Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  I won’t attempt to defend my unawareness of monetary problems or my insistent refusal to discuss them in relationship to the College. I do want you to know, however, how badly I felt about the Kaltenborn speech. Most of the people present seemed to think that his remarks were very much in order and that a Fascist such as you should be put in your place. I feel quite the contrary, however. It seems to me that Kaltenborn delighted in making you uncomfortable. There wasn’t any reason, in my judgment, for his being so vigorous and unrestrained. I’m not sure I agree that your heckling was in good taste, but on the other hand I can understand the impulse which fathered them. Throughout my sympathies were with you when they weren’t with me. Since I was the chairman of the meeting obviously I didn’t want a riot.

  Pound wrote back, ‘git over the idea that I was in any way uncomfortable. I was disgusted at the twaddle’—indeed he had felt anger ‘without which nothing gets started’, and it ‘Wd/ have been pusillanimous to let his twaddle pass unchallenged’. He added—possibly as a retort to Cowley’s having remarked, ‘obviously, the experience of the alumni lunch still rankles’—‘not interested in my feelings, interested in AGENDA / feelings. mere voltometers. useful if used as such.’

  Cowley had closed his letter by gracefully returning to what the Kaltenborn fracas had overshadowed, the conferring of the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters upon ‘a great son of the College’. That after all, at least from the College’s point of view, had been the purpose of his ‘visit to the Hill’. At the dignified academic ritual in the College Chapel this citation, a judicious and sympathetic summing up, had been read by the Dean:

  Ezra Pound: Native of Idaho, graduate of Hamilton College in the Class of 1905, poet, critic, and prose writer of great distinction. Since completing your college career you have had a life full of significance in the arts. You have found that you could work more happily in Europe than in America and so have lived most of the past thirty years an expatriate making your home in England, France and Italy, but your writings are known wherever English is read. Your feet have trodden paths, however, where the great reading public could give you few followers—into Provençal and Italian poetry, into Anglo-Saxon and Chinese. From all these excursions you have brought back treasure. Your translations from the Chinese have, for example, led one of the most gifted of contemporary poets to call you the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. Your Alma Mater, however, is an old lady who has not always understood where you have been going, but she has watched you with interest and pride if not always with understanding. The larger public has also been at times amazed at your political and economic as well as your artistic credo, and you have retaliated by making yourself—not unintentionally perhaps—their gadfly. Your range of interests is immense, and whether or not your theories of society survive, your name is permanently linked with the development of English poetry in the twentieth century. Your reputation is international, you have guided many poets into new paths, you have pointed new directions, and the historian of the future in tracing the development of your growing mind will inevitably, we are happy to think, be led to Hamilton and to the influence of your college teachers. You have ever been a generous champion of younger writers as well as of artists in other fields, and for this fine and rare human quality and for your own achievements in poetry and prose, we honor you.

  The colours of the doctoral hood which the President then placed over Pound’s head were buff and blue, in commemoration, it is said, of the colours of the uniform of the army of the American Revolution.

  But the revolution had been betrayed—was being betrayed right then, it had seemed to Pound, in Washington, in New York, at Yale and Harvard and Hamilton. Even if he stood alone, perhaps all the more because he felt that he stood alone, he would not give up his fight for the revolutionary democratic idea. He would deploy such weapons as he had, words in print, words on the air, words addressed from Italy to America out of the coming war.

  APPENDICES

  A. Outline of Pound’s Le Testament or Villon

  The action is continuous—the fourteen numbers 1 are sung through in a single act which lasts about fifty minutes in Western Opera Theater’s 1971 recording—but one can make out a clearly structured progression, an arc through the life of Villon’s world to its end. (These notes, except for arias 9 and 10, are based primarily on the performance edition of the Pound/Antheil score prepared by Robert Hughes, and on the 1971 recording—see item 11 in Appendix B.)

  I Meditations on death (arias 1–3 = Villon’s Le Testament, ll. 313–56; 976–89)

  (1) Villon begins, ‘meditative, almost sotto voce’ (direction in score), ‘Et mourut Paris’ (‘And Paris died, and Helen’), and goes on to think, with stark realism sung dispassionately, how death racks and tortures the body;

  (2) Villon continues, ‘Dictes moy’, ‘Tell me…Where are the snows of yesteryear?’, thinking now, in a ‘voice reflective and elegiac’, that death carries all away, the beautiful, the wise, the strong, and even the Sovereign Virgin could not save Jeanne d’Arc; his voice rises at the close to an emphatic, unanswerable demand, ‘Mais où sont les neiges d’an.tan ’; ‘The bite is in the rhythm’, Pound insisted, ‘Not to be got by sobstuff or tears in voice’ (EP to Harding, the BBC producer, 27 October 1931, CPMEP 54);

