An informal
poll among friends
in New York (some musicians, some not) points up
considerable divergence of opinion about
the present
stature of Virgil Thomson (1896–
1989), the American composer and critic who is
now the subject of an incisive and not at all hagiographical
biography
by
Anthony
Tommasini, a music critic for
The New York Times.

For a start,
it should be said that Virgil Thomson’s
reputation is now based primarily on two things.
First,
he was the composer of two
influential American operas written in collaboration with Gertrude
Stein: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All
(1947). The second source of his current reputation is the witty
yet unremittingly highbrow music
criticism he wrote for The New York Herald Tribune between 1940
and the fall of 1954. Thomson’s position as a serious
composer who also held a critic’s post on a major daily newspaper
makes him a rare if not, indeed, unique case in the annals of
American cultural life. Certainly, nothing like it could happen
today.

Both of the above-mentioned operas, along with
his last opera, Lord Byron (1972), are now available on the compact disc
format, and a selection from his books, Tribune criticism, and
later contributions to The New York Review of Books can still be
found
in A Virgil Thomson
Reader, edited by Thomson himself with an
introduction by John Rockwell (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).

As I say,
there was
little consensus among