Monday, Feb. 12, 1996

FINDING THE THERE THERE

By Michael Walsh

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF Virgil Thomson's impish opera Four Saints in Three Acts? Composed to a nonsense text by Gertrude Stein, originally sung by a mostly amateur all-black cast and set against a 15,000-sq.-ft. cyclorama backdrop made of cellophane, the work was a sensation at its Hartford, Connecticut, premiere in February 1934 and quickly moved to Broadway for a six-week run. Ever since, music lovers have been debating what, if anything, it means. "Pigeons, on the grass alas," indeed.

To the rescue has come Robert Wilson, the avant-garde theater artist whose gorgeous new staging of Four Saints at the Houston Grand Opera gives new life to Thomson's hothouse flower. The production, which runs through the end of this week and will be seen this summer at the new Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, is the perfect marriage of director and subject. Stein's wordplay and Thomson's homespun music are direct antecedents of such minimalist classics as Wilson's 1969 The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and the 1976 Wilson--Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach.

With a work as deliberately stylized as Four Saints was at its premiere, the key is to find its essence--a trick made more difficult by the fact that Thomson, who died in 1989, was an even better gadfly than he was a composer. Hiring an all-black cast, for instance, clearly served a symbolic social purpose in 1934 (though Thomson's rationale--"They alone possess the dignity, the poise and the lack of self-consciousness that proper interpretation of this opera demands"--is patronizing, to say the least). If Four Saints is to find its way into the repertory, it will have to stand on its own eight feet.

That it does in Wilson's production, and gloriously. Ignoring Stein's simulacrum of a plot (the lives of 16th century Spanish saints), Wilson treats the opera's Dadaesque musings as a delicate dreamscape, filling the stage with characteristically elliptical images. Some, such as a levitating illuminated triangle, are familiar from earlier Wilson spectacles, while others--fluffy sheep that slowly ascend into the heavens, where they become clouds--are new. Robustly conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, the opera's simple Midwestern melodies provide an ideal complement to the graceful stage pictures, while the cast, headed by soprano Ashley Putnam (St. Theresa I) and baritone Sanford Sylvan (St. Ignatius), projects Stein's words and Thomson's music with true joie de vivre.

Indeed, what this production proves is that the opera, which has been only infrequently revived since its premiere, has a life beyond its self-consciously arty origins. Wilson's elusive images match both poetry and music perfectly, revealing a fundamental truth about Four Saints that bodes well for its future: it's just plain good.

--By Michael Walsh