Virgil Thomson

• Born: November 25, 1896
• Birthplace: Kansas City, Missouri
• Died: September 30, 1989
• Place of death: New York, New York

American classical and film composer

The most French-influenced of the twentieth century composers crafting a new “American” identity in music, Thomson was a fluent writer for voice and instruments, a pioneer in film scores, a remarkable composer of operas, and one of America’s greatest music critics.

The Life

From his birth and rearing in America’s heartland, Virgil Garnett Thomson absorbed a love of regional identity and a feeling for Protestant hymnody. His early musical training was on the organ. He enlisted in the army and was spared service in France only by the end of World War I. Studying at Harvard University, he was active in conducting and accompanying, but his teachers fired his interest in the newly fashionable musical and cultural life of France. On a fellowship to Paris, he was briefly a student of Nadia Boulanger and came to know important composers of the moment, such as Erik Satie, whose ideals of simplicity and ironic wit would long be an influence on him.

After further studies at Harvard and Juilliard, Thomson returned to Paris, which he made his primary residence from 1925 until 1940. Thomson said that living in France allowed him to understand his American identity better, also prompting him to convey it musically to the French. There he composed his first symphony, Symphony on a Hymn Tune.

As World War II loomed, Thomson moved to New York (1940), where he became the music critic for The New York Herald-Tribune, a position he retained until 1954. During the decade and a half of his tenure, he introduced a new voice to music criticism, taking to task the conventional and the pompous in favor of new musical values.

Having roomed at the Chelsea Hotel briefly in 1936-1937, upon arriving in New York in 1940 Thomson began a residence that would last for the rest of his life, in this celebrated haven for writers and artists on Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. His apartment was modest, but he loved its eccentric ambience. A discreet, lifelong homosexual in a closeted time, he nevertheless had a rich circle of friends, male and female, and became an enduring musical celebrity. He wrote, lectured, conducted, and collected awards, all on a wide scale and into his last years. He was working on a composition until a week before his death, two months shy of his ninety-third birthday.

The Music

Thomson produced an extensive output. Though he tackled larger forms, such as two string quartets, three symphonies, and a cello concerto, as well as suites from his opera and film scores, he was essentially a miniaturist in feeling and created a vast number of small pieces. He delighted in setting poetry, either for solo voice and piano or for choral forces; one of his masterpieces is his set of Five Songs from William Blake, which eventually (1951) took form as a cycle with orchestra. Perhaps his most idiosyncratic practice was having friends or important people to “sit” for him while he composed “portraits” of them on the spot, usually for piano but often for instrumental combinations—in this, extending Stein’s creation of “word pictures.” Four Saints in Three Acts. In Paris, Thomson was drawn into the expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein. He had known her writings and even set some of her poems to music. With her he planned a full-length opera, using her free-wheeling libretto. This was Four Saints in Three Acts, an eccentric and plotless confection of religious and mystical imagery built around Spanish saints. The libretto was completed in 1927, but it was several more years before the fully composed and orchestrated score was ready, filled with hymns and dances in a deliberately simple and folksy style. With a scenario imposed on it, with an unconventional all-black cast, and in a production of striking visual novelty, Thomson presented it in New York and Chicago, creating a sensation.

Film Scores. Thomson became the first American classical composer to write important film scores. From 1936 through to 1964, he produced nine of them, the most famous being for The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, both with Pare Lorenz, as well as Louisiana Story with Robert Flaherty. In these scores, as well as in his ballet score Filling Station for Lincoln Kirstein, Thomson furthered his very personally “nationalistic” style, assimilating folk songs, traditional tunes, and Protestant hymns with French finesse.

Music Criticism. Thomson had already balanced his composing with extensive writing on music when, in 1939, he published a collection of wide-ranging essays titled The State of Music. With such evidence of his literary flair—on the eve of his final departure from France in the face of the impending World War II—he accepted an appointment on the staff of The New York Herald-Tribune as its chief music critic. In this position, from October, 1940, to September of 1954, he established himself as America’s most penetrating and provocative music critic. Conditioned to French elegance and clarity, he avoided the pomposity and pedantry that marked the writing of so many peers and wrote in a direct, pungent style that electrified the musical scene. He had strong opinions and no fear of taking positions opposed to other critics; he was perfectly willing to disparage then-idolized musicians of the day (such as Jascha Heifetz and Arturo Toscanini) and to hound sacred cows, such as the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic (especially its authoritarian manager, Arthur Judson).

