Biography
Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1896 and, after wartime military service, studied at Harvard University. A fellowship took him to Paris, where he studied with Nadia Boulanger and moved in circles that included Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie. With Stein he wrote the operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), whose plain idiom rooted in American hymn tunes stood in deliberate contrast to Stein's associative texts. From 1940 to 1954 he was also an influential music critic for the New York Herald Tribune and composed award-winning film scores, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning music for Louisiana Story. Thomson died in New York in 1989.
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