  (3) Ythier, his friend, sings ‘Mort, j’appelle de ta rigueur’, a conventional rondeau which Villon wrote at his request—the lover complains that because death has taken his love away he too must die; sobstuff to which Pound adds an ironic and yet touching echo from La Beauté at her window;

  II Old age, regrets for times past (arias 4, 5 = ll. 169–84; 453–532)

  (4) Villon’s regrets are not for lost love, rather for his lost youth—‘Je plains le temps de ma jeunesse’—and his complaint is of his present decayed condition; sung dispassionately; effectively a prelude to

  (5) La Heaulmière’s great aria, ‘Ha, vieillesse felonne et fière’, a first climax in the work: a powerful, passionate, and sustained raging against the decay of the body; unsparing in its realism, ranging from wild outrage to gentle and tender moments, and wonderfully expressive of a great range of emotion—‘simple, tragique, implorant, pompeux, presque parlé, douloureux, violent, scandé, déchirant, intense, snarl, aspro, dolce, doux, triste, elegiac, resigné lent’ (from Pound’s 1926 markings, EPRO 118); altogether a heartbreaking evocation of the irredeemable loss of all she has lived for—as moving as any spirit in Dante’s Inferno;

  III The way we live now [i] (arias 6, 7 = ll. 942–9; 533–60)

  (6) The Gallant sings ‘Faulse beauté’, foreseeing that the false beauty he pursues will be his undoing—see (12);

  (7) ‘Item’, a brief extract from Villon’s will (in which he leaves to his love, his dear Rose, neither heart nor liver, since her taste falls somewhere below those things); leads into ‘Or y pensez’, ‘It’s time to think of yourselves’, in which La Heaulmière and two younger whores wise up—take what you can get while you still can, you’ll soon be past it—sung fiercely, with violin and oboe in firm support, and Villon’s Mother joining in at the close, ‘very cracked and sarcastic, as it were out of tune’ (direction in score);

  IV A future in heaven? (arias 8, 9 = 873–909, W. li Viniers)

  (8) ‘Dame du ciel’: Villon’s Mother sings a prayer he wrote for her, calling on the Virgin to receive her into heaven, and declaring her faith in the painted paradise on the church wall where angels play harps and lutes, above the painted hell where the damned are being boiled on hell’s fires—‘Grant me the joy of paradise, great Goddess to whom sinners must turn’; this is sung in a voice of terrified, breathless, unstoppable pleading over a continuous thunderous rumbling in ‘the cellarage’ from bass-bells and/or the very bottom notes of the piano; the voice is on one pitch as in medieval liturgy, but with the dissonant intervals of the tritone, the ‘devil in the scale’ that never comes to a resolution; (Fisher: 2003, 31–2, 34–5, notes an effect of sustained, controlled c
haos; Schafer writes of the deranging difficulty of synchronizing the measures of the vocal line with those of the accompaniment (‘Ezra Pound et la musique’, Les Cahiers de L’Herne: Ezra Pound/2 (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1965), p. 649)); all this places the mother among the souls on the painted wall reaching up to be saved and in terror of the devils there who would drag her down;

  (9) ‘Mère au sauveour’, in response to and at an absolute remove from the Mother’s terror of hell, is a straightforward hymn to the Virgin, sung by a chorister within the church, as if by the painted angels on the wall there, offering assurance that through her ‘paradise shall be opened to us’; the words and melody in William li Viniers’s thirteenth-century mode, taken from Rummel’s Hesternae Rosae (1912), but accompanied (through first ten bars) by recurrent tubular chimes suggesting the altar bell (cf. EPRO 121, 262–3 n. 116); this is not a troubadour love song, rather an orthodox hymn in which the Virgin is set apart from all women on earth, and the divine light is not looked for in a living woman;

  V The way we live now [ii] (arias 10–12 = 625–6; 1591–1610, 1619–22; 713–28)

  (10) A ‘Very husky priest’—Pound’s markings (CPMEP vii, EPRO 121)—‘Bass profundissimus’, while crossing from church to brothel, and turning—and turning the opera—back from the Virgin to the whore, bawls a few bars of ‘Suivez beauté’, ‘Chase after beauty, run to feasting, | love as you will and take your fill’ (my translation); the vocal melody is the simple 6/4 re-arrangement and setting of Villