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

125 Rare and Unforgettable Concerts
sekkertary, and that is Japan . . . no reason he shdn’t have that damn
purrfessorship fer a year, it was o√ered to ole Uncle William [W. B. Yeats].
No job & no glory, but if one went to tidy up [the] rest of the [Ernest]
Fenollosa [collection] . . . there would be a excuse . . . she make a
mental note.’’
‘‘She all for going to Japan,’’ was Olga’s answer, no doubt aware that it
was an impossible dream. Ezra never mentioned the subject again.
The Halcott Glovers invited Olga to join them in Cambridge. After
learning of her relationship with Pound, Etta had written from their temporary
quarters in Kampala, Uganda: ‘‘We often speak of you, my dear,
and are refreshed that out of this increasingly depressing world of pettyminded
nitwits there’s one, at any rate, who has had the courage and
generosity to face life and wrest from it all that seemed most worth
having, whatever the cost.’’ They o√ered a house with sta√ at the university
while Hal was working on a novel, and Olga eagerly accepted their invitation.
‘‘It will give me a chance to look up the Vivaldi mss. in the Fitzwilliam
[Library],’’ she wrote Pound.
Among the rare treasures Olga discovered at Cambridge were the
original manuscript of Vivaldi’s Concerto no. 7 in A Major for Violin (with
the name Fitzwilliam and date 1706 inscribed on the title page), and a
large-scale masterpiece, Juditha Triumphans, about the biblical heroine
Judith who beheads the Assyrian general Holofornes. ‘‘A sacred military
oratorio’’ with Latin text originally written for the pupils of the Pietà
Seminary in Venice, Juditha would have its modern premiere, the first
performance in more than two hundred years, at the Accademia Chigiana.