Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

117 Rare and Unforgettable Concerts
Olga had hidden at the bottom of the mulepath: ‘‘That’s what all of the
peasant women in the hills do when they go to town,’’ Olga said, slinging
the violin case over her shoulder so that both hands were free to carry
satin shoes and music in one hand and hitch up the long skirt of her
evening gown with the other.
When they sat down to rest on a narrow bench halfway up, near the
landmark eucalyptus, Olga said: ‘‘I always have to sit down here. Gee, I’m
tired sometimes.’’ She reminisced about Paris, how beautiful her apartment
had been, and added as an afterthought, ‘‘It’s awful these nights
when it rains, the violin is so sensitive.’’ Only this, Mary commented, after
endless practicing, the long walk down to the hall, the climb back up in the
dark. ‘‘I knew exactly what Babbo meant when he said, ‘The real artist in
the family is your mother.’ ’’
That winter was unseasonably cold in Rapallo, with a great deal of
snow. In November, Olga and Münch appeared at the Istituto Fascista di
Cultura in Genoa, a program featuring fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
compositions from the Chilesotti collection, Bach, Mozart, and Debussy
sonatas, and as an encore two movements of Purcell’s ‘‘Golden’’ Sonata.
Olga, spending another white Christmas with the Richardses in Hook
Heath, considered her life there ‘‘pretty ghastly after Sant’Ambrogio . . .
incredibly boring . . . if she didn’t get some oxygen pumped in from
outside, she will su√ocate.’’ She was pulling herself together to enjoy ‘‘an
English fambly Xmas . . . more fuss and yatter about the getting ready of
houses than is conceivable. . . . they are like dogs turning round and round
before they lie down—then they don’t!’’ The old couple had tactfully invited
‘‘a Mrs. Hanys and a Miss Stella Fife for some mild quartette playing,
with interruptions from grandma for ‘little Tony’ to turn the pages.’’
Ezra admitted ‘‘feeling very solitary and Dickensian.’’ He enclosed a
Christmas card forwarded from Frau Marcher with a message from Leoncina.
Their gift of a new coat ‘‘arrived in time and pleases.’’ He asked Olga
to search in London for ‘‘the spare parts of [the] William Young,’’ a
sixteenth-century composer he wanted to present at the Rapallo concerts.
These works—written five years before the birth of Purcell by the court
musician to Charles II—were the first published English sonatas for the
violin, edited by Gillies Whittaker, head of the Scottish Academy of Music.