Sophisticate from Missouri

"For good or ill," says Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson, "I've lived off the products and byproducts of my musical talents since I was 25." The products have included some of the best theater music (Four Saints in Three Acts and suites from Louisiana Story and The River) written in the U.S. Among the byproducts is some of the wittiest and most perceptive musical criticism. This week, at a concert of his music in Manhattan's Town Hall, Thomson celebrated his 63th birthday and 40 years of passionate proselytizing for modern music.

Included on the program were excerpts from Thomson's The Mother of Us All, a two-act opera about Feminist Susan B. Anthony, with text by Gertrude Stein, the Sonata da Chiesa, Etudes for Piano, Lamentations for Accordion. Although Thomson's neatly fashioned, strongly melodic film scores have a misty, impressionist charm and are his best known works, there is a more abrasive and far more somber side to his music. It was clearly demonstrated in the anniversary concert's Sonata da Chiesa, with its opening chorale based on a Kansas City Negro church service. Strangely, the program ignored his expertly tailored Four Saints in Three Acts, also written with Gertrude Stein. This "apotheosis of sophistication," as the opera was later hailed, was given its premiere in 1934 and made Thomson famous overnight.

Cream in Stone. Throughout his 14-year (1940-54) "professional honeymoon" as New York Herald Tribune music critic, Thomson campaigned for the performance of modern works and unfamiliar ancient ones, carped at the heavy concert ration of German, Italian and Slavic music, and set about with gusto to deflate what he thought were undeserved reputations. Toscanini he criticized as a practitioner of the "Wow Technique," by which he meant "the theatrical technique of whipping up something in a way to provoke applause automatically." Strauss's Salome, he wrote, was "like modernistic sculpture made of cheap wood, glass, rocks, cinders, papier-mache, sandpaper and bits of old fur. But the whole makes a composition and the composition speaks." Thomson freely acknowledges that concerts were often the merest excuses for mounting one of his numerous musical soapboxes. No critic catnapped more frequently in his seat, and the Trib's critic was famed for writing some of his most thoughtful review's about concerts through which he had dozed.

Starve in Paris. Missouri-born and Harvard-educated, Thomson lived in Paris until World War II ("I preferred to starve where the food was good"), now divides his time between his Paris and New York bachelor apartments. He gave up reviewing, he says, because "after 14 years, I had reviewed all the artists there were and all the kinds of music there are; you go on repeating yourself after that." Nowadays he never listens to records, composes as regularly, he says, "as a hen lays eggs." Contemporary music, he thinks, is in pretty sad shape: "Practically none of the music reviewers like any of the music they hear, or like any musical event." And what about the public? "The truth about the public," says Composer Thomson sadly, "is that they have been oversold on music. Satiety will soon set in."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.