November 25, 1896– Virgil Thomson was born in the heart of the USA. He was an influential and important 20th century music critic and a composer. Thomson was one of a group of young gay musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, John Cage and Samuel Barber who changed American music during a very magical time in NYC.
When I lived in Manhattan in the mid-1970s, an era when the city was an impoverished place with cheap and plentiful apartments and the perpetual hazard of being mugged and murdered, my boyfriend, a native, would take me on tours of noted landmarks associated with the figures that held my interest. The guided walks included two apartment buildings to which I would often make a return pilgrimage. One was The Dakota, the residence of John Lennon, Lauren Bacall and Roberta Flack, plus it being famous for the location filming of Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The other was The Chelsea Hotel located way downtown on a rather sad block of West 23rd Street. The Chelsea Hotel was home to a fabulous selection of musicians and literary figures: Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen, Bette Midler, Quentin Crisp, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Janis Joplin. Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia at the place in 1953. In 1978, Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death there by her boyfriend Sid Vicious of The Sex Pistols.
It was also the longtime residence of Virgil Thomson, who had moved there in 1940 after leaving Paris on the brink of the war. The Chelsea Hotel did not have a doorman. I would sometimes just hang out in the garish, decaying lobby or the next door café, waiting to be discovered or playing up the possibility of getting laid by some celebrity. I spotted the famous composer several times, including one afternoon when he was napping in a tattered chair in the lobby. He was a tiny man with a not so tiny tummy and round cherubic face.
Thomson is probably best known as the mother of all lesbians, Gertrude Stein’s collaborator on a pair of operas: Four Saints In Three Acts (1934) and The Mother Of Us All (1947). It was a collaboration between a shy gay guy composer and an especially extroverted lesbian poet. The hymn like melodies that shape the score of Four Saints In Three Acts are an echo of Thomson’s earliest musical career as an organist for the Baptist church in his hometown of Kansas City.
After serving in the US Army during WWI, he studied music at Harvard. Thomson also studied on a fellowship at Cambridge where he thrived in the glee club. He later studied musical composition in Paris, where, in 1925, he met Stein, whose works he had already begun to set to music. In Paris, he hung out with Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie, all who had an influence on his style. He also made the acquaintance of a young painter, Maurice Grosser, who became his lifelong lover and sometimes his artistic collaborator.
In 1934, Thomson premiered that queerest opera ever staged, Four Saints In Three Acts. It has no plot, but was somehow about the Spanish Saints, Teresa Of Avila and Ignatius Loyola. But, the score was based on Protestant hymns. The premier featured an all-Black cast and was produced by the sardonically titled Friends And Enemies Of Modern Music. In spite of its title, the opera features numerous real and imaginary saints, and it is, in fact, four acts long, plus a prologue. It has never quite become part of the standard repertory of the world’s great opera companies, but it has achieved a certain quirky reputation, and it remains its composer’s signature work.
In 1946, the nutty pair of collaborators staged another opera, The Mother Of Us All, about lesbian icon, suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony. This one combines Thomson’s pastiche of 19th century American popular songs, along with more old fashioned, sentimental musical styles to create another highly unconventional piece of musical theater.
From 1940 to 1954, Thomson was the stylish and opinionated music critic of the important daily newspaper (remember them?), the New York Herald Tribune. His acerbic essays from that time were published in four volumes: The Musical Scene, The Art Of Judging Music, Music Right And Left, and Music Reviewed. In 2014, they were all gathered together in one hefty book (1300 pages), Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles. His writing is on a level with my favorite critics Pauline Kael, David Ehrenstein and Frank Rich.
Thomson continued to write essays and prolifically compose musical pieces for the rest of his long life. He wrote more than 250 compositions, including the scores for plays and films. His score for the movie Louisiana Story (1948) won the Pulitzer Prize. Thomson’s music is noted for its wit, irony, simplicity, American idiom speech rhythms, and hymnbook harmonies.
Despite his association with Gertrude Stein and unlike his contemporary, Aaron Copland, Thomson remained cautiously in the closet for most of his life. During the McCarthy era, he lived in fear that he might be outed. But for their time, Thomson and Grosser were able to live as a couple with a somewhat open gay life together at The Chelsea Hotel.
His final and most emotional opera, Lord Byron (1972), was commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera but it was never staged, apparently because of its subject matter: the famous poet’s incestuous relationship with his sister.
Thomson took his final bow in 1989, in his place at The Chelsea Hotel, a year to the day after the passing of Grosser in the same room that they had shared for nearly 50 years. The Chelsea Hotel currently has no current residents of any kind. It is being converted into luxury accommodations for rich tourists. It’s slated to open in spring 2017. The advertisements capitalize and make note of its history with the former famous residents.
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