Four Saints and Mr. Thomson

A Manhattan audience, looking unseasonably plushy, last week cooed and clapped its way through the revival of a cockeyed opera--Four Saints in Three Acts. The author of its words, expatriate Gertrude Stein, is still expatriate in Occupied France. The author of its music, Expatriate Virgil Thomson, now repatriated in Manhattan, supervised the second showing.

At the original production (1934) in Hartford, Conn., people actually wept at the Cellophane scenery, the lovely costumes, the adroit stage business, and Harlem Negroes singing Miss Stein's screwball words about St. Therese, St. Ignatius, some 30 other saints. Last week the audience controlled itself better.

That first performance, thought Composer Thomson, had been "too perfect"; it scared off any second attempts. To prove that the opera could be done in simple oratorio form, this spring he reassembled the original cast, drilled them at length, stormed when they failed to articulate to his satisfaction such Steinese as "He asked for a different magpie."With Mr. Thomson at the piano, Four Saints was presented in dress rehearsal at one of the Museum of Modern Art's "Coffee Concerts" (TIME, May 12).

Last week a small orchestra sat on the Town Hall stage, with most of the principal saints in evening dress, the chorus in monkish robes. After seven years Virgil Thomson's tunes still sounded engaging, well-made, occasionally trivial. The most charming aria was still that sung by St. Ignatius: "Pigeons on the grass alas. Short longer grass short longer shorter yellow grass," etc. But Four Saints in Three Acts still owed a lot to its original Cellophane.

Virgil Garnett Gaines Thomson, 44, is a chub-cheeked, baldish, chirrupy, witty, exquisitely cultivated native of Kansas City. A piano-prodigious only son, he went to the same high school as Playwight-Critic Richard Lockridge, Contralto Gladys Swarthout, Actor William Powell. Virgil Thomson went to Harvard, where he wore kid gloves to scull on the River Charles, and played the organ in Boston's King's Chapel. He spent a year after graduation on a grant from the Juilliard Foundation, then went to Paris, to go hungry. "I hope," he declared, "I shall never again have to earn an honest penny." He remained in Paris until last year, managed to live in a canary-yellow-walled apartment, had his clothes made by Couturiere Lanvin, ate (and cooked) exquisite little dinners, went to bed for days at a time when he felt bored. He still calls Paris his home.

As a composer, Virgil Thomson helped invent Neo-Romanticism, which is described in the current Modern Music as "a melodious simplicity, accepting all the known tricks of the trade, with a friendly nod to dissonance or any other musical Nance."

Last autumn Neo-Romanticist Thomson became musicritic of the New York Herald Tribune. Since then the musical intelligence in that paper--often dictated by Mr. Thomson in his dressing gown (camel's hair, from Sulka)--has been the most readable in the U.S. Critic Thomson knows his stuff, and is entirely without self-consciousness in saying it. Instead of mumbling about dynamics, he reports: the orchestra "played loud." He announced firmly, of Composer Samuel Barber, that "his heart is pure." In cafe lingo he declared that a chorus sang "perfectly. But perfectly." He also twists the tails of Carnegie Hall's sacred cows. Thomson on Fiddler Jascha Heifetz:

"His famous silken tone ... his justly remunerated mastery of the musical marshmallow, were like so many cushions of damask and down to the musical ear.... It was admirable and fine and swell and O.K. and occasionally very, very beautiful. The guy can fiddle. . . . Four-starred superluxury hotels are a legitimate commerce. The fact remains, however, that there is about their machine-tooled finish and empty elegance something more than just a trifle vulgar."

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