ROBERT WILSON

“In the early sixties I began to read Gertrude Stein's work and I also heard the recordings of her speaking. That was actually before I began to work in the theater and it changed my way of thinking forever. I felt a creative dialogue with her, especially with her notion of seeing a play as a landscape. The architecture, the structure, the rhythms, the humor - they invited mental pictures. […]

 For me Four Saints in Three Acts is a meditation on the joy of life. It is something to be experienced. Gertrude Stein's text is not just literary. Her words are constructed musically in the way a composer would write. Virgil Thomson's music parallels the lyrical composition of Stein's libretto, allowing the two to reinforce rather than merely illustrate one another. […]

It is like a Cubist painting. It is a work that is of no time - not timeless, but full of time - of no conclusions, of no beginning, no end. It is part of a continuous line.”

-  Robert Wilson

 

Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein completed Four Saints in Three Acts in 1928, but it was not until 1934 that the premiere took place. Although based on the lives of historical figures - St. Teresa of Avila, St. Ignatius Loyola - there is no linear story line, and there are no conventional arias or recitatives. Stein's text is as concerned with the sound and shape of the words as it is with their meaning - an approach that Wilson himself has taken in many of his original works. 

A chamber opera involving 10 principals and a chorus of 24, the four acts of Four Saints in Three Acts (one of Gertrude Stein’s stylistic jokes) last for 1 1/2 hours and the piece is performed without intermission. 

Mr. Wilson’s approach to the piece was to view it with the naivety of a children’s Christmas pageant, and he has created a world in which the saints move among a constellation of flying sheep, angels, palm trees and other miraculous visions while a golden acrobat (Stein’s “vision of the holy spirit” celebrated by the lines “Pigeons on the grass, alas”) crosses the stage on a balance beam suspended 2 meters above the floor.

PRODUCTION DATES
Houston, USA, Brown Theater, World Premiere, 26 January 1996
Lisbon, Portugal, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos
22 & 25 – 27 February 2002