{"id":699,"date":"2016-08-21T18:59:30","date_gmt":"2016-08-21T22:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=699"},"modified":"2016-08-21T18:59:30","modified_gmt":"2016-08-21T22:59:30","slug":"virgil-thomson-guerilla-tactics-and-slapdash-judgments-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2016\/08\/virgil-thomson-guerilla-tactics-and-slapdash-judgments-2.html","title":{"rendered":"Virgil Thomson: Guerilla Tactics and Slapdash Judgments"},"content":{"rendered":"

In today’ s Wall Street Journal<\/em> I review the new Library of America Virgil Thomson compendium. Here’s what I had to say:<\/p>\n

The heyday of American classical music occurred around the turn of the 20th century, when most everyone \u00adinvolved assumed that American composers would create a native canon and that American orchestras in 2016 would play mainly American music. This vibrant fin de si\u00e8cle <\/em>moment also marked the apex of classical-music journalism in the United States. In New York, the most estimable critics were W.J. Henderson of the Times, Henry Edward Krehbiel of the Tribune, and the ubiquitous James \u00adGibbons Huneker. All were active participants, not sideline observers.<\/p>\n

One reason that music journalism declined after World War I was the criterion of \u201cobjectivity,\u201d which \u00adremoved critics from a world of composers, performers and institutional leaders that Henderson, Krehbiel and Huneker had knowingly inhabited. The grand exception, proving the rule, was Virgil Thomson of the New York Herald Tribune, who was a composer of consequence and an active conductor and who maintained close and significant working relationships with artists in other fields. Thomson\u2019s 1967 autobiography, \u201cVirgil Thomson,\u201d \u00adreprinted in the Library of America\u2019s new Thomson anthology, records theatrical enterprises alongside Orson Welles and John Houseman and interactions with a Parisian cohort that included James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Edited by Tim Page, the new Thomson collection incorporates two additional books\u2014\u201cThe State of Music\u201d (1939) and \u201cAmerican Music Since 1910\u201d (1971)\u2014as well as an assortment of essays for the New York Review of Books and other \u00adperiodicals.<\/p>\n

Not included, because they were republished in a previous Library of America volume, are the hit-and-run Tribune reviews that made Thomson a notorious and influential guerrilla warrior from 1940 to 1954. These \u00adbrilliantly informal inside jobs bore witness to the commercialized celebrity culture that classical music had become. It was Thomson who fingered Arthur Judson, a national musical power broker (running two \u00adorchestras and the leading New York concert bureau) who put business first and art second, and it was Thomson again who reduced the \u00ad\u201ceducational\u201d efforts of David \u00adSarnoff\u2019s NBC and RCA to \u201cthe music appreciation racket.\u201d He called the \u00adviolinist Jascha Heifetz \u00ad\u201cessentially frivolous\u201d and considered the Philharmonic \u201cnot part of New York\u2019s intellectual life.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his autobiography, Thomson explains: \u201cThe New York Herald \u00adTribune <\/em>was a gentleman\u2019s paper, more like a chancellery than a business. During the fourteen years I worked there I was never told to do or not to do anything.\u201d Notably, Thomson was not told not to continue composing and conducting. His favorable reviews of Eugene Ormandy, who programmed lots of Thomson\u2019s music with the Philadelphia Orchestra, were part of the package. And he pursued an insouciant personal style that would never have been tolerated at the Times. His principles, he wrote, \u201cengaged me to expose the philanthropic persons in control of our musical institutions for the amateurs they are [and] to reveal the manipulators of our musical distribution for the culturally retarded profit makers that indeed they are.\u201d Another sally in his autobiography records that the Times\u2019s \u201cchronic fear of any take-off toward style came back to mind only the other day, when Howard Taubman, its drama critic, dismissed a play by the poet Robert Lowell as \u2018a pretentious, arty trifle.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

If re-reading Thomson\u2019s feuilletons<\/em> today remains a bracing experience, it must be emphasized that his larger efforts are compromised by know-it-all slapdash judgments and contentious aesthetic biases that are more forgivable and delectable in a daily newspaper, where they may be \u00adbalanced by others\u2019 accounts. The longer pieces collected here are studded with howlers, of which I will cite two bearing on a Thomson specialty: American opera.<\/p>\n

