Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934

[@chadwickthomasclarinet]

Four Saints was not premiered to celebrate the Picasso retrospective; both the premiere of Four Saints and the Picasso retrospective were planned to celebrate the 1934 opening of the new Avery Memorial building of the Wadsworth Atheneum.

[@galolito]

the comment by Mabel Weeks was made by Weeks not Stein nor Thomson who had not intended to end anything. Weeks was someone you would really have to want to know about to know about.

[@yvesklein5414]

The commentary doesn't tell us anything. It would be nice to just see the film fragments with the music, and no pointless voice-over.

[@v1m]

Yet it didn't "finish opera," any more than Picasso did for oil painting. It's an amusing enough bit of gibberish with a few beautiful passages by Thomson.

[@edsmart5443]

Stein, even more than Picasso, was the most important artist of her time. She did not write gibberish.

[@AndrewRudin]

What nonsense, this commentary. Picasso didn't "finish" oil painting. And Virgil Thompson CERTAINLY didn't finish opera. There's just a few people who still managed to somehow go on after him: Berg, Poulenc, Britten, Stravinsky, Bartok to name a few.

[@malloryelmo]

I agree, but the narrator wasn't saying that it did finish opera, she was just quoting, and I don't think the person she was quoting was being literal.