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

118 Rare and Unforgettable Concerts
Olga had been shopping for a new ‘‘fiddle,’’ and Ezra o√ered twentyfive
hundred lire ‘‘lying there in the bank, doing no particular good. . . . It
is all lire she has paid back to him at one time or another.’’
Olga: ‘‘It [is] all very noble of Him and his 2,500, but she has already
planted the Leoncina on Him and all sorts of expenses.’’
Ezra: ‘‘All he thinks is that she git a good one. What is a few quid one
way or the other. . . . As soon as she gets [the] fiddle / he announces
matinee with 3 Wm / Young fer 2 fiddles.’’
Olga saved an invoice dated February 20, 1934, from William Hill &
Sons, Makers & Sellers of Violins & Bows on New Bond Street, ‘‘o≈cial
violin maker to His Majesty the King of England, the King of Italy and
the Queen of Holland.’’ It was the finest violin she would own in her lifetime,
No. 295 in the style of ‘‘Le Messie’’ Stradivarius. The purchase
price of some fifty pounds was a considerable sum in the Depression year
of 1934.
She returned to Rapallo for the March 13 concert to play the works of
William Young on the new violin. An enthusiastic letter from Lindy
Shaw-Paige cheered her on: ‘‘Awfully pleased about your concerts at
Rapallo. As for EP, what a Man!!! I love people who are a law unto
themselves.’’
Early April was Music Festival Week in Florence, and Olga met there
the acclaimed Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia, who would soon join
Maestro Casella and Ildebrando Pizzetti at the Accademia. Her friends
from Venice, Giorgio and Alice Levi, were also in Florence, but Count
Chigi, who disliked travel, received the delegates in Siena. The Count was
‘‘very down,’’ Olga said, because his mother had died a month before.
She returned to Rapallo to play a series of Mozart sonatas—composed
in 1778, 1781, 1784, and 1787, at important stages of the boy genius’s
development—accompanied by Borgatti. The audience was ‘‘deelighted
wi√ [the] concert, so her violin wuzn’t wasted.’’
Olga commenced another diary that summer, providing a brief picture
of her life with the poet, beginning with a concert in Chiavari on June 20,
after Dorothy’s departure for England.
‘‘This year [I] am not allowed in the [via Marsala] flat, [we] dine at the
Albergo Rapallo and then up here [Sant’Ambrogio], at 3 or 4:30 . . . not