Complete Songs of Virgil Thomson for Voice & Piano

These discs offer the most complete recorded collection of works for voice and piano of Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), one of the most important American composers of the twentieth century. Thomson wrote songs throughout his career and they offer a unique window into his changing musical concerns and his compositional evolution. Since this recording includes works previously unpublished and unrecorded, several of which are substantial in themselves and important to his development as a composer, it makes possible a more complete understanding of his work. Among the major rediscoveries is the grandly expressive and beautiful , which, without sounding like it at all, evokes Satie’s .

Thomson wrote that the great song composers—Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, Faure, Debussy, Duparc, Ravel, and Poulenc — accomplished their miracles through their ability to make the music “not only of equal quality with the verse but also its mate. It gets inside a poem and stays there, intertwined unforgettably, never to be thought of henceforth as not a part of the whole idea.” He contrasted these works with the songs of Purcell, which he thought, although very beautiful and expertly done, nonetheless did not fuse the music and text—the music was merely “decorative.” Thomson’s songs run the gamut of his classification. If one sets out to set words to music in a way that deliberately avoids interpreting or illustrating them, one probably sets up a situation where the music and words are separable. So the early Stein settings, the , and the may (or may not) be very beautifully and elegantly decorative, but it is difficult not to think of the music of or , or the as anything other than an inseparable part of the whole. There the music gets right inside of the words, and right inside of us.