Grey peak of the wave,
wave, colour of grape’s pulp,
Olive grey in the near,
far, smoke grey of the rock-slide,
Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk
cast grey shadows in water
After that wonderfully interactive image as the light fails so too does the vision.
A discordant tower—it was explicitly a ‘Church tower’ when Pound drafted this passage at Sirmione—‘like a one-eyed great goose | cranes up out of the olive-grove’. Its one eye may be a clock face which tells the time and knows nothing of the process it measures; or it may be the Church’s dogma that there is only one God that makes it one-eyed. Either way, it is seen in the satiric mixed metaphor as if with double-vision. The canto closes in playful retort to monocular monotheism with the comedy of the double-natured fauns chiding Proteus, the shape-shifting sea-god, and then the once metamorphosed frogs ‘singing against the fauns | in the half-light’. Fauns and frogs, variform though they are, seem to think that theirs is the only shape.
That coda looks back to the canto’s (revised) introduction:
Hang it all, Robert Browning,
there can be but the one “Sordello”.
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.
So Shu churned in the sea.
The mock-protest encapsulates the painful lesson of his apprenticeship to Browning; while the rhetorical question would save his dignity by positing other possible Sordellos, the ‘real Sordello’ and the one he might invent. ‘Lo Sordels’, from ‘a manuscript in the Ambrosian library at Milan’, might be taken to settle the matter with a statement of fact: Sordello was from Mantua. That might satisfy the scholar-historian; and it might be as illusory as So-Shu’s trying to solidify the ocean. Are there not now as many Sordellos as there are perceivers of him; and is not Sordello compounded of all the recorded perceptions? It will be the burden of the canto that the One is manifold and that we need to be many-minded to comprehend it.
The canto, which at first sight can appear a simple succession of fragments, can now be seen to be organized as a musical composition. It has a main theme, and a counter-theme, both of them developed through a series of variations around the extended central episode. Simply stated, the theme has to do with the different modalities of seeing the sea of being and all that is in it; while the counter-theme has to do with the errors of false or one-eyed perception which can arise from and lead to possessiveness, repression, rape. In the development through the variations of the main theme there is a progression from myth, which opens the mind to what there might be in life, towards precise observation and analysis of its manifestations. The light and life-in-process of the universe, it is implied, are not occult but are evident to illuminated sense, as in the ‘Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk’.
‘Le Testament’ or Pound’s Villon: in the dark
Canto (meaning, in Italian, ‘I sing’ as well as ‘a chant or song’) signals an aspiration to compose words into music, and certainly canto II is as musical as words alone can be. Its method of composition is that of music, and so too is its way with words. In the dimension of the meanings and resonances of words and images it works as music does by accords and dissonances and progressions. In the dimension of sound it makes melodies of the tones of vowels, while the consonants, shaping the weights and durations of the syllables, help define the tempo and rhythm. Most striking to the ear is the recurrent double-beat, coming twice or even three times in many lines, and pulsing at varying intensities throughout the canto. It sets a definite overall measure, and yet each line has its own measure, so that a seemingly complete freedom for change and variation coexists with that constant though shifting pulse, rather as in an Indian raga.
Pound had been working intensively on the music in words in the months before completing that canto. He had brought with him to Paris some preliminary draft settings of Villon’s poetry, and in April of 1921 he resumed work on composing his opera, Le Testament. ‘Will probably send you my first scrawls sprawls, for criticism in a few days,’ he wrote to Agnes Bedford on 5 May. By the 16th he had ‘done 116 pages of something that looks, at 1st glance, like an orchestral score’. But he was having to ask elementary questions. ‘Cello is I believe written in same clef as the troubadour stuff in original mss.??? No.? That clef is only half tone lower than mod. treble??’ And again, ‘have a vague suspicion that cello ought to be about three notes lower than voice to sustain it, and that bass viol ought to be about an octave below…possibly it should be two octaves, save that I want to use that cellarage for definite purposes’.
