The Virgilicm Knack

"Virgil Thomson is the only man In the world who can keep me up until four in the morning." The late Sir Thomas Beecham's remark was a tribute to the fact that Thomson, one of the foremost U.S. composers, composes sentences just as brilliantly as he does music. He has been as familiar to the music public for his books (The State of Music) and his distinguished music reviews in the New York Herald Tribune (1940-54) as for works like the opera Four Saints in Three Acts or the film score for Louisiana Story, Whether in words or notes, Thomson expresses himself with the homespun texture of his Missouri background, the elegance of his Parisian training and an elfin wit all his own.

Last week, implausibly, the elf turned 75. To mark the occasion, there was a series of performances of his music (highlighted the week before when the Philadelphia Orchestra played Three Pictures for Orchestra in Philadelphia and New York). There was also a conversation with TIME Music Critic William Bender which, although it did not last until four in the morning, showed that Thomson has lost none of the old Virgilian knack:

OPERA: "I find it the most interesting thing around in music today because it is least bound by schoolmasters and school-book minds. It's show business, and therefore has to work."

HIS FORTHCOMING OPERA "LORD BYRON" (to be given its world premiere in April by Manhattan's Juilliard School): "The world is full of orchestration operas--everything down to and including the kitchen stove, and then the singers have to yelp above it. Mine is a singing opera. I like the words and rather wanted them heard. Byron is the hero and the villain both. Byron slept with everybody around. He was, don't forget it, a lord, a millionaire, a genius and a beauty. And with all that, he had to misbehave every day to cut himself down to size."

BRAHMS: "He can be very touching. When he gets it right, that is. The songs, the short piano pieces, anything that's in miniature form, they're wonderful, very personal, and elaborately subtle. He gets kind of square-toed in the big long numbers."

MIXING ART, BUSINESS AND FUNNY BUSINESS:

"The ladies and gentlemen of the average symphony or opera board are, roughly speaking, the chamber of commerce. I think it is always bad to have artistic direction in the hands of the business community. Not that I mind a bit of funny business now and then. If people want to get some orchestras or opera companies started so their wives will have a place to go, and they can sleep with prima donnas, that's all right, because once the artists are up there in front of the public, corruption disappears." BEING 75: "One of the nice things is that you don't have to go out so much. You can be very close to composers like Beethoven and Mozart and Bach, Haydn and Schumann, but that doesn't mean you have to run uptown all the time to hear them played. They're in the mind, like your grandmother."

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