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

9
The Red Priest of Venice
126
1936–1939
‘‘Scraper of catgut and reviver of Vivaldi’’
Long before the Four Seasons became part of the standard repertoire,
Olga was drawn to the long-forgotten early-eighteenth-century composer
Antonio Vivaldi, not only because he composed so prolifically for her
instrument but because of his colorful personality. Red was Olga’s color,
and in midlife she tinted her dark auburn curls with henna to mimic the socalled
Red Priest of Venice.
Count Chigi addressed her as ‘‘Miss Rudge-Vivaldi’’ and adopted a
teasing tone in his letters when he wrote: ‘‘O prophetic apostle and devotee
of that Antonio . . . as undeniably a great artist as he is a womanizer,
a seducer of minors and an impenitent satyr! . . . I hope you will not be
o√ended by the ways in which I speak of your ‘beloved,’ but the truth does
not harm anyone, rather adds highlights to the image of our heroes, even
when it shows them with their flaws.’’
Ordained a priest in 1703, Vivaldi became a teacher of music at La Pietà,
a convent school for orphaned girls, and, in Ezra’s words, ‘‘ran an opera
company . . . traveling from Mantua to Vienna in company with a barber’s
daughter whom he taught to sing with great success, and with assistant
nymphs.’’ On Vivaldi’s womanizing: ‘‘The idea of celibacy is a perversion