SOURCE: “Paris between the Wars,” in The Paris Review, Vol. 36, No. 130, Spring, 1994, pp. 283-303.

In the following essay, edited by Thomas Dilworth, the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer reminisces about his relationships with Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and other figures he met in the literary and artistic circles of Paris.

Virgil Thomson visited Paris in 1921 and lived there from October 1925 to August 1940. It was during his long stay in Paris that he became an important American composer. He is considered the first serious modern composer to set English to music without distorting its natural rhythms and inflections. In the 1930s Thomson helped to found the neo-romantic movement in music and painting centered in Paris. In 1928, in collaboration with Gertrude Stein, he wrote his first opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which was produced in 1934. He went on to compose settings for several of Stein's texts and a second opera, The...