Underrated Classical Musicians 2/2/20

Kansas City won the Super Bowl. Doesn't Joe Montana play for them?.... The great classical musician of Kansas City is, almost without a doubt, Virgil Thomson. And his most famous piece is Mother of Us All - an opera with a script by Gertrude Stein and whose main character is Susan B. Anthony. 

For fifteen years, Virgil Thomson covered music for the New York Herald and he ruled the music scene with an iron pen. He now has the dubious fate of being better known as a writer on music than a composer. If you listen, you'll realize that he was a very good and original composer, but he was a great writer. He was biased, venomous, uncomprehending of many composers, and extremely funny. One could also make the argument that in a contemporary context, he was also corrupt because he clearly saw no conflict of interest in reviewing groups who played his music. After a bad review, the conductor George Szell once programmed Thomson's piece, Louisiana Story, when asked why he programmed it, Szell replied that he was making a 'Louisiana Purchase.' 

'Mother of Us All' is still his most famous piece. Thomson, like so many young American musicians after World War I, came to the newly cheap Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger, younger sister of Lili. Not only was Thomson obviously as literary as he was musical, but he was also gay. Mentioning this is important because Mother of Us All particularly came out of the volatile friendship between Thomson and his partner Maurice Grosser on the one side, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas on the other. The entire plot, in fact, comes from Grosser, an artist and art critic (the same dichotomy as his partner) who is the the only one of the four whose writing is no longer iconic. The plot not only includes Susan B. Anthony, but Daniel Webster, Andrew Johnson, Thaddeus Stevens, John Quincy Adams, and Ulysses S. Grant. 

Is it a great opera? Well, not in any traditional theatrical sense, but then, it's not meant to be a traditional opera. It's an experimental piece by ferociously intelligent people grappling with issues too large to be in their grasp of even the smartest people. Generally speaking, opera uses the emotional extremes available in singing to deal with primary emotions - the text is usually about three things: it's either 'what should I do?', 'I love you!', or 'I should kill this guy!' But Mother of Us All is dealing with some of the largest issues on earth: history, time, perception, memory, morality, human behavior... it's all there. Thomson is a good composer, and his score is certainly interesting, but there's no way he can find musical means of portraying all that. To come up with the proper music for issues that large you'd have to be a 20th century Mozart.

It's absolutely worth listening to, the music of nearly each scene is great on its own, it's only a problem when you put them together over the course of a whole evening. It's quite beautiful music and beautiful in extremely strange ways. Stein's script (or libretto) is easy enough to hear through the music, and unlike so much opera, the sentiments have not aged a day. Perhaps another composer, or a team of composers, or a woman composer, could try having another crack at setting Gertrude's libretto.