For fourteen crucial years in the middle of the twentieth century, Virgil Thompson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music from his vantage as the nationally syndicated music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thompson communicated its joys and complexities to a wide readership in a clear and winning style, and his daily reviews and Sunday columns set a high water-mark in American cultural journalism. With this volume Thompson's writings are available for the first time in decades.