Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle

Composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) had an impact on American musical life quite out of proportion to the modest attention his own music received during his lifetime; such was the force of his personality and his skills as a controversialist, particularly in his years as the influential music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, where he played a decisive role, along with Aaron Copland, in attracting much-deserved attention for serious American music. This full-scale biography, by a music stringer for the New York Times, is a masterly piece of work: exhaustive, penetrating and eminently fair-minded. It is a tribute to Tommasini's narrative skills and objectivity that when he gets to know his subject personally, in Thomson's closing years, he is able to switch his narrative into the first person without missing a beat. Thomson's enormous charm and uninhibited waspish wit won him a huge circle of friends, though, as a homosexual, he sought to remain in the closet and thought gays who lived openly as such were mistaken. Thomson made unique contributions to 20th-century American music: formative years in Paris, then working as an opera composer to texts by Gertrude Stein (Four Saints in Three Acts; The Mother of Us All, probably his most notable achievements), film scores (The River; Louisiana Story, which remain his most-played music) and copious letters, reviews and books. Striving to keep himself and his music in the limelight, he wrote a stylish but much-prettified autobiography, and supervised a study of himself (with John Cage as a co-author). Though Thomson might not have liked to see in print everything that Tommasini has set forth here, he could not fail to be impressed by the scale of the attention and care--and as a critic, composer and a peculiar kind of American icon (despite his sophisticated Gallicism, he was born in Kansas City), he merits it. Photos not seen by PW. (June)