VIRGIL THOMSON
557
score and alllhal, but Gertrude just liked being put
to
music. I don't
think there's any music in Eliot. There was a bit in Pound; he
actually wrote an opera on a text of Villon in old French, which he
knew quite well.
Trilling:
And who did the music?
Thomson:
Pound.
Trilling:
He knew music enough to write an opera?
Thomson:
He could prosidize the vocal line and write it down, then he
would add a little bit of counterpoint or a bass note here and there to
make it a little fuller. He was not really trained in harmony, but he
knew how to write down a prosidized vocal line. That he would do
himself. So he took the text-with some cutting-of the
Testament
and made an opera out of it. I heard it. He had very good singers. It's
not musicians' music, but it may very well be the best poets' music
since Campion.
Trilling:
In the days when there was so much Communist domination
of the musical and intellectual community, was there actually a great
deal of stress upon music as an instrument of propaganda, just as
there had to be socialist realism in painting? You know Prokofiev's
War and Peace,
and the way it gets progressively worse as the opera
goes on, and becomes more and more propagandistic.
Thomson:
Well, he may have been getting ill too, because his illness
was a progressive one, it was not an instantaneous stroke. I don't
know whether you saw a book that was written by John Houseman,
who produced plays for the Federal Theater and later the Mercury
Theater, all during the thirties. He was very active. He mentions
there what I knew perfectly well at the time, that you really couldn't
do anything in the theater in New York without asking a certain
Commissar in charge of intellectual matters. I think his name was
O'Neill though I'm not sure about that; but the name's in the book,
and Houseman will tell you all about him. He was a sort of
eminence grise
who could stop things. He could pull the union
workers off the show if he didn't find it acceptable ideologically.
Trilling:
Did you yourself have much to do with the Mercury Theater?
Thomson:
Nothing at all. I left the Association before they formed
that. I was with John Houseman and Orson Welles when we started
the first of all the Federal Theaters, which was the Negro one in
Harlem, the Lafayette.
Trilling:
This is probably
lese majeste,
but I've always thought that
Citizen Kane
was one of the most overestimated things that was ever
done.
