VIRGIL THOMSON: MUSIC CHRONICLES

1 4 3 R V I R G I L T H O M S O N : M U S I C C H R O N I C L E S V I N C E N T G I R O U D Having lived in France more or less continuously from 1924 on, Virgil Thomson fled Paris just before the city fell to the Germans and arrived in New York on 12 August 1940. A month later, Alexander Smallens, who had conducted the premiere of his Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford in 1934 (as well as that of Gershwin ’s Porgy and Bess the following year), introduced him to Geo√rey Parsons, who coordinated cultural coverage for The New York Herald Tribune. Thomson was recruited at once as the paper ’s chief music critic, beginning on 10 October. He had tried his hand sporadically at music reviewing in the 1920s and 1930s, in Vanity Fair, of all places, and, especially, for Modern Music, the organ of the League of Composers, whose membership included several American composers, such as Aaron Copland and Walter Piston, who, like him, had studied with Nadia Boulanger. Writing for a daily with a circulation of more than four hundred thousand was obviously an altogether di√erent challenge, which Thomson took up, as he put it, ‘‘in a spirit of adventure,’’ all the more so since V i r g i l T h o m s o n : M u s i c C h r o n i c l e s , 1 9 4 0 — 1 9 5 4 , edited by Tim Page (Library of America, 1,200 pp., $45) 1 4 4 G I R O U D Y The Herald Tribune was, in his view, ‘‘a gentleman’s paper, more like a chancellery than a business.’’ Parsons gave him more or less free rein, and Thomson soon became New York’s most famous music critic – and the most feared. He remained with the paper fourteen years, and his reviews, along with other writings, some previously unpublished, have been collected by the Library of America into Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles, 1940–1954. As a critic, Thomson thought of himself, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘‘as a species of knight-errant attacking dragons single-handedly and rescuing musical virtue in distress.’’ That he was not afraid to cause o√ense to the musical establishment was already in evidence in his 1939 book The State of Music, where a long chapter was devoted to ‘‘Who does what to whom and who gets paid.’’ The chief dragon he was determined to take on was the amateurism and snobbishness of the rich patrons of New York musical institutions, especially the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. He was equally determined to expose the mercantilism and cultural retardation of the ‘‘manipulators of our music distribution.’’ As for ‘‘musical virtue in distress,’’ it included, as he put it, everyone involved with music in a relation ‘‘based only on music and the sound it makes.’’ Another dragon Thomson meant to confront was what he felt to be the excessive weight of the German tradition in American musical life. A Francophile whose musical pantheon ranged from Debussy and Satie to Edith Piaf (along with Duke Ellington one of the few nonclassical musicians featured), he never lost an opportunity to remind his readers that borders and monopolies did not belong in the world of music. Nor was he well disposed toward systems or schools. Not afraid to proclaim himself an antiWagnerian , he spoke respectfully, sympathetically even, of dodecaphonism and its practitioners, including the young Pierre Boulez and Luigi Dallapiccola, while making clear that he would not endorse claims that theirs was the music of the future. Even the neoclassicism of Stravinsky was felt to be an impasse (it would be interesting to read this self-professed ‘‘Stravinsky fan’’ on the master’s latter-day conversion to serialism). The fourth dragon, and probably Thomson’s main bête noire, was fanaticism. Among music lovers, he saw it as a front for ignorance, among composers as a form of intolerance, or part of a V I R...