generation of creators was emerging, and around the same time Marcel Duchamp’s mistress, Mary Reynolds, had remarked, “The good chaps are beginning to get together again.”
Thomson felt that modernist music—saturated with dissonance, descended from the pre-World War I triumvirate of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Debussy—had arrived at its end point. “I had a moment of truth if you wish in which I said, ‘This is old-fashioned and there is very little profit to be derived in trying to continue it beyond its recent masters.’ What I had better do is to write as things come into my head rather than with a preoccupation of making it stylish and up to date, and it was by the discipline of spontaneity, which I had come in contact with through reading Gertrude Stein, that made my music simple.”
Thomson drew on his repertoire of musical associations: the patter of Anglican chant and the booming choruses of the Harvard Glee Club, marches and parlor dances, children’s games and Gilbert and Sullivan. Most of all he thought of American hymns. “When you reach down in your subconscious, you get certain things,” observed Thomson. “When Aaron [Copland] reaches down, he doesn’t get cowboy tunes, he gets Jewish chants. When I reach down, I get southern hymns or all those darn-fool ditties we used to sing: ‘Grasshopper sitting on a railway track.’ ” (Thomson did find a problem with his method: “Jingle Bells” frequently crept into his compositions.)
Thomson employed what he called “plain-as-Dick’s-hat-band harmony,” hymnbook cadences, a single melodic line with plain choral accompaniment. On first hearing, the score sounded simple and folksy. But, one scholar observed, “it is more like a fine, multi-faceted diamond than a simple rectangular transparent window pane.”28 The opening section of the opera, for example, sounds like a waltz vigorously played at a fairground. But it quickly changes to a minor key, and the accompaniment switches meter. What starts off as a waltz soon becomes a musical comment on American rhythms. Beneath its apparently simple surface are finely calculated repetitions of musical phrases associated with syntactical units, bits of neo-Baroque recitative, and melodic lines that shift as the meter shifts. “I’m not a naive composer, you see, and neither was Satie,” Thomson later warned. “My simplicity was arrived at through the most elaborate means.”
With Stein’s words unmoored from syntactical meaning, Thomson’s compositional architecture had to shape the theatrical narrative as clearly as possible. His apparent simplicity animated the text and provided shape, climaxes, and stretches of run-along patter. “You can’t be advanced all over the place,” Thomson remarked. “What that text needs is clarity, and it needs music to help it run along. Obscure as it is, if you add further musical complexities, it is like putting sand in a gear. You don’t want to make friction, you want to eliminate friction.”
Thomson placed Stein’s libretto for Act I on his music rack each morning that November and improvised harmonies on the piano and sang each part. He did not write down a note. “I don’t mean that her writing lacks music; I mean that it likes music,” he wrote. When the melodies began to come out the same way each day, Thomson knew it was time to set the work to paper. For the first ten days in December, he sketched his improvisations from memory, setting down the vocal parts and figured bass lines, leaving harmonies for a later point. In just over one month, he finished a performable piano score of the opera’s first act.
Thomson invited a dozen carefully chosen friends for a Christmas night champagne and lap supper party. Among the guests were Alice and Gertrude; Henry-Russell Hitchcock and his Harvard architect friend Peter Smith; Tristan Tzara, the former leader of Zurich Dada; and the young French poet Georges Hugnet. Thomson built his lavish meal around three culinary gifts from his patron Mrs. Chester Lasell.29 Prepared by the former cook for King Edward VII, the box of Christmas goodies included a Stilton cheese soaked in port wine, a foie gras en croute, and plum pudding. Thomson added to this a salad of mâche, beets, celery, and peeled walnuts, a huge truffle-embedded chicken aspic creation in the shape of a bird with four wings, and champagne. “It was too beautiful for anything and heavenly to eat,” Thomson reported to his sister. But he ate little before sitting down at the piano to play the score he had unconsciously memorized. For half an hour he sang all the saints’ parts in his light tenor voice. Given the company, he worried that his music might be dismissed as backward-looking. But when he finished, Thomson recalled that “they had all undergone a musical and poetic experience so unfamiliar that only their faith in me (for they were chosen friends) had allowed them to be carried along, which indeed they had been, as on a magic carpet.” Thomson’s one-man performance was the first of the many performances that Henry-Russell Hitchcock would dub “the Paris production.”
Gertrude Stein’s first letter after that Christmas blithely tossed off the opera’s first-act premiere. “Otherwise there is no news,” she wrote Carl Van Vechten, “… and beside I have written an opera and a rather amusing young American is making it put on the stageable.”30
| | |
Thomson’s composition of the next acts proceeded so smoothly during that winter and the spring of 1928 that he recalled the period as a blessed point in his life and 17, quai Voltaire, as a magic locale. Money came from his two patrons: Mrs. Chester Lasell sent him $125 a month in appreciation for medical advice that had saved her life, and Gertrude Stein’s supporter Emily Chadbourne provided $1,000 to encourage the collaboration. For a brief period, Thomson did not have to worry about money.
