ABSTRACT
Virgil Thomson was the maverick. He knew that the mode and style of operatic presentation, the content, the form—all these had to be renovated. The stories and the gossip embedded in this study should not divert anyone from the larger issues that Thomson's musical and critical career represent. One thing is the Virgilian agenda, clearly under way in France under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger, and very much audible in the opera and the orchestral suites from the Thirties. Virgil Thomson did survive to the state of an aged eminence, with honors at the Kennedy Center among other events. When, at the end of his life, he totted up the royalty payments he had received over the years for The Mother of Us All, he found that over one thousand separate productions had taken place, in colleges, amateur groups, or small opera companies.
