Virgil Thompson: Music Chronicles 1940 - 1954

Description

For fourteen crucial years in the middle of the twentieth century, Virgil Thompson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music from his vantage as the nationally syndicated music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thompson communicated its joys and complexities to a wide readership in a clear and winning style, and his daily reviews and Sunday columns set a high water-mark in American cultural journalism. With this volume Thompson's writings are available for the first time in decades.

TIM PAGE won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his writings in the Washington Post, for which he was a music critic from 1995 to 2008. A professor of music and journalism at the University of Southern California, he is co-editor of Virgil Thomson's Selected Letters and editor of the Library of America edition of Dawn Powell's novels.

"One of the best regular critics of any subject whatsoever who ever walked into any newspaper's city room. . . . It is more fun reading Virgil Thomson today on subjects of scant general interest than it is to read the vast majority of designated dullards and snark-slinging trivialists currently employed. . . . Thomson, like much of Mencken, remains riotously readable." - Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News "The present volume is valuable, of course, as a chronicle of a particularly rich period of musical life in this country. All the big composers and performers are here at their height. It was a Golden Age. But I think the book is even more valuable as a record of one deeply musical man's listening experiences put into beautiful prose. It is a book that can teach us all how to be better listeners." - Timothy Mangan, Orange County Register "Anyone with a passing interest in music and good writing needs to have this book. There's an enormous amount to learn in these 1,000 pages-and your education will be painless, thorough and entertaining." - Christopher Purdy, WOSU Classical Music 101 "[Thomson's] bracing attitude about the job of the music critic has never been more urgent than it is now, an era of unprecedented choice, a chaotic cultural marketplace, and scant curatorial guidance." - Peter Dobrin, The Philadelphia Inquirer