The Southern Review, June 22nd, 1997
The opera 'Four Saints in Three Acts' by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson represents a notable attempt to spatialize the temporal media of text and music. Stein's antinarrative text attempts to create a landscape that is empty, in which nothing happens. Stein's work suggests that the saints become a thinking landscape preoccupied mostly with the spatial arrangement of its elements. Without narrative to supply motion, the topographical mode becomes predominant. Virgil Thomson's music also lacks a sense of progression. A scenario was created for the opera by Maurice Grosser. Four saints in thr...
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