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

8 Olga and Ezra in Paris
somebody in the second. . . . By this time, people in the galleries
were pulling up the seats and dropping them down into the
orchestra; the police entered and arrested the Surrealists who,
liking the music, were punching everybody who objected. . . . Paris
hadn’t had such a good time since the premiere of . . . Sacre du
Printemps.
The riot was used later as a film sequence in L’Inhumaine, starring Georgette
Leblanc.
Pound was then undertaking a transcription of a twelfth-century air by
Gaucelm Faidet that he had discovered in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in
Milan, ‘‘Plainte pour la mort du Richard Coeur de Lion,’’ and composing
an original work, Sujet pour Violon, for Olga’s concert on December 11 at
the ancien Salle du Conservatoire. One critic of that concert praised the
young violinist as possessing ‘‘a very pretty sonority bidding fair to develop
into virtuosity. . . . We admire this young artist for having enough
courage to sacrifice on the altars of Mr. Antheil’s conceited art, personal
honors which otherwise might have been hers. Both her enterprise and her
playing merit commendation.’’ Pound’s pieces won their share of applause:
‘‘to those who like to push their musical researches into that kind of
thing [they] were extremely interesting.’’
But the critics’ focus in the December concert was on the controversial
Antheil sonatas for violin and piano. The Paris Tribune: ‘‘Can this really be
denoted music? . . . No, it is a kind of primitive melopoeia . . . like those
bizarre tambourine accompaniments of Arab or Moroccan musicians when
in their drinking dens and cafés.’’ Mozart’s Concerto in A Major was called
a ‘‘a heaven-sent beneficent repose for the ears’’ by one critic, while
another dissented: ‘‘In his own music, Mr. Antheil may try to ‘get away’
with whatever he wants to, but he really should beware of composers so
refined and subtle as Mozart.’’
Ezra advised Olga to ‘‘practice the Mozart and Bach for a couple of days
by themselves. I mean don’t play the Antheil at all, but concentrate on
B[eethoven] and M[ozart], so as to eeeliminate the e√ects of modern
music.’’
In late December, Ezra checked into the American Hospital in Neuilly