Customer Reviews (1)

One of America's finest essayists.
What Stanley Kauffmann is to film criticism, Virgil Thomson was to music criticism--with one major difference: Thomson is himself a major artist within his critical area, classical music. While Thomson was one of the significant classical composers of his era, his name is perhaps more famous courtesy of his music criticism, which, like his music, is straightforward, erudite, graceful and concise. From the early 40s until the early 50s, Thomson was the most important music critic writing in English, and this rare collection is the finest compilation ever assembled of his reviews, essays, portraits and memoirs. Thoroughly annotated, this is the best place to start for those interested in acquainting themselves with one the finest essayists in our language. ... Read more

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Virgil Thompson is universally recognized as one of the dominant music critics whose unique sensibility was informed by his groundbreaking work as a composer of the mid twentieth-century. Whether writing for a daily newspaper or an academic journal, Thompson brought wit and erudition to a literary form that is often staid. Not suffering fools gladly, unwilling to kowtow to the powers that be, Thompson and his writing remain remarkably relevant and entertaining today. This essential reader includes his essays on making a living as a musician; his articles on classic composers; his relation to his contemporaries; his articles on newcomers in the music world, including John Cage and Pierre Boulez; his autobiographical writings and commentary on his own works. ... Read more

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In this vivid portrayal of a giant in American twentieth-century music and criticism, Anthony Tommasini recounts Thomson's experiences as a composer, critic, and gay man. Tommasini chronicles Thomson's upbringing in turn-of-the-century Kansas City, along with his struggle to accept his sexuality-"I didn't want to be queer"-as he searched for a place in the wider world through army service in World War I as well as at Harvard and in 1920s Paris. There Thomson studied with Nadia Boulanger and formed an artistic alliance with Gertrude Stein that would result in the pioneering opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Thomson's fourteen-year tenure as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune showcased his talent for brilliant, biting commentary and established him as an influential writer on music and an arbiter of musical taste. The result of this involving narrative is a classic American biography of a classic American character.Amazon.com Review
Best known for an opera he set to Gertrude Stein's text, Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), and for the Pulitzer Prize-winning score of the documentary Louisiana Story (1948), composer Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was also an unswerving champion of modern American classical music during his tenure as the powerful music critic of the New York Herald Tribune (1940-54). His works' tonality, stress on simplicity, and skillful use of traditional American tunes strongly influenced Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. Lively prose evokes the crusty character of an American original in this enjoyably opinionated biography. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent work, the new standard on Thomson
Bravo, Anthony Tommasini.What a tour de force!Exquisitely written, copiously researched, deftly presented.This biography has it all.Look no further if you are interested in Thomson's REAL story.Thank you, Mr. Tommasini for this marvelous book which is destined to be the standard reference work on Virgil Thomson for many years to come.

An excellent overview of Thomson's life
The late composer Virgil Thomson did write an autobiography.However, autobiographies are not often fully honest.Nor do they often capture the essence of the person.Anthony Tommasini has accomplished both tasks.His portrait of Thomson, while certainly uncompromising is neither a scandal volume and it certainly is not hagiographical.He portrays Thomson very much as he was.

At the time when Thomson wrote his autobiography, American attitudes towards homosexuality were less than favourable.His colleague, Henry Cowell had done time at San Quentin Prison for his homosexual relationships with young men.Tommasini very frankly discusses Thomson's many relationships, particularly his long relationship with the painter Maurice Grosser.

Tommasini obviously does hold his subject in high esteem.However, that does not preclude Tommasini's critical look at his subject.He presents us with a portrait of an often irascible composer/critic whose contributions to American musical life have not yet been fully realised.Bernstein's statement on the death of Thomson unfortunately rings true today: 'we loved his music but rarely played it.'Hopefully, those who read Tommasini's work will become more interested in the extraordinary oeuvre of Virgil Thomson.His is a unique voice.Hopefully, it will be recovered. ... Read more