He needed Agnes Bedford’s trained musicianship because he didn’t know how to write down music as it was then written; but at the same time the music he had in his head was not that of a modern trained musician and he did not want it to sound as if it were. It was more nearly related to the modes of Arab and of Provençal and medieval music than to Satie or Stravinsky. ‘My ignorance is deeper than Erebus, and really my chief hope,’ he told Bedford, meaning that it would leave him free to stick to his own principles. Foremost among those was to admit nothing ‘that interferes with the words, or with the utmost possible clarity of impact of words on audience’. Hence no ‘chord-harmony’, no orchestration of several instruments to build up and blur a note with their ‘very different overtones’, and no developed ‘instrumental counterpoint’. He meant to constrain his singers to sing the music in the words, and to use the instruments of his orchestra very sparingly just to support and enforce that music. His problem would be to get his performers to understand that he was not ‘setting words to music | BUT | setting music to words’, and that ‘the music is simply an emphasis on the meaning and shape of Villon’s words’. Another thing, though he called Le Testament an opera he did not want it sung by voices developed to sing nineteenth-century Grand Opera; he wanted ‘tough, open-air singing’, or that of a music hall or cabaret singer such as Yvette Guilbert, singing that would concentrate not so much on the notes as on the sound and rhythm of the words. Getting across the ‘emotive contents’, he would call that, or, alternatively, ‘Inducing emotional correlations’.
In July, on the 10th, Dorothy who was with her parents in London, asked, ‘What the devil does this mean “Op. I revision is at p. 67” in your letter?’ Pound replied on the 14th that it was ‘a musical work now at p. 119’. Then Agnes Bedford was over in Paris ‘for a few days’, and on the 23rd Pound was wondering whether she would ‘have time to work on the opera’. (In his next letter he mentioned that he had ‘succeeded in dancing the tango on the sabath’ for the first time in his life, ‘at Bullier—with that Herald reporteress whom I met at Miss Beaches’.) Bedford probably had no choice in the matter of the opera, and a few days later they were ‘Chewing into op. mostly 4–6 hours per day’, with ‘orchestral climax and final 6 part song to tackle’. ‘Ezra sang and beat out the rhythm’, Bedford later recalled, ‘and also picked out the tunes on [Natalie Barney’s] piano while he sang them.’ She particularly remembered how he ‘sang each of the parts of the concluding canon separately, and it all fitted together’—‘A miracle,’ she thought. On 6 August they were still at work, now ‘up to as much as 8 and 9 hrs per diem’, and Pound was hoping that ‘A.B. may hang on for another week’. By the 10th, though, he was able to tell Natalie Barney that he had ‘got through worst of my struggle’ and was ‘eternally grateful for the piano’. The same day he wrote to Dorothy that he had devised ‘nice contrapuntal hurdy gurdy of trombone, cello, bassoon, for “Pere Noé” [the drunkards’ song], running against jazz’. Finally, on 2 November 1921, he wrote to Bedford that the opera was finished.
In fact it was only the first, Pound–Bedford version, that had been completed. A second, Pound–Antheil version, was to follow in 1923. 2 Pound met Antheil, then a very young musical prodigy, in mid-1923 and was delighted to secure his approval of his orchestration of the opera. ‘I naturally think him a genius,’
he wrote to his parents between jest and earnest, ‘Nobody but a genius COULD approve of my orchestration.’ 3 That autumn, in two months up to ‘11 o’clock Dec. 31’, he had Antheil go over the work, under his direction, re-noting ‘it all with highly fractional notation == bars all sorts of lengths from 1/8 to 17/32—7/16 etc.’ Antheil ‘made no attempt to understand the words’, Pound later told Bedford, ‘Simply took down the stuff as [I] hummed it.’
