My first brush with Virgil Thomson came as a journeyman critic taking part in a seminar given by the Music Critics Association in the mid-1970s. We baby scribes knew something of his reputation, of course — he was the formidable, influential former music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, the composer of the Gertrude Stein operas “Four Saints in Three Acts” and “The Mother of Us All,” and so forth. We were prepared to be impressed.
What we got was a round, pudgy, bald, no-nonsense authoritarian with a gaze as penetrating as his mind. He spoke in a high-pitched, rather prissy voice a colleague likened to “iron filings bordelaise,” and he took apart our practice-reviews with a merciless scalpel. We were awed.
“I can’t teach you anything about music — that you either have or you don’t,” he announced at the outset of our session. “But I can teach you something about writing.”
When one of us youngsters used the adjective “splendid” in a review, Thomson all but slapped him. “No! No! No!” he fumed, bouncing up and down in his chair. “We won’t allow that word! Splendid means full of light, and that’s not what you mean at all!”
Thomson devoted his entire career, whether composing reviews or composing music, to saying what he meant. He regarded language as a means of telling the truth about the world — though he was not averse to interpreting the truth as he saw fit. From the 1920s — when the expatriate Thomson filed cultural dispatches to the Herald Tribune from Paris, where he was serving his apprenticeship — through his 14 years (1940-54) as that paper’s chief music critic, he was the power to be reckoned with in the musical life of New York City.
Thomson, who died in 1989 at age 92, was the last of the great composer-critics, a line that extended back to Robert Schumann. As Anthony Tommasini puts it in his penetrating, compulsively readable new biography, “Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle” (Norton, $30), “Thomson had an aisle seat not just for the concerts he critiqued but also for the century he nearly lived through and reported on brilliantly.”
He used his post as a bully pulpit from which to advance his own music (and American music in general), bash the star-dominated musical establishment, settle scores and boost those composers and institutions that shared his aesthetic bent. He argued his iconoclastic points of view with a sweeping incontrovertibility that made people pay attention, even if their own interest in music was almost nil.
Thomson’s editor at the Herald Tribune apparently had no problem with his outrageous conflicts of interest. Neither, from all evidence, did Thomson. It was no coincidence, as Tommasini points out, that when Thomson became the Herald’s principal critic, important artists whom Thomson praised in his reviews — musicians who had not previously demonstrated interest in his music — started performing Thomson’s works in prominent venues. Among them were the conductors Eugene Ormandy, Thomas Beecham, Artur Rodzinski and Vladimir Golschmann.
Thomson felt he didn’t need to play by the rules because his talent made him exempt. As he remarked late in life: “Why did a daily paper tolerate my polemics for 14 years? Simply because they were accompanied by musical descriptions more precise than those being used then by other reviewers.” His composer’s ear gave him a powerful advantage over his New York colleagues, with their didactic prose and lockstep allegiance to the status quo. But his style was so distinctive — witty, elegant, direct, unpredictable, cloaked in conviction — that his opinions resonated well beyond the Herald’s circulation area.
As a composer he left his most lasting imprint in the theater. With their Dada-esque wordplay and radical subversion of notions of theatrical narrative, the two operas on which he collaborated with Stein proved an ideal match for his cheerful, Americana-drenched music. But the rest of his creative output — including film scores (“Louisiana Story,” “The Plow That Broke the Plains”), chamber music and dozens of exquisite songs — has not stuck in the repertoire. It is ironic that Thomson the tastemaker had far greater success pushing other people’s music than his own.
Stylistically, Thomson dared to buck intellectually fashionable modernism in favor of a modernism of simplicity, outwardly homespun but infinitely worldly-wise. He exerted a profound influence on later tonal composers like Leonard Bernstein and paved the way for the minimalist school of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Thomson lived long enough to see his radical simplicity debunked as sappy and passe, and he died just as the neo-romantic movement he had inspired was gaining a popular following.
A daily-newspaper critic and musician himself, Tommasini was a confidant of Thomson’s during his later years and thus was privy to sources and information denied previous biographers. He writes affectionately of his subject, but with a clarity, modesty and candor that expose the chinks in Thomson’s crusty armor.
The Thomson we meet in these 572 pages is nothing if not a paradox. Born and bred in a Southern Baptist home in Kansas City, Mo., he was the very model of cosmopolitan sophistication. “A genius at social manipulation,” in Lincoln Kirstein’s words, he was an intensely private and insecure man who, as Stein said, expected friends to “leave him inside himself completely to himself.” He was an intellectual who detested the music produced by those he called “the complexity boys.” He could be generous to a fault with artists, as well as unspeakably petty when he thought they were snatching his limelight.
From an early age, Thomson knew how to cultivate friendships with important people, people he sensed could be useful to him later on. But his mean streak made many of these friendships tenuous at best.
Like any good biographer, Tommasini tells all, much more than Thomson would have allowed were he alive. All his life he wrestled with “being queer” (he hated the word “gay”). When writers stuck their noses into his private life, he threw them off the scent by concocting romantic liaisons between himself and various female friends. The closest he had to a lifetime companion (though not in a monogamous sense) was the painter Maurice Grosser, who died of AIDS in 1986. Everybody in Thomson’s circle knew of their relationship, but nobody talked about it; he was adamant about that. In his day, even a whisper of homosexual behavior was enough to ruin lives and reputations.
For all that, Thomson had various male lovers, enjoyed a wide circle of gay artist-friends, adored gay gossip and the fawning attention of young gay males. But he abhorred the openness of the gay-rights movement that burgeoned in his later years.
Thomson stage-managed his death as shrewdly as he stage-managed his career. He passed away, as Tommasini observes, just as he had wished it: “at home, in his sleep and in time to make all editions of the Sunday New York Times.” Yet, despite all his honors and eminence, Thomson died feeling the world owed him more attention than he got.
Tommasini does not peer into any crystal balls to determine how Thomson the critic and Thomson the composer will stack up in the eyes of history. It seems likely his relatively slim and decidedly uneven musical output will always be for rarefied tastes.
Thomson’s writings are another matter. Especially at a time when standards of music criticism have sunk lower than when the Herald hired Thomson, his sensible, elegant, knowledgeable, feisty prose deserves to stay in print as an object-lesson for critics, and would-be critics, in how to capture the essence of musical performance in a few well-chosen words. He was, quite simply, the best music critic this country has ever or may ever produce.