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Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Prepare for Saints is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account of how that revolutionary opera was born.Amazon.com Review
This crisp and accessible work offers both a penetratingreconstruction of the 1934 American productions of Gertrude Stein andVirgil Thomson's modernist opera Four Saints in Three Acts anda delightful study of an unprecedented artisticcollaboration--involving not only Stein and Thomson, but a large castof supporting characters. From arbiters of taste like Carl Van Vechtento the society hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan to the plucky, well-connectedband of Harvard-trained art professionals who eventually set "thecourse of 'official' modernist culture in America's most prestigiousinstitutions for nearly half a century," Steven Watson tracks theimprobable development of an audience for a quintessentially Americanopera that happened to be set in Spain, peopled by nuns and saints,and staged with an all-black cast performing an incoherent story infront of combustible sets. Along the way, Watson illuminates thelarger history of modernism in Paris and New York between the wars, aswell as many smaller histories, like the growth of museums in Americaand the influence of high bohemia on the worlds of fashion and design.--Regina Marler ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Fascinating cultural history
I came to this book hoping to learn about the creation and production of Stein's opera, and I was not disappointed. I thought the book delivered that information, and more.Watson writes well, and he tells a fascinating story of the complicated network of interpersonal relationships that were finally led this unlikely opera into production.I think Watson understands the nature of Stein's as well as anybody, although the focus of the book was not on the way the opera was written.He manages to express the way that all the participants were inspired by Stein's words in different ways, the "miracle" of their all having "to create and all of them did."

Opera is used as a hook for a less saleable topic
This is a meandering, disappointing, misleadingly titled book. Clearly the author wanted to write a book about the Harvard modernists and their era, including exploring "Negro chic" and the homosexual culture ofthe period. This would be a harder sell as a mass-circulation book, andhence the device of recruiting FOUR SAINTS as a distillation of the worldhe is interested in.

But the result is that one does not get enough ofanything, and too much of what you didn't buy the book for. Chick Austin,Muriel Draper, and the others may have provided physical settings relevantto the gestation of FOUR SAINTS, but they did not CREATE the piece. Assuch, the lingering over their particular biographies is excessive in abook purportedly devoted to the birth of the opera. Too often we get listsof celebrities present at this gathering or another, complete with fawningdescriptions of what they were wearing and how they decorated their rooms-- but this stems from a fan's love of a period, not a chronicling of FOURSAINTS itself.

Thus while we read through elegant page after page gushingabout Mrs. Harrison Williams and Lucius Beebe, by the end we have littleidea of what went on on stage in the opera, what more than a few of thelyrics were, or how the music sounded. If it is vital for us to know howJulien Levy founded his art gallery blow by blow, why so little info onblack theatre in New York before and after FOUR SAINTS? Why spend aparagraph following up on, say, Alfred Barr after SAINTS but only briefmention of what happened to any of the SAINTS cast members? This is a bookabout art museums mispackaged as one about the theatre.

This book is abit of a cynical hoax. You can just feel the editor "shaping" abook about largely forgotten arts administrators and critics, the partiesthey went to, who they slept with, and how openly, via hanging it all on anopera which fascinates in legend because of combining a black cast withGertrude Stein's lyrics. In the end, this book is a collection ofwell-written personality sketches of pictorial artists and their patrons.The author clearly has but subsidiary interest in music or theatre -- fatalin a book purporting to be about an opera.

More gossip than information
For those who know little or nothing about the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thompson opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," this book will provide some basic information.Those searching for any kind of in depthanalysis either of the libretto or the music will be disappointed, as Iwas.Long on the sexual preferences of the members of the 1930's modernistelite, short on any discussion of a landmark work of art.Listen to theoriginal cast album instead. ... Read more

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Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson are known as much for their formidable egos as for their contributions to twentieth-century arts. That either could collaborate intimately with anyone is surprising. Yet Stein and Thomson did work together, magnificently so, most notably on the landmark opera Four Saints in Three Acts and the fanciful The Mother of Us All. This annotated collection of correspondence reveals the spark that existed between the two American masters over the course of their sometimes rocky friendship.The roughly 400 letters written between 1926-1946 record the fascinating nature of their partnership-their mutual excitement over evolving projects and their process for bringing together two often radical aesthetic sensibilities.The style of the letters is careful and forceful when the relationship is strained, but most often it is relaxed and affectionate. As a record of friendship the letters are particularly compelling, replete with love, support, and mutual fascination. Not surprisingly, the correspondence is stylistically remarkable-Stein being arguably the most innovative literary modernist and Thomson the author of crisp, insightful, irreverent music criticism, the most quoted of his century.In addition to their artistic partnership, the letters provide a revealing glimpse into their individual careers in the realms of literature and music, as they document a web of mutual friendships and the vibrant artistic community of the early twentieth century.The editors' notes contextualize this valuable exchange and add a layer of richness and accessibility. The volume will interest readers, critics, and scholars in music, literature, avant garde arts and modern culture more generally. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Curious Canadians Compile Contract Correspondence Coherently - Nearly
The Canadian editors of this collection of correspondence between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson (but including letters from Alice B. Toklas and W.A. Bradley as well) admit in the Introduction that the collection is incomplete due "possibly owing to souring of relations") but they do an admirable job of connecting and arranging the letters that do exist such that they form an accurate chronology and dramatic narrative between a famous older writer and a young upcoming musician. The narrative story these pieces of correspondence tell falls neatly into two halves: (1) the commercial collaboration between two artists on an artistic project ("Four Saints in Three Acts") which brings both of them to a crisis in friendship and trust over contractual agreements on the project, and (2) what happens after these two artists' tempers cool and no lawyer any more serves as the go-between between the two artistic egos.

