Volume 44, Number 14 · September 25, 1997
On the 'Virge'
By Robert Craft
Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle
by Anthony Tommasini
Norton, 605 pp., $30.00
Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle provides important amplifications and sortings-out of fact and fiction in Thomson's own and other versions of his life. His own remains the best-written life of an American musician,[1] but Anthony Tommasini's ranks not far below it in that regard and has the advantage of being more truthful. His fluent, easy-going style, free of fustian, thickets, ponderosities, is indebted to Thomson's as well as to Thomson's personal tutoring. Much of the material is familiar—the Missouri Baptist background, the discovery of intellectual and musical precocity, the Harvard years, life in l'entre deux guerres Paris—but a surprising amount is new and revelatory. It will subtract several cubits from Thomson's stature as a man.
Review, 4904 words
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