Robert Hughes observed that ‘The most salient feature’ of the Pound–Antheil version was ‘its use of micro-rhythms’ and ‘fractional metrics’—these were even more elaborate and more irregular than in Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps (1913) and L’Histoire du soldat (1918). For example, these are the measures in bars 74–86 of the ballade of the old woman regretting the time when she was young and beautiful:
Pound’s orchestration was similarly fractional, calling for the vocal line to be supported (‘generally at the interval of the unison or octave’) after this fashion: in bars 74 and 75 by flute, oboe, bassoon, and horn; in 76 by bassoon and tambour (each a single note); by cello and contrabasse in 77; in 78 (‘Auquel’) by oboe, bassoon, and drum; at 79 it is oboe, drum, cello, and contrabasse; at 80 and 81 just cello and contrabasse; 82–5 (‘A qui’) have solo flute accompaniment; in 86 the cello plays a single note. Hughes found that this fragmenting of the vocal line among a group of instruments, ‘a klangfarbenmelodie technique similar in concept to Webern’s’—though evidently arrived at quite independently by Pound—is ‘the dominant instrumental concept’ of the opera as a whole.
Pound was deploying his varied musical resources 4 to give emphasis to the specific shape, tone, time, and resonance of each scrupulously assayed phrase and word and syllable. In bars 74–86 past feelings are revived one upon another: a yielding to the memory of having once really loved, a simple statement of how much she had loved, a softening regret (or is it remorse?) that she also did for her man. Through the following forty bars (eleven lines of the verse) all the distinct feelings making up the complex of a helpless love for a heartless pimp are rendered with immediacy and intensity: a core of inner calm from knowing she would have done anything for him, even though he cared only for what she brought him; the pain of having abased herself to his abuse; and the self-disgust, the sense of profound self-betrayal, at having made love not with but for him with lecherous gluttons. All this is in the words, but it is there as music is in the written score. It is only in the performance of the music, in the singer’s interpretation of it, that we hear the tender and sardonic and self-lacerating overtones and undertones of the withered whore’s memories and are moved to responsive insight.
There is no sunlight in this work, and no glimpse of a sunlit world timeless in its time. There is not a single image to give confidence in the life-force. Time here is irresistibly destructive, nothing but a passing away of life’s energies and loves and a bringing on of physical decay and death. A song celebrating the vine associates it not with Dionysos but with Noah, acclaiming him as the first to plant a vineyard. The revelling singers would have known that in Genesis 9 he next drinks of the wine and falls into a drunken stupor, as they are doing. They then invoke Lot who in his drunkenness mated with his own daughters. Before their counter-rhythmic, dissonant clamour, which dies away into mere incoherence, there has been much articulate rage and regret, grief and cynical realism, disillusion and horror, the full gamut of lacerating emotions from bleak disappointment with life through memory’s torments to the turning in despair to the vanities of church, brothel, and tavern. The only resolution, if that is what it is, comes in the final concord of the several voices singing in harmony of their dissolution on the gibbet.
This final chorale is at once ruthlessly realistic and out of this world. The hung corpses ask for pity from their fellow beings and mercy from God; but the burden of their singing is of how their flesh has rotted and been pecked away by magpies and crows, of how the rain has scoured and cleansed them and the sun dried out and blackened them, and now they are simply bones swinging in the wind. ‘Pray God absolve us all’ is their refrain, meaning ‘forgive us our sins’. But this is not the terrified crying of Villon’s mother imagining the pains of hell. These voices are beyond fear and terror, almost beyond expectation of either heaven or hell, though their voices rise to that plea for absolution. The most profound conviction in their harmonies is of the solemn reality of physical dissolution, which they accept as their state with simple humility, and in that is their purgation and their peace. The effect is of a poignantly compassionate and humane catharsis.
Pound’s Villon, like his Rihaku, his Propertius, and his Mauberley, is a register of the mental and moral condition of his time. His specific virtù, to Pound’s mind, was that, along with having ‘neither optimism nor breadth of vision’, he had no illusions and was ‘able to realize his condition, to see it objectively’. This is the Villon who somehow distilled into his occasional ballades an impersonal and universal vision of his life ‘in this bordello of a world where we belong’ (En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat), while otherwise filling out his long last will and testament with a very personal and mordant settling of old scores and with complaints of his poverty and many misfortunes. Pound was not interested in his personal life and character, but only in bringing out the specific vibrations and resonances of his virtù.
