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

54 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
numbers on the program,’’ another critic observed, ‘‘if one understands
the architecture of ‘horizontal’ music, splendid specimens of which are
even found in the works of one J.S. Bach.’’
Pound elaborated his theory of horizontal music in an essay, later
published in Paris by William Bird and the Three Mountains Press as
George Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Technical matters were of
great importance to Olga, who noted ‘‘what she doesn’t understand or
disagrees with’’ in a twelve-page handwritten letter:
She doesn’t honestly think it [The Treatise] his chef d’oeuvre,
or . . . likely to be understood by people . . . interested in opera. . . .
I beg of him once more to consider the question of notation from
the performer’s point of view. . . . If, before criticizing singers, he
would . . . learn to sing a simple rhythm from notes, he would find
out why the notation of the George mss. is impossible to use . . . if
he would stop confusing time length and accent! It is perfectly well
known that a player can play in strict time and be dull and
worse . . . without the right accents! . . . the troubadours found the
matter easy enough. . . . My dear caro, I should think a bar lasting
1/4 or 1/5 of a second remarkably quick—if your watch has a
second hand, try it!
Olga was not the only trained musician to take exception to Ezra’s
Treatise. Her lifelong friend the pianist Kathleen Richards wrote from
London: ‘‘I disagree with practically everything therein, and think the
Treatise the maddest thing ever penned.’’
In October 1924, Pound and Dorothy left Paris with the intention of
making their permanent home in the milder climate of Rapallo. Olga was
in Venice at the Conservatorio di Benedetto Marcello. She took a room at
the Casa Friollo, a pensione on the Zattere, and asked Ezra to join her. He
refused, but sent a nostalgic letter with a hand-drawn map of the area near
San Trovaso where he had lived in the summer of 1908 and wrote his first
published book of poems, A Lume Spento: ‘‘Xe una bbrrrava ragazza
[She’s a clever girl]. All right, she go out and look at Venezia. It will