The editors, in their Introduction, provide a substantial, informative, non-academic yet intelligent background to both Gertrude Stein's career and Virgil Thomson's career and serve as excellent historians in setting up for the reader what serves as the drama in the story these letters convey, although there is a bit of sense of overkill for the reader already familiar with both artists since the Introduction is 22 pages long and more formal in tone and more comprehensive than the writers of the compiled correspondence ever were or intended to be. That is, the reader can just read the letters and leave out the critical editorial introduction altogether.

While the editors state rather too diplomatically in their Introduction that the crisis between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson was "occasioned by Thomson's perceived misstep in mediating" negotiations between Stein and a literary collaborator (George Hugnet), the reader immediately perceives that the "misstep" was not at all Virgil Thomson's. If the reader cannot see what happened directly from reading the letters themselves, then on pages 189 through 192, the editors contradictorily and perhaps conspiratorily tell the reader quite plainly that Alice B. Toklas set Virgil Thomson up for a fall, jealous as, was her habit, of anyone getting too intimate with her Gertrude Stein.

The literary pleasures to be found in reading the correspondence overall are not plentiful since the aim and purpose of the entire correspondence here was and remains commercial enterprise and business communication, not friendship or literary (or musical) expression, though the writers do not deny themselves some expression of literary hedonism once the business of business is momentarily completed. Much of the reading is tedious since contracts, agreements, and the wording for copyrights are a subject itself quite dowdy and, given the chronology or time-period, dated. These commercial discussions and disputes between Stein and Thomson deal with contract law, both in France and America, from 1926 through, at best, 1946 (where Stein even mentions that she wants Thomson to deposit her royalty check in the Mercantile Deposit Bank of Maryland (founded in 1874) but which no longer exists since it was merged into PNC Bank in 1971). I suppose an historian of such concerns might find this correspondence a bit more exciting than the non-specialist reader.

Nonetheless, along the way, this pilgrimage of legal wrangling and friendship, Virgil Thomson makes the frequent attempt to entertain -- if not Gertrude Stein herself directly, then the reader, indirectly. He plays with language in his letters as much as Gertrude Stein does in her formal works. I liked this: "The cake is grand and many thanks it arrived just before tea-guests and was a great success and it is beautiful to look at not to speak of eat." Or "Saturday with pleasure. Only Sauget is coming for lunch and to pose for his portrait and I'll get to your house as early as possible after. Maybe three. Maybe four. May two even." He also can be quite sweet: "If there's anything on earth that I can do for you or send to you, please let me know." (Just try to find the same kind of expression in any of Gertrude Stein's letters -- not that she wasn't a pleasant host in person and in her own home.) Thomson writes this sentence years after the crisis of friendship and at a time when Gertrude Stein and Alice are stuck in France, being threatened with going to a concentration camp. On a lighter note, Virgil Thomson's very long letter (hardly containing any business aims at all), humorously critiquing the foibles of plot and narration in Edith Wharton's novel, "Glimpse of the Moon," shows what a pleasant, intelligent and amusing friend he really could be. (All Gertrude Stein could reply to Thomson's excellent remarks was "She is like that." Done. Finis.)

