Episode 013: Four Saints in Three Acts with Stephanie DePrez

Fortunately to be interested in Four Saints in Three Acts. To be interested fortunately in Four Saints in Three Acts. Interested fortunately in Four Saints in Three Acts and… This week, soprano and comedian Stephanie DePrez joins us to discuss Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s modernist 1934 gem Four Saints in Three Acts, including what it’s like to sing a work when you get the vibes but not the text, the star-studded (and slightly problematic) history of this work’s premiere, and pigeons on the grass.

Additional topics include: Jesuit theater education, Pete Davidson, Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, and ecstatic visions.

Follow Steph on Instagram, TikTok, and Substack.

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Simon says:

“I cannot tell you the story of the opera, for there isn’t any.”

(100 Great Operas. and Their Stories)

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Four Saints in Three Acts: The story

• Act I

• Act II

• Act III

• Act IV

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Recordings cited

• Lynn Torgove, Tom McNichols, Aaron Engebreth, Sarah Pelletier, Gigi Mitchell-Velasco, Gil Rose: Four Saints in Three Acts (BMOP/sound, 2016)

• Betty Allen, Benjamin Matthews, Arthur Thompson, Clamma Dale, Florence Quivar, Joel Thome: Four Saints in Three Acts (Nonesuch, 1981)

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Further reading

• Steven Watson: Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (2000)

• Patricia Allmer, John Sears: 4 Saints in 3 Acts: A Snapshot of the American Avant-Garde in the 1930s (2017)

• Teresa of Avila, JM Cohen (translator): The Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Herself (1988 ed.)

• Teresa of Avila: The Interior Castle (2004 ed.)

• Patrick Saint-Jean: The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice: A Month of Meditations with Ignatius of Loyola (2021)

• Ignatius of Loyola, George E. Ganss: The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius: A Translation and Commentary by George E. Ganss, SJ (1992)

• Sarah Bay-Cheng: Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre (2003)

• Leslie Atkins Durham: Staging Gertrude Stein: Absence, Culture, and the Landscape of American Alternative Theatre (2005)

• Barbara L. Webb: “The Centrality of Race to the Modernist Aesthetics of Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts” (2000)

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Playlist

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