Deploring the narrowness of performing repertoires, Thomson created his list of the “Famous Fifty,” works most likely to appear in concert programs. His reviews and articles set a new standard for musical writing, rather as George Bernard Shaw in London had done more than a half century before. The four collections Thomson published of his criticism—The Musical Scene (1945), The Art of Judging Music (1948), Music Right and Left (1951), and Music Reviewed, 1940-1954 (1967)—are still altogether readable and stimulating today (as are Shaw’s).

The Mother of Us All. Thomson continued to compose during and especially after his official career as a critic. Perhaps his most important achievement was his renewed collaboration with Stein, in the full-length opera The Mother of Us All (1947), a veritable pageant of Americana focused upon the struggle for women’s rights as led by Susan B. Anthony. A third opera, Lord Byron, with a libretto by Jack Larson, was composed laboriously during the 1960’s but not produced untl 1967.

Musical Legacy

Thomson’s music has at times been written off as simplistic and superficial, and he was even accused of winning performances by virtue of his influence as a critic. However, if relatively few of his highly individualistic works have won enduring places in the working repertoire, they remain landmarks of American creativity, notably the two Stein operas. He deserves status beside those mid-century composers who established a distinctly “American” musical sound—such as Roy Harris and especially Aaron Copland. Finally, Thomson’s writings made him one of the most effective commentators on American musical life in his time.

Bibliography

Hoover, Kathleen, and John Cage. Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1959. The earliest biography of Thomson, heavily edited by the composer but still valuable.

Page, Tim, and Vanessa Weeks Page. Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson. New York: Summit Books, 1988. A wide-ranging and stimulating collection.

Thomson, Virgil. Music with Words: A Composer’s View. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Thomson’s personal analyses of forms and styles.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The State of Music. New York: William Morrow, 1939. Rev. ed. New York: Random House, 1962. Trenchant and provocative essays on American musical life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Virgil Thomson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967. A collection of essays and reminiscences—the closest Thomson came to producing an autobiography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Virgil Thomson Reader. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Routledge, 2002. A generous anthology of articles, reviews, essays, and interviews.

Tommasini, Anthony. Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. The most thorough and authoritative biography to date.

Watson, Steven. Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. A joint study of the writer and composer, in the context of their creation of Four Saints in Three Acts.

Principal Works

ballets (music): Filling Station, written 1937, performed 1958 (libretto by Lew Christensen); The Harvest According, 1952 (libretto by Agnes de Mille); Parson Weems and the Cherry Tree, 1975 (libretto by Erick Hawkins).

chamber works:Sonata da chiesa, 1926 (revised 1973); Portrait of Señorita Juanita de Medina Accompanied by Her Mother, 1928; Five Portraits for Four Clarinets, 1929; Madame Marthe-Marthine, 1929; Portrait of Alice B. Toklas, 1930; Miss Gertrude Stein as a Young Girl, 1938; Portrait of Jamie Campbell, 1940; Concerto for Flute, Strings, Harp, and Percussion, 1954.

film scores:The Plow That Broke the Plains, 1936; The River, 1938; Tuesday in November, 1945; Louisiana Story, 1948; The Goddess, 1958; Power Among Men, 1958; Journey to America, 1964.

operas (music): Four Saints in Three Acts, 1934 (libretto by Stein); The Mother of Us All, 1947 (libretto by Stein); Lord Byron, abridged version 1972, complete version 1991 (libretto by Jack Larson).

orchestral works:Symphony No. 1, 1928 (Symphony on a Hymn Tune); Symphony No. 2, 1931 (revised 1941); Sonata No. 1, 1932; The Seine at Night, 1947; Wheat Field at Noon, 1948; Sea Piece with Birds, 1952; Sonata No. 2, 1964.

piano works:Traveling in Spain: A Portrait of Alice Woodfin Branlière, 1929; The John Mosher Waltzes, 1937; Portrait of Briggs Buchanan, 1943; Bugles and Birds: A Portrait of Pablo Picasso, 1944.

vocal works:Susie Asado, 1926 (lyrics by John Rippon); Capital Capitals, 1927 (lyrics by Gertrude Stein); Preciosilla, 1927 (lyrics by Stein); Five Songs from William Blake, 1951; Four Songs to Poems of Thomas Campion, 1951; Praises and Prayers, 1963.

writings of interest:The State of Music, 1939; The Musical Scene, 1945; The Art of Judging Music, 1948; Music Right and Left, 1951; Virgil Thomson, 1966; Music Reviewed, 1940-1954, 1967; American Music Since 1910, 1971; A Virgil Thomson Reader, 1981.