by Margaret Fisher
Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound audio CD liner notes
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II A brief history of the operas--Excerpt
copyright 2003 Margaret Fisher
Ezra Pound’s two operas, Le... more
II A brief history of the operas--Excerpt
copyright 2003 Margaret Fisher
Ezra Pound’s two operas, Le Testament (1920–1921; rev. 1923, 1926, 1931, 1933–1934) and Cavalcanti (1931-1933), approach their subjects with such different structures and contrasting music that these works are from all appearances entirely separate, each with its unique dramatic impulses and concerns, as unrelated as Villon’s Parisian nights to Cavalcanti’s Tuscan days. Pound composed the two operas under very different circumstances as well, making the most of his limited training by working with professional musicians to score the first opera, then scaling the degree of difficulty of the second opera to a level of technical competence he was confident he could achieve on his own. He also wove the discoveries he made in one poet’s work back into the fabric of the other. For example, Pound’s 1912 translations of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300) prompted his first statements on the role of rhythm in music; his musical settings of the poetry of François Villon (1431-?) provided him a laboratory in which to experiment with rhythm. While setting Villon, he discovered the melodic cell and specific uses for the interval of the octave. These discoveries became the structural building blocks for his opera Cavalcanti.
Pound’s project began with a modest observation in 1919 that in two poems by Villon, and a sonnet by Cavalcanti, the music was already made by the words. Composition of Le Testament began in earnest at the end of 1920 with the help of London concert pianist and vocal coach Agnes Bedford. They finished working in Paris the summer of 1921, turning out a one-act opera for ten soloists, large chorus, and seventeen instrumentalists. Pound was responsible for the work’s artistic and structural shape, its rhythmic emphasis, unusual instrumentation and spare design for the orchestration; Bedford offered technical advice and notated the work in score form.
Late in 1923 Pound engaged the American composer and pianist George Antheil to recalculate the metrical divisions of the opera in “fractional notation,” the time signatures ranging from 1/8 to 25/32, to account for all possible syllabic durations and patterns of sounds in Villon’s words. Antheil had entered Paris in June that year with a reputation as a sensational concert pianist and avant-garde composer. He came in awe of Stravinsky and also to challenge him. Antheil would be the new champion of TIME as the sole and true canvas of music. The rhythmic drive of his Mechanisms, Sonata Sauvage, and Airplane Sonata caused pandemonium at his October 4th Paris debut. To a press voracious for the latest and biggest scandal, Antheil was the new futurist darling. To Marcel Duchamp, Eric Satie and Man Ray, he was the instant hero of their dada world. A month later Antheil premiered two new violin sonatas written for the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Ezra Pound had requested the sonatas; they were the first of three commissions he arranged to keep Antheil employed in Paris. The second commission to be completed was the re-scoring of the Villon opera.
On the last day of that year Antheil signed off as editor of Pound’s new Le Testament, only to pick it up again the next day to fire this salvo to prospective performers:
“This opera is made out of an entirely new musical technic, a technic, for certain, made of sheer music which upholds its line through inevitable rhythmic locks and new grips...a technic heretofore unknown, owing to the stupidity of the formal musical architects still busy with organizing square bricks in wornout and formal patterns,...a powerful technic that grips musical phrases like the mouths of great poets grip words... [The opera] is written as it sounds! Please do not embarrass us by suddenly developing intelligence.”
Antheil then turned to finish the third commission, a film score for Fernand Léger titled Ballet Mécanique. It would be the final stunning composition of an unrelenting push into new musical territory, unleashed onto Paris as a storm, “streamlined, glistening, cold, often as ‘musically silent’ as interplanetary space, and also often as hot as an electric furnace, but always attempting at least to operate on new principles of construction…” Antheil wrote that he “had possibly gone too far in this matter of reaching out for purely new form” and he beat “a hasty retreat from … the premature fame…” (from Antheil’s autobiography, Bad Boy of Music).
He had certainly let Pound go too far with rhythmic invention. Though wedged among some of the century’s most extraordinary experiments in rhythm and time, Antheil’s transcription of Pound’s rhythms for Le Testament received little comment because the music was unplayable in the 1920s and 30s. Performers were simply unequipped to prepare such music, the difficulties of which exceeded even Stravinsky’s meters. It would be almost 50 years before the 1923 Pound/Antheil score would sound as written!
The audio cd is available through Other Minds Festival, San Francisco: <http://www.otherminds.org/cgi-bin/shop.pl/page=Poundcd.html/SID=1262992699.22958/buy=1>;
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