On the other hand, Gertrude Stein comes off largely in these business missives as proper and patrician with her "we are pleased" and her "do tell" phrases, common in every collection of her correspondence ever gathered. "Here we are all peaceful and very pleased to be so . . . " "... do give us your news and do take the best of holiday greetings from us." She exhibits a certain amount of playfulness, but largely one observes saves her creativity for her work, not for the business of conducting business. Here is Stein combining business with pleasure so to speak: "All the business part of your letter I have answered to Bradley, and otherwise well really there is no otherwise." But sweetness and gaiety is not her typical mode of expression in letters: "Sorry about the grippe but look here I am not awfully anxious to mix in but you must not be too school girlish about Georges and also after all he is putting down his 500 francs of his fathers credit for your book and hell it is a gamble and he could do things with it that would be surer and after all he is doing it and nobody else is . . . anyway I love you . . . "

The correspondence between Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein dates from 1926 to 1946 when Gertrude Stein dies. However, the editors continue the story ("Epilogue") by including a touching narration of their own, with examples from correspondence, at the near-end of the book of the friendship that developed and continued between Thomson and Toklas until each was worn out by old age. Behind the correspondence are five Appendices, two of which revolve around Georges Hugnet, not only a subject related to the crisis between Stein and Thomson but a crisis in its own right. Stein's break with George Hugnet (who wrote beautifully and touchingly about Stein and her writing -- and Stein admits to this heartfeltedly) inspired her own touching piece of literature, "When the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded." Appendix E, the last one, contains the final contract for "Four Saints In Three Acts" eventually agreed upon after years of bickering and dickering.

On the whole this is an admirable edition for a number of reasons. The effort to give historical and chronological accuracy for this volume of correspondence is truly worthy of this Oxford edition. The footnotes to the correspondence are keenly historically informative, helpful, and very well-written. I particularly enjoyed the editors' translating the occasional French phrase, particularly when the writer was writing in poor French. I think this collection is even better than those of Stein with Wilder, Van Vechten or, certainly, with Picasso (see my review on that collection) because the editors took the care to provide the future reader a comprehensive and detailed context, one that isn't at all biased toward one artist or the other and thus, the voyeristic experience of reading someone else's distant letters becomes an enriching, insightful experience, one I think this work can thus provide new impetus for more further reading of Stein's difficult works and certainly wider enjoyment of Virgil Thomson's music.

*****

Curiously enough, a huge omission exists in this correspondence that isn't covered by any editorial explanation or overview.It's the fact that the State Department of the United States Government actually paid for Virgil Thomson's adaptation of Gertrude Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts," and you can read the entire book and never even glean a clue that this is where the money came from.Please see "The Cultural Cold War" by Frances Stonor Saunders (1999), pages 118-119 for the details.Gertrude Stein's work and Thomson's music was part of an American propaganda campaign for the Cold War. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
I had expected a livelier writing style.Instead, this book was not moving along.Whether/not it was Thomson's writing style or content--I expected much more about his experiences in Paris--it is good for one thing:zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Thoroughly enjoyable
I found this autobiography by Virgil Thomson thoroughly enjoyable.I was led to read it after seeing his name consistently referenced by some leading historiographers of the 20th century such as Joseph Horowitz and Harvey Sachs.Reading this work has encouraged me to do a little more research into his life since he is extremely shy about sharing his private life, especially any events that demonstrated his homosexuality.If he was so concerned about hiding this rather important part of his personality, I could not help but to wonder how much else he portrayed in veiled sequences.Nonetheless, his obvious brilliance and the delectable way that he uses the English language makes his story telling absolutely riveting.I just don't know how much of it is true. ... Read more

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Virgil Thomson reveals how he learned to compose music for English poetry and prose. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Virgil makes me tear my hair out
I remember listening to a performace of The Soldier's Tale in which the three most prominent living American composer's; Copland, Sessions and Thomson read the roles.No one who has read him will doubt who Virgil Thomson was, the devil.There has probably never been a composer/critic who could be so wonderfully generous, unbiased and insightful or more small minded and wicked.This book has a lot in it to reccommmend but you'd be crazy to take it as gospel.Even while shaking my head with doubt, I can't ignore what he says. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Old, but not dated
I guess that I have become a big Virgil Thomson fan in my old age.The preternatural importance of his music in forming an "American Sound" (to wit, sine qua non), his conviction about the roles of musicians, painters and poets in society and his sardonic vision about everything that he heard appeals to me.This book is a classic and should be read by anyone who considers him- or herself an objective listener.Excellent book. ... Read more