Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)
Vocal and Chamber Music
Virgil Thomson was born in 1896 in Kansas City,
Missouri to an old Baptist farming family. He always
retained a love for the land, but its traditions did not
have the usual effect upon him: he attributed to his
seemingly gentle mid-Southern heritage his “arrogance
and unhesitating disobedience”. He liked to cite religion
as an example: “I have never felt inferior to the
believers, or superior; I simply am not one... The
loyalties formed in my preadolescent years lie elsewhere
than to Bible reading and preachers. They are to music,
companionship, and hospitality...”
After military service came Harvard. A tour of
Europe with the Harvard Glee Club in 1921 altered his
life permanently. He fell in love with Paris, that den of
intellectual ferment packed with native and expatriate
artists, poets, musicians, and wealthy hangers-on.
Thomson spent most of two decades there, carefully
avoiding “working” to support himself. A Harvard
grant, commissions, a bit of free-lance journalism, and,
above all, contributions of private patrons kept him just
above the poverty line and in Bohemian spiritual
splendour. His circle included James Joyce, Man Ray,
Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Darius Milhaud, Aaron
Copland, and countless others who shaped twentiethcentury
culture with their sense of style and fun. Above
everyone sat the celebrated American radical poet
Gertrude Stein, Thomson’s inseparable comrade.
Thomson’s two musical focusses were the young
Nadia Boulanger, who taught analysis and composition
to the American students, and the irresistible Erik Satie -
whom he met once - radiating irreverent wit and
simplicity. He also enjoyed the Dadaists’ preachings
that all artistic conventions were equally valid (or
equally invalid). Although not a true Dadaist, Thomson
invented his own conventions, shedding bombast and
borrowing Satie’s aesthetic of tender humour. In his
earliest music, he balanced modernity, classicism, and
romanticism in a way similar to Milhaud, Poulenc, and
Satie, but with a totally individual sound.
Synthetic Waltzes (1925) is a charming legacy of
those years. A stylized society waltz, it is full of subtle
misbehaviour, such as at the opening and conclusion,
where Thomson creates the impression of two waltz
tempos heard simultaneously. Other works of this
period, especially his Gertrude Stein song settings,
display a serious whimsy that time has not tarnished.
While friends came and went, Gertrude Stein was
always there. Their first collaboration, the opera Four
Saints in Three Acts, made Thomson’s name. While
travelling to the United States in the early 1930s in
search of a production for the opera, he kept returning to
Paris, where he felt liberated from the Germandominated
musical tradition. Of course that epoch was
doomed: Depression, labour disruptions, and political
strife bordering on civil war assassinated the city’s old
joyousness. Actually, although change was now high
drama, the wild early 1920s had already given way to
neo-romanticism, returning to “emotion” from the
“objectivity” or the surrealism that had dominated the
immediate post-war years. That neo-romantic spirit is
central to the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1930), but
this work is neither a common new-romanticism nor a
common sonata. Virtually non-repetitive, its flowing
melodies constantly explore new territory, rarely
returning to their starting-point.
By the late 1930s most of the old foreign
community was leaving Paris, replaced by refugees
from Spain, Germany, and Austria. Thomson, Stein, and
a few others stuck it out, however, stimulated rather
than frightened by the dangerous ferment. Besides,
where else could one have so much fun with so little
money? Then, in July, 1940, the Nazis conquered
France and it was time to go. In New York, when
Thomson succeeded Lawrence Gilman as music critic of
the Herald Tribune, his disobedient spirit gained a
public voice, giving him a central position in the
American literary scene through the brilliance and
outspokenness of his essays. He found new American
friends and fellow rebels, especially Lou Harrison and
John Cage. Life was fruitful, but when France was
liberated, Thomson was off to Paris to persuade
Gertrude Stein to write a libretto for a second opera, The
Mother of Us All.
Thomson left the Herald Tribune in 1954,
concentrating now on composing. The works of this
later period include the glorious settings of Thomas
Campion’s poetry (1951), and two contrasting vocal
works of 1963: Praises and Prayers and Two by
Marianne Moore. Praises and Prayers was composed
for Betty Allen, who expressed her preference for
Thomson’s religious music; his irreligiousness did not
prevent his responding powerfully to sacred texts.
Rather than exploiting the full range of the virtuoso
singer, Thomson kept the songs in the middle of the
vocal range, where, as he has said, clear speech and
flowing melody lie in every voice. Within this limited
compass of an octave and a half, he sought a freedom of
line and delicacy of expression, which is matched by the
very individual piano parts for each song, some
romantic, some quasi-medieval, and all fresh in sound.
Throughout these works, as in so much of his music,
there is an almost indefinably American quality, which
probably stems from the irreligious Thomson’s deep
identification with the music of the Baptist community
in which he grew up, and the Midwestern American
heritage of folk-song and dance.
Thomson had had his first contact with the great
American poet Marianne Moore in 1925, when she, as
editor of The Dial, requested him to write articles about
Paris. Like Gertrude Stein’s, Moore’s poetry once again
appealed to Thomson’s love of the pure sound of words,
to which he calls the listener’s attention by cleverly
implanting them in simple musical materials.
A third opera, Lord Byron, occupied much of the
remaining 1960s. From the later 1970s, Thomson’s
production tapered off, except in an area that fascinated
him throughout his career, the musical “Portraits” of his
friends and acquaintances. Despite increasing health
problems, he composed sporadically until shortly before
his death on 30th September, 1989.
© 2005 Continuum