Friendships were budding during that period. Visiting writers included André Gide and young Scott Fitzgerald, who drunkenly stood on a stove and nearly toppled off. Bernard Faÿ brought princesses and writers; there were neo-Romantic painters, including Christian Bérard, Eugene and Leonid Berman, and Kristians Tonny; and women including New Yorker columnist Janet Flanner [aka Genêt] and Mary Reynolds (Duchamp’s companion, known as the American queen of Montparnasse). Thomson played leisurely games of plafond (a card game) and ate delicious, cheap meals carried up five flights by an energetic waitress dubbed “Yvonne the Terrible.” Thomson’s afternoons were filled with leisurely walks through the city with his voluble guide, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who was in Paris writing his first scholarly pieces on modernist architecture. Thomson had new clothes from Lanvin and a trim waistline, thanks to workouts with a Russian gymnast. He had never composed so assuredly, and the opera proceeded steadily. “Nothing seemed to be going on,” Thomson recalled, “because everything was going right.”
Thomson took advantage of his career momentum—and the financial largess of his patrons—to organize a concert devoted entirely to his own compositions. Staged on May 30, 1928, at the Salle d’Orgue of the Old Conservatory, the concert included his “Variations and Fugues on Sunday School Hymns,” “Capital Capitals,” Georges Hugnet’s “Le Berceau de Gertrude Stein,” and songs set to French texts by the late Duchesse de Rohan. The singers performed perfectly, and both the tony audience and the press responded with lively praise. But silence followed. Thomson was not to be adopted by the French musical tastemakers. (Years later, expressing surprise at Thomson’s power as a critic, Darius Milhaud recalled that “in Paris he was just that little man in a dark suit.”) Two weeks later Thomson wrote Stein that everyone considered the concert a great success, but there were “no echoes” and the Left Bank cafés were filled with “my American rivals.”31 He would voice his feelings of exclusion from the musical establishment throughout his life, blaming sometimes Jews and at other times “the German-Austrian musical complex” or the Metropolitan Opera, but the theme persisted. “Nobody said so in my presence,” Thomson wrote years later about this 1928 concert in Paris, “but I could feel it, smell it, know it for true that my music, my career, my position in the whole time-and-place setup was something the French power group did not choose to handle.”
The French musicians of Les Six were friendly but not inviting. The same pleasantly noncommittal response came from that inveterate French career maker Jean Cocteau, who praised Thomson’s music but did nothing to promote it. A few years earlier, Thomson had left the womb of Nadia Boulanger’s circle of young American composers. Ezra Pound had once suggested to Thomson, “If you stick around with me, you’ll be famous,” and James Joyce later invited Thomson to compose music for a ballet based on Finnegans Wake, but Thomson could not brook Pound’s dominating presence, and he rejected Joyce’s invitation because he knew that he could not be simultaneously aligned with both Stein and Joyce.
On July 1, 1928, Thomson headed south for a tiny Basque village called Ascain, with the opera’s fourth act still to be completed. Each morning he walked closer and closer to the Spanish border, but he refrained from crossing. Along the way he stopped in Catholic chapels with gilded Madonnas and polychrome wooden saints, mass-produced religious charms and brightly painted altars. “This is an extremely God’s-country sort of country,”32 he wrote to Stein on his second day. Three days later he saw San Ignacio (Spanish for Saint Ignatius). Quoting the opera, he wrote to Stein, “And he was handsome and thirty-five between thirty-five and forty-five and alive and he had a black beard and was singing an aria.”
After completing the score on July 19, 1928, Thomson finally allowed himself to cross the border into Spain. The landscape reminded him of Texas. “And the Spaniards are all enclosed like Americans and very sad though not about anything in particular and they are very sweet and gentle and they like you,” reported Thomson. “They are really very tender.”
Although he finished composing the opera in July, he could not hear it on a piano until he returned to Paris in the fall. In Paris he played it over and over and wrote to Gertrude, “And wasn’t I surprised it is very swell and full of inspiration and variety and I can only hope it isn’t as bad as my contentment would indicate.” The opera was completed.
Stein and Thomson’s joint creation went against all conventional stereotypes about the collaborative process. Theirs depended on artistic sympathies and trust, but also on privacy and differences. In age and geography, in levels of understanding. “Gertrude was twenty-two years older than I,” Thomson observed. “That was a gap big enough for Gertrude and me to talk across. Anything less would have made for difficulties.”33 Stein worked alone and collaborated in the only way that she could imagine, creating a libretto that was uncompromisingly hers. She made no bow to the practical needs of stage production. Thomson composed with minimal consulting. The collaboration was a clean, independent affair. Thomson wrote, “Beauty is not a product of opposing forces, which neutralize each other, but of vector forces, which combine.” Years later, he expanded on that theme: “Collaborative art, I knew from instinct and experience, can only give a good result when each man offers to the common theme, through his own working methods and at a proper time, his own abundance.… These must come out of each man’s own technique. An artist cannot be ordered about or hypnotized, but he can be fecundated by another’s faith. Here lies the difference between live art and the commercial, that in live art everybody trusts everybody else.”
But an opera unproduced was only slightly more tangible than an opera unwritten. Bravig Imbs, who had heard the “Paris production,” expressed a common opinion: “I was pretty certain at the time that … he was writing posthumous music. It seemed most incredible in 1928 that an opera by Gertrude would ever go on the boards—just as it seemed incredible that the wave of prosperity should ever break.”