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

66 A Marriage That Didn’t Happen
On the twenty-sixth, Olga was at the Hotel d’Ingleterre in Rome,
preparing for a concert on May 7 with Alfredo Casella at the Sala Sgambati.
At the last minute, Ezra sent regrets from Rapallo. His comments
about her publicity photo reveal the character of both correspondents:
‘‘An her lookin’ so bew-yewteeful, to say nothing of her splendid new
clothing with quattrocento finish . . . [yet] so filled with inexpungable
sorrows, and with such a distinguished melancholy, just as always when
she is pu≈kly convinced that it is all his fault, which he declines to
believe.’’ The Paris Tribune critic praised Olga’s performance and the
program, which included contemporary compositions by Erik Satie and
Maurice Ravel, Pound’s Hommage à Froissart, the new Pizzetti sonata, and
Fritz Kreisler’s arrangement of Danse Espagnole by Enrique Granados.
Ezra joined Olga in Paris June 19 for an event that achieved considerable
notoriety, the premiere of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, conducted
by Vladimir Golschmann, with an orchestra of eighty-five musicians—eight
grand pianos, electric bells, a battery of percussionists, and
two airplane propellers. Under the banner headline, ‘‘George Antheil’s
Ballet Stirs Huge Audience to Plaudits and Catcalls,’’ the Tribune reported:
‘‘The carefully upholstered Théâtre des Champs Elysées vibrated to
strange and beautiful sounds yesterday afternoon. . . . [Antheil] was
greeted with an applause so uproarious to leave no doubt in his mind that
his tonal seed had not fallen upon stoney ground. . . . The audience was
divided into two belligerent and opposing camps. . . . ‘Silence, imbéciles,’
Ezra Pound shouted, with the French inflection, although the audience
was anything but French.’’ As Sylvia Beach recalled: ‘‘The music was
drowned out by yells from all over the house. . . . You saw people punching
each other in the face, you heard the yelling, but you didn’t hear a note
of the Ballet mécanique.’’ Eventually the airplane propellers drowned out
the catcalls and raised a breeze that—as artist Stuart Gilbert remembered
—blew the wig o√ the head of a man sitting next to him.
Not to be upstaged, Pound premiered his avant-garde opera Le Testament
de Villon on June 29, 1926, in the old Salle Pleyel on the rue Roche-
Chouart, former venue of Chopin and Liszt. The large hall resembling a
drawing room with seats in rows facing each other around a square was
filled with some three hundred guests, near capacity, a who’s who of the