Taking a chance on love: scenes, scripts, and affects in Four Saints in Three Acts and Jazz-Cabaret songs and performances of the 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) famously combined avant-garde aesthetic practices and elements of popular culture. While commentators routinely note the recurrence of folk- and hymn-tune harmonies and cadences in Thomson’s otherwise resolutely ‘modernist’ music, they have accorded virtually no attention to the jazz-cabaret song, a form of popular music that emerged and established itself artistically and commercially during the same decade that Four Saints in Three Acts was produced and performed. This article examines a dynamic point of intersection between Stein and Thomson’s avant-garde opera and the jazz-cabaret song-form of the 1930s in some of the performances of Black cabaret star Jimmie Daniels as they were experienced by Thomson and other gay-male habitués of Harlem and Paris cabarets. One of Daniels’s signature tunes, the 1932 Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler song, ‘I’ve Got the World on a String’, is analysed in relation to Freud’s account of the fort-da ‘game’ and more generally in relation to Silvan Tomkins’s script theory.