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

7 Olga and Ezra in Paris
Olga, determined to make the music, he wrote Ezra, ‘‘as wildly strange as
she looked, tailored to her special appearance and technique. It is wild, the
fiddle of the Tziganes . . . totally new to written music . . . barbaric, but I
think Olga will like it . . . it gives her more to do and show o√ with than the
other sonatas.’’
In late summer, while Dorothy was in London to assist her mother,
Olivia Shakespear, in caring for her husband during a long illness, Ezra
introduced Olga to the land of the troubadours. No written record remains
of that summer holiday, or their itinerary, only a fading black-and-white
photograph album labeled ‘‘August 1923—Dordogne.’’ Olga was the photographer
and Ezra often the subject, appearing under gargoyles of the
cathedrals in Ussel and Ventadour and other unidentifiable French villages.
In her eighties, she reminisced about ‘‘the photos EP and I took on our
walking tour. . . . ‘I sailed never with Cadmus,’ ’’ she recalled, referring
to a line in Canto 27, ‘‘but he took me to Ventadour.’’ On the back of
one snapshot she wrote: ‘‘note how elegant a gentleman could be, walking
25 kilometers a day with a rucksack—in those days, no hitchhiking.’’
The Antheil-Rudge collaboration at Olga’s flat continued on an almost
daily schedule in the fall. Antheil praised Olga’s mastery of the violin: ‘‘I
noticed when we commenced playing a Mozart sonata . . . [she] was a
consummate violinist. . . . I have heard none with the superb lower register
of the D and G strings that was Olga’s exclusively.’’ On October 4 at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the three short Antheil sonatas that premiered
as the curtain raiser for opening night of the Ballets Suédois
became the most controversial musical event of the season. A correspondent
of the New York Herald compared the evening to the premiere of
Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps: ‘‘a riot of enormous dimensions occurred
when George Antheil . . . played several piano compositions. . . . Antheil is
a new force in music . . . of a sharper and more breath-taking order than
Stravinsky.’’ In his autobiography, Antheil recalled:
My piano was wheeled out . . . before the huge [Fernand] Léger
cubist curtain, and I commenced playing. . . . Rioting broke out
almost immediately. I remember Man Ray punching somebody in
the nose in the front row, Marcel Duchamp arguing loudly with