What further characterized Villon for Pound was that, unlike Dante, he ‘lacked energy to clamber out’ of his hell on earth, his inferno terrestre. This was represented, in the dramatic frame which Pound sketched in 1959 for the second BBC radio production, by Villon’s not moving as his friends urge him to flee the scene to escape imminent arrest. In the opera itself the lack of energy or will to rise above the condition of the gutter is all pervasive, and emerges as the dominant and unifying concept.
Immobility and depersonalization are the main features of Pound’s notes for a minimalist staging, one that anticipates late Beckett. The scene, according to his notes, is ‘Church—St Julien les Pauvres | bordello built in between buttresses | right, The Prison | left, tavern with two very poor tables’. The principal soloists were to have the upper half of their faces masked, apart from La Beauté (Rose in the 1971 score), or else to have make-up ‘stylized to the utmost’. The notes insist on ‘The general immobility of most of the play’, and especially of Villon who, stage centre, should be ‘completely immobile from start to finish’ with ‘eye fixed on window of La Beauté, in bordello’. Beauté should have ‘no change of expression save in eyes. Maximum of non-attention and observation’. La Heaulmière, she who was once the beautiful armouress or helm-maker, ‘has a nervous swinging of the arms—from left to right, right to left’, but only while she sings. Villon’s mother, while she sings, has ‘a certain jerkiness’. The brothel-keeper—‘Pornoboskos’ in Pound’s notes—‘oscillates but does not move, save for jerking thumb over shoulder’, as he sings his drunken aria about his whore, Fat Margot, at the end of which he passes out. Only two minor soloists have some moves: the Priest crosses from church to brothel as he sings a snatch of a carpe diem; the Gallant ‘enters bordello, Beauté closes the window…[he] staggers out stabbed, sings Je renaye amours, crashes left, back of stage’. In the ‘Père Noé’ drunken chorus, however, there is, in absolute contrast with the rest of the work, a ‘general hurley burley…maximum confusion’. In the silence following that, ‘back drop is raised showing Les Pendus’—whose sextet, ‘Frères Humains’, then comes from the (presumably now unlighted) soloists, male and female, who have not moved. Thus the staging, with the notable exception of the drunken chorus, at once dramatizes the fixed state of Villon and his world, and does nothing to distract from the action of the words being sung into the minds of the audience. The drama is all in the mind’s ear.
Greek drama has been proposed as a model for Pound’s Le Testament, also the Japanese Noh, the latter especially because it is essentially music-drama. A nearer model, and one more appropriate to Villon’s fifteenth
century, would be the medieval morality play such as Everyman. But then Pound’s is a morality without the wicked tempters and the guardian angels. It presents simply the doomed life of a world without the grace of enlightenment, and with no way out except through the absolution of death. ‘Villon’, Pound wrote in 1934, ‘the first voice of a man broken by bad economics’,
represents also the end of a tradition, the end of the mediaeval dream, the end of a whole body of knowledge, fine, subtle, that had run from Arnaut to Guido Cavalcanti
This ‘very complicated structure of knowledge and perception, the paradise of the human mind under enlightenment’, had been ‘hammered out’ of Villon, Pound implied, not by his sins, but by the decadence of the Church and by the ‘bad economics’ which placed no value on his genius and so drove him to a life of poverty and crime and dissoluteness. He was ‘The hardest, the most authentic, the most absolute poet of [his] France’, of a France which had ‘lost the increment of intelligence’. Le Testament presents, as does Dante’s Inferno, the hell of those who have lost ‘the paradise of the human mind’.
A new theory of harmony
Composing his Testament was one thing, and getting a hearing for it quite another. ‘It will be twenty years before they will stand it’, Antheil said to Pound, but, as it turned out, it would be nearly fifty years before there was a performance in which the music sounded as they had written it. The forever changing, unpredictable, micro-rhythms presented difficulties exceeding even Stravinsky’s measures, and performers in the 1920s and 1930s found them simply unplayable. Besides, Pound had no standing among professional musicians and their patrons in Paris, and had to make do with small resources and scarce opportunities.
Ezra Pound: Poet Page 4
