![]() ![]() Their collaboration resulted in the premier of the groundbreaking composition Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934. After meeting Stein in Paris in 1926, Thomson invited her to prepare a libretto for an opera which he hoped to compose. His most important friend from this period was Gertrude Stein, who was an artistic collaborator and mentor to him. Gertrude Stein in 1934, photograph by Carl Van Vechten Grosser died in 1986, three years before Thomson. He also encouraged many younger composers and literary figures such as Ned Rorem, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Frank O'Hara, and Paul Bowles. Later he and Grosser lived at the Hotel Chelsea, where he presided over a largely gay salon that attracted many of the leading figures in music and art and theater, including Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, and many others. In Paris in 1925, he cemented a relationship with painter Maurice Grosser, who was to become his life partner and frequent collaborator. He eventually studied with Nadia Boulanger and became a fixture of "Paris in the twenties". While studying in Paris he was influenced by several French composers who were members of " Les Six" including: Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, and Georges Auric. He studied in Paris on fellowship for a year, and after graduating lived in Paris from 1925 until 1940. His tours of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped nurture his desire to return there.Īt Harvard, Thomson focused his studies on the piano work of Erik Satie. Smith, the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and father of Alice Smith. After World War I, he entered Harvard University thanks to a loan from Dr. During his youth he often played the organ in Grace Church, (now Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral), as his piano teacher was the church's organist. As a child he befriended Alice Smith, great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint movement. Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion". He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. Virgil Thomson (Novem– September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. Performance of Virgil Thomson's The Plow That Broke the Plains – Suite, Leopold Stokowski conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in 1946
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