Recalling the inception of the Metropolitan Opera on page one of \u201cAmerican Music Since 1910,\u201d Thomson records that \u201cfor its first seven years, from 1882 to \u201989, [it] gave \u00adeverything, including Bizet\u2019s Carmen<\/em>, in German.\u201d In fact, the Met began in 1883 as an Italian house and was ambushed by Germans from 1884 to 1891 before the box holders took it back. This issue of opera and language, as Henry Krehbiel (miscalled \u201cEdward\u201d by Thomson in a paragraph extolling fact-checking at the Herald Tribune) acutely appreciated, would prove crucial to the failure of American opera in the decades to come.<\/p>\n

A second example: Writing in 1962, Thomson called George Gershwin\u2019s \u201cPorgy and Bess\u201d an \u201cop\u00e9ra comique, like Carmen<\/em>, consisting of musical numbers separated by spoken \u00addialogue.\u201d But Gershwin wrote sung recitatives. The dialogue one sometimes encounters in \u201cPorgy\u201d was added after Gershwin\u2019s death. Thomson himself loudly reviewed \u201cPorgy\u201d at its 1935 premiere. He denigrated Gershwin<\/a> as a gifted dilettante\u2014the same judgment he had applied to Charles Ives. A chronic Francophile, Thomson keyed on the professionalism instilled by his Paris-based teacher Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Aaron Copland and countless other Americans whose music was more kindred to Thomson than \u201cPorgy\u201d or Ives\u2019s \u201cConcord\u201d Sonata. A 1962 encomium to Boulanger is the warmest and tenderest thing in the Library of America collection; the usual temperature of Thomson\u2019s prose approximates that of an ice-cold shower.<\/p>\n

Thomson\u2019s assessment of Ives,<\/a> in a chapter from \u201cAmerican Music Since 1910\u201d called \u201cThe Ives Case,\u201d makes strange reading today. A breathtaking Thomsonian generalization\u2014\u201can artist\u2019s life is never accidental, least of all its tragic aspects\u201d\u2014predicates a breathtakingly severe verdict: that all of Ives is compromised by \u201ca divided allegiance.\u201d By dividing himself between composition and the life-insurance work he pursued to earn a living, Thomson argues, Ives never mastered a musical calling. From Thomson\u2019s essay one would never glean that, even as a student, Ives could craft an exemplary German Lied (\u201cFeldeinsamkeit\u201d). Rather, a \u201chomespun Yankee tinkerer,\u201d Ives wrote songs that \u201cwill not, as we say, come off.\u201d His exemplification of \u201cethical principles and transcendental concepts,\u201d Thomson opines, seems \u201cself-conscious,\u201d \u201cnot quite first-class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever one may make of such judgments, what seemed Germanic hot air to Thomson is what for many today most gauges Ives\u2019s greatness. Those \u201cethical principles\u201d and \u201ctranscendental concepts\u201d are what convey a moral afflatus equally found in Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius and Shostakovich\u2014also on Thomson\u2019s list of windbag composers. With Germanic \u201cInnerlichkeit\u201d (or inwardness) he will have nothing to do: Only Thomson could have likened its most famous podium practitioner, Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler, to Arturo Toscanini, who \u201cstreamlined\u201d music in favor of surface affect.<\/p>\n

Thomson believed that the German influence on such American composers as Ives, Edward MacDowell and George Chadwick was toxic. Are Chadwick\u2019s symphonic works merely \u201ca pale copy of . . . continental models\u201d? I would not say that of Chadwick\u2019s effervescent \u201cJubilee\u201d (1897), with its whiff of \u201cCamptown Races.\u201d Did Thomson even know much of Chadwick\u2019s music? It is doubtful. But his assumptions were echoed in the American-music narratives popularized by Copland and Leonard Bernstein, both of whom also dismissed Chadwick and questioned the professionalism of Ives and Gershwin.<\/p>\n

Among the most substantial occasional pieces in the present collection is a 1965 assessment of books about Debussy, Bizet, Berg and Webern for the New York Review; it provides a concise exegesis of Thomson\u2019s aesthetic predilections. Debussy was, he wrote, the \u201cmost original\u201d 20th-century composer, and French literature was his inspirational fount. His \u201cmost vibrant pages are those in which a literary transcript of some \u00advisual or other sensuous experience has released in him a need to \u00adinundate the whole with music. This music, though wrought from a vast vocabulary of existing idiom, is profoundly independent and original. . . . None of it really sounds like anything else. It had its musical origins, of course; but it never got stuck with them; it took off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Debussy\u2019s highest flight is the \u00adopera \u201cPell\u00e9as et M\u00e9lisande\u201d (1898), in which \u201cfor the first time in over a century (or maybe ever) a composer gave full rights to subtleties below the surface of a play. . . . The sensitivity with which the whole is knit . . . never again produced so fine a fabric.\u201d The only \u201crunners-up\u201d to \u201cPell\u00e9as\u201d among 20th-century operas are Berg\u2019s \u201cWozzeck\u201d and \u201cLulu.\u201d Berg depended on his German musical forebears \u201cto guide him through the dark forests of abnormal psychology.\u201d Owing, Thomson confides, to a \u201cperverse fascination with the Germanic view of music as something strictly for scholastic temperaments,\u201d he undertakes a review of Willi Reich\u2019s then-newly translated Berg biography. Both the book and its subject, he says, embody \u201cGermanic types\u201d who \u201cthink in simplified alternatives\u2014black or white, right or wrong, our team against all the others in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

