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

279 Olga Triumphant
the Italian consul. All travel expenses were to be paid in advance; a roundtrip
excursion air ticket required her to stay for a month. Olga did not
hesitate but cabled a triumphant ‘‘Yes!’’ Hughes remarked later that Olga
—after traveling for a day and a night—was still radiant and enthusiastic,
her ‘‘translucent, perfect skin, and benevolent face, transcendent. She had
not added a pound since her youth—the perfect figure of ‘Aphrodite.’ ’’
The re-creation of the 1926 concert version of Le Testament de Villon
was performed by the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music at the
Herbst Theater March 28, with Hughes conducting. Thomas Buckner
sang the Villon role; Jan Curtis, a mezzo-soprano, ‘‘Heaulmière’’ (Ezra
had called it ‘‘the fireworks of the piece’’); John MacAllister, a bass, was
Bozo. Toyoji Tomita designed, constructed, and performed on the cornetde-dessus,
the five-foot-long medieval instrument that introduced the
opera.
The slight, white-haired woman on the front row next to the Italian
consul listened intently to the all-Pound program: Three Pieces for Solo
Violin, which Ezra had composed for her, and the Plainte pour le Mort du
Roi Richard Coeur de Lion by Gaucelm Faidit, arranged from late medieval
music, pieces that Olga had performed as a slow movement interlude in
her programs. Fiddle Music, the most performed and shortest of Pound’s
violin works (published in the Transatlantic Review in 1924) was played by
Nathan Rubin, who also premiered Al Poco Giorno, a Pound work from
Olga’s manuscript collection. ‘‘Ezra assigned pitches to the exact rhythms
of Dante’s poem,’’ she remembered.
On Easter Sunday, she joined Walter and Brigit in Cambridge. The easy
informality of the young couple delighted her: ‘‘I eat and sleep (at night) as
I have not done in years. . . . an enormous breakfast, brought by Walter,
who arranges pillows, etc. as a matter of course—no fuss, Brigit equally
easy-mannered.’’ The apple of her eye, great-grandson Michael Ezra, was
‘‘on his toes, looking at new things.’’
Back in New York at the Gotham Book Mart, she renewed her friendship
with owner Frances Stelo√, another octogenarian and legendary
figure in the literary world, whom she had met at Caresse Crosby’s Castello
di Roccasinibalda. Among Olga’s purchases was Rebecca West’s The
Meaning of Treason, first published in 1947, an account of the post–World