Download or read book Four Saints in Three Acts written by Virgil Thomson and published by A-R Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virgil Thomson and Gertrude SteinFour Saints in Three ActsEdited by H. Wiley Hitchcock MU18 / A 64 ISBN (2008) lv + 447 pp. $250.00 ISBN 978-0-89579-629-5 Rental parts available from Schirmer only. With music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts was completed in 1928 but waited almost six years for its first performances. After a week¿s run in Hartford, Connecticut, in February 1934, it moved to New York where--with some sixty performances in six weeks--it became the longest-running opera that Broadway up to that time had experienced.This critical edition by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Charles Fussell features the scenario by Maurice Grosser and is based on the full score that Thomson commissioned from copyist Ben Weber for his 1947-48 revision; it includes the 32-measure orchestral prelude to the Act II "Dance of the Angels," and it makes comparisons primarily to the manuscript scores held at the Library of Congress and Yale University. The critical apparatus applies as much to the music as to the Stein text, the principal source for which is the 1929 first publication.