Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934

The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde
February 28--June 3, 2012
www.metmuseum.o...
Audio commentary by Rebecca A. Rabinow, Curator for Nineteenth-Century European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Produced by Christopher Noey
Edited by Sarah Cowan
Audio clip and images of Gertrude Stein from "Prepare for Saints," Directed by Steven Watson, 1999
Courtesy of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Film Clips of the Opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," from "Virgil Thomson Composer," directed by John Huszar, 1980
© 1980 FilmAmerica, Inc.®

[@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.

[@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.

[@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.