A slightly earlier New York Review piece, \u201cHow Dead Is Arnold Schoenberg?,\u201d supplements these views. Schoenberg\u2019s letters are said to distill the self-portrait of \u201ca consecrated artist, cunning, companionable, loyal, indefatigable, generous, persistent, affectionate, comical, easily wounded, and demanding.\u201d Schoenberg is the characteristic German \u201cfor whom a certain degree of introversion was \u00adesteemed man\u2019s highest expressive state.\u201d It is good to lay the cards on the table.<\/p>\n

And what of Thomson\u2019s own place in music history? The readings at hand amass a shrewd self-assessment, becomingly modest yet laced with piercing insinuations of self-regard. It is only appropriate that Thomson lavishes attention on his two operatic collaborations with Gertrude Stein. \u201cFour Saints in Three Acts\u201d (1934) and \u201cThe Mother of Us All\u201d (1947) embellish the tiny American operatic canon. For those who love the artful innocence of Erik Satie, they are a sublime achievement; for the rest of us, they embody a taste rarefied yet readily accessible.<\/p>\n

Thomson was also one of the best American composers for film (a topic somewhat skirted in his autobiography). His scores for the classic \u00addocumentaries \u201cThe Plow That Broke the Plains\u201d (1936), \u201cThe River\u201d (1938) and \u201cLouisiana Story\u201d (1948) are outstandingly fresh, organic in unexpected ways. For a cavalcade of cars fleeing drought-infested farms\u2014the climax of \u201cThe Plow\u201d\u2014Thomson \u00adfurnishes a divine habanera. Elsewhere his patchwork of hymns and popular song strikes an American note both authentic and original. When Thomson claimed to have \u00adpreceded Copland in concocting an American idiom combining \u201csimplification\u201d and \u201cfolk-style tunes,\u201d he was merely telling the truth.<\/p>\n

Finally, Thomson embodies an iconic American life story. Born in Kansas City in 1896, seasoned in Paris, ultimately a legendary denizen of Manhattan\u2019s Chelsea Hotel, he combined vernacular New World whimsy with the refinements of Old World high art. He traced his \u00adobstreperousness to \u201cthe Booth \u00adTarkington-George Ade-Mark Twain connection.\u201d In his lifetime, this \u00adgadfly spirit made Thomson a necessary voice. Posthumously, he utters fearless but fallible understandings based on formidable knowledge and experience and equally formidable \u00adeccentricities of feeling and opinion. He is more a guide to his own time and place than a sage analyst or observer of timeless truths.<\/p>\n

One can feel grateful for this \u00adLibrary of America volume and yet believe that a greater service could be rendered by anthologizing American musical journalists from an earlier era. Henderson\u2019s 2,500-word Times review of the premiere of Dvorak\u2019s \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony remains a masterpiece of probing approbation, with one of the subtlest descriptions of the central Largo ever conceived. Krehbiel\u2019s 4,000-word Tribune review of the American premiere of Strauss\u2019s \u201cSalome\u201d remains a masterpiece of moral opprobrium, as plausible today as the day it was written. Huneker\u2019s account, in his autobiography, of an inebriated evening with Dvorak (\u201cSuch a man is as dangerous to a moderate drinker as a false beacon is to a shipwrecked sailor\u201d) remains among the most colorful portraits of any composer ever penned. A full dose of such writings would open wide a window on an American past not sufficiently remembered\u2014not least by Virgil Thomson.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In today’ s Wall Street Journal I review the new Library of America Virgil Thomson compendium. Here’s what I had to say: The heyday of American classical music occurred around the turn of the 20th century, when most everyone \u00adinvolved assumed that American composers would create a native canon and that American orchestras in 2016 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-699","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-bh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":700,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions\/700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}