Old Pigeons

"The apotheosis of sophistication--style and manner without content," wrote Brooks Atkinson for the New York Times. Said Critic Robert Sylvester of the gum-chewing Daily News: "I liked that thing back in 1934 and I liked it even better last night." So last week, after 18 years, the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, had critics and audiences in a froth again.

Revived on Broadway for a two-week brushup before opening at Paris' international Exposition of the Arts next month, Four Saints got a brilliant production, with Composer-Critic Thomson himself conducting. Like some abstract paintings, it was pretty to look at--and in this case agreeable to listen to--even though it made no sense at all.

Gertrude Stein's libretto "shows saints moving about in Spanish landscape and doing all the things that saints do, such as praying, singing hymns, seeing visions, performing miracles, traveling and organizing." The trouble is that Stein's saints sing Steinese. Samples:

P: "Pigeons on the grass alas."

P: "Nobody visits more than they do visits them."

P: "Two saints four at a time a time."

The music of Thomson, the onetime Missouri church organist who went to Paris to study composition, is expertly tailored, but out of wholly familiar cloth. Handel might have composed most of it in an off moment, especially if he had lived in Missouri in the 20th century.

Four Saints seemed a mighty old, effete and expatriate piece of Americana to represent U.S. culture at Paris.

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