Biography of Virgil Thomson

About the Artist

Virgil Thomson was the original multi-faceted elder statesman of American composers, as well as music critic. He was particularly famous for his two operas in collaboration with Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts and its sequel, The Mother of Us All, about Susan B. Anthony, which together became a landmark of American musical theater, he was also among the first major American composers to write motion picture scores. Among them are Louisiana Story, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Plough That Broke the Plains. He also presided over the American musical scene from 1940 to 1954 as the insightful, uninhibited music critic for the New York Herald Tribune.

By the time young Thomson was 5, he was learning to read music. He had soon made a name for himself locally by playing piano and organ. He also spent free tie in the city's numerous theaters.

After having attended high school and junior college in St. Louis, young Thomson went to Harvard. He studied piano with Heinrich Gebhard and organ with Wallace Goodrich in Boston, and, having already been introduced to the prose of Gertrude Stein, made his first visit to Paris in 1921 as assistant conductor of the Harvard Glee Club.

Thomson originally went to Paris as a student, studying from 1920 to 1921 with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger. There he met Stein and Erik Satie, both of whom had a great influence on his career. Before returning to France in 1925, Thomson studied composition with Rosario Scalero in New York and was organist at King's Chapel in Boston (1923-24).

Back in Paris, the influence of Satie, the maverisk French composer, is said to have helped turn him into a Francophile whose music combined Gallic wit with the hymnal simplicity of the Bible Belt. He joined a group of composers known as "Les Six" and befriended the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

It was in 1928 that Thomson first collaborated with Gertrude Stein on the two operas. Stein wrote the libretto, and Thomson put it to music and added the stage directions. The result was Four Saints in Three Acts. The deliberate confusion wrought by the author of the play (there are actually four acts and more than a dozen saints, some of them in duplicate) and the composer's almost solemn hymn-like treatment create a hilarious modern opera-buffa. It was first introduced in Hartford, CN, on Feb. 8, 1934 and announced as being under the auspices of the "Society of Friends and Enemies of Modern Music," of which Thomson was then director. It, with "The Mother of Us All," ultimately reached "classic" status.

Although he spent much of his time in Paris until the outbreak of World War II, Thomson spoke the musical vernacular of his homeland in such works as the Symphony on a Hymn Tune. He has said that just about all the music he wrote in Paris was about Kansas in one way or another.

Aaron Copland once said that Thomson's idea behind his music "is derived from the conviction that modern music has forgotten its audience almost completely, that the purpose of music is not to impress and overwhelm the listener but to entertain and charm him. Thomson seems determined to win adherents to music through music of an absolute simplicity and directness."

As a pioneer in the writing of motion picture scores, Thomson also won much acclaim. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize-winning score for Louisiana Story and The Plough That Broke the Plains, he provided the music for such films as The Goddess, Power Among Men and Journey to America, the last for the American Pavilion at the New York World's Fair (1964).

Music for such scores as The Plough That Broke the Plains, the story of the grasslands of the Middle West, tamed and domesticated by farmers from the East and then ruined by drought "poured forth easily," according to Thomson.

"I knew the Great Plains landscape in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas," he explains. "And during the War, I had lived in a tent with 10-below-zero dust storms. I had come to them nostalgic and ready to work."

In another facet of his musical life, Thomson was a sharp, peppery and formidable music critic. He began as a musical commentator in the pages of the Boston Transcript, Vanity Fair, Modern Music, and other periodicals.

During his 14 years with the New York Herald Tribune, he is said to have done more to elevate the standard of journalistic criticism in this country than anyone before or since. He once described the lush string sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra as "pale pinky-brown velvet." He called Wanda Landowska's harpsichord recital "as stimulating as a needle shower." He considered Beethoven's Egmont Overture "an hors d'oeuvre. Nobody's digestion was ever spoiled by it and no latecomer has ever lost much by missing it." Of Jascha Heifetz's interpretation of Mozart, he stated: "It tries to make out of the greatest musician the world has ever known something between a sentimental Pierrot and a Dresden china clock."

Of his own criticism, he said: "I thought of myself as a species of knight-errant attacking dragons singlehandedly and rescuing musical virtue in distress." But then of criticism in general he said, "It's a minor art practiced by composers." At a time when many critics hated the sound of anything new, he helped make contemporary music respectable.

Thomson also authored eight books, including an autobiography, Virgil Thomson by Virgil Thomson. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for his A Virgil Thomson Reader. Among his numerous other awards are a gold medal for music from Harvard, John Hopkins, and Columbia.