Arts and Letters

When I first beheld Virgil Thomson, nearly fifty years ago, he was on a stage for one of those benighted roundtables about Meaning in Music. His fellow panelists, straining for a definition of the art, were about to settle for the Bard's "concord of sweet sounds" when Thomson yelled: "Boy, was he wrong! You might as well call poetry a succession of lovely words, or painting a juxtaposition of pretty colors. Music's definition is: That which musicians do." Which settled the matter. If Shakespeare erred, albeit divinely, Congreve did too, with his "charms to soothe a savage breast." Thomson, like all composers, disdained metaphoric ascriptions of music as mere cushion for the emotions. His businesslike summation was the first professional remark I'd ever heard from a so-called creative artist, and I was soon to hear more, from the horse's mouth, when I quit school at age 19 to work with the master.

I already knew of course that he was born in 1896 in Kansas City, excelled at Harvard, then moved to France in 1920. And that in the next two decades he sent back to America not only trunkloads of sonatas and songs, but quartets and symphonies, a ballet called Filling Station, scores for movies of Pare Lorentz, a best-selling book called The State of Music, and, above all, a collaboration with Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, which was then and perhaps remains the most viable opera by any American. American he utterly was despite, or maybe because of, the removal from his homeland which gave him a new slant toward his roots. For it was he who first legitimized the use of homegrown fodder for urbane palates. He confected his own folk song by filtering the hymns of his youth through a chic Gallic prism. This was the "American Sound" of wide-open prairies and Appalachian springs, soon borrowed and popularized by others.

At the start of World War II, Virgil Thomson returned from Paris to begin his fourteen-year stint as critic for the New York Herald Tribune. And the rest, as they say, is... well, it's geography. Thomson single-handedly changed, for a time, the tone of serious American composition from the thickish Teutonic stance which had dominated since before MacDowell to the transparent Frenchness of those in the Boulanger school.

He was at his peak when we met in 1943. As his in-house copyist, for which I received twenty dollars and two orchestration lessons a week, my daily chores were done on the parlor table within earshot of the next room where—propped in bed, a pad on his lap, an ear to the phone—Virgil ran the world of music. During those first months, by being accountable for his every note, by heeding his ever-lucid but never-repeated dicta on instrumentation, and by eavesdropping on his talk with, say, Leopold Stokowski or Oscar Levant or colleagues at the paper, I gleaned as much, aesthetically and practically, about the terrifyingly golden milieu of my future vocation as in all the previous years.

Virgil the author, as his ten books attest, was the world's most informative and unsentimental witness to other people's music. These qualities were enhanced by his addressing the subject from inside out—from the standpoint of the maker—and by his readability which owed so much to Paris where, in art as in life, brevity is next to godliness. Beside him, other critics were superfluous. They may have shared his perception, even exceeded his scope, but none boasted his knack for cracking square center with that perfect little Fabergé hammer.

Virgil the musician, over and beyond his affable innovation (based not on new complication but, ironically, on age-old simplicity), was our sole composer as convincing in song as in opera. His music cannot be assessed on the same expressive basis as any other music, even Satie's, since his more than any other depends on words. If Virgil never received a bad review (or, except for the Stein operas, a really good review), it's less because reviewers were intimidated by Papa than because they didn't know what to say about this seeming inanity. In fact, the inanity was sophistication at its most poignant. His every phrase is aria-in-a-microscope, built from but two or three intervals. The result differs from folk song only in the ambiguous accompaniment and eccentric literariness. The songs are rarely sung right, but despite their sparseness they do need to be heard to be believed. They are not Augenmusik, yet the critic's ear is not often given to listening to them, even in imagination. Thomson's unique urge was to codify simplicity, the way others have been urged to codify complexity.

Virgil the man had concerns, but not anxieties like we morbid others; he didn't agonize about the daily news—which may account for his longevity. Emerging from anesthetic after an operation three years ago, he asked: "Will I live?" When the doctor said yes, Virgil replied, "In that case I'll need my glasses."

His music resembles himself, is impatiently terse, free of padding, sensuous without self-indulgence, not especially warm but often quite dear. It is also very, very witty—if that adjective makes sense when applied also to nonvocal works. His art is generous by its very frugality—we recall it accurately forever.

If in texture Virgil Thomson was American as apple pie, in "message" he was French as tarte tatin, because he was not a specialist. During the decades of our friendship (sometimes warm, sometimes cool) I never thought of him as less than this century's most articulate musicologist and most persuasive opera maker. Like all artists he was able to do what cannot be done. Through his prose he convincingly evoked the sound of new musical pieces, and through his musical pieces he continues to evoke the visual spectacle of all our pasts.

When I last beheld Virgil Thomson two weeks before he died, he was ensconced as usual in that armchair near the piano, gazing at paintings by dear friends—Stettheimer, Arp, Grosser, Bérard—that had for so long hung on his east wall at the Chelsea. In the dreamy murmur that was now his sole voice (contrasting with the glib staccato that once so intimidated most of us), he announced: "Just sitting here, day after day after day, I realize how beautiful my pictures are." That is how I like to remember him—a general practitioner, in taste as in talent, never blasé, dying as he had lived, among an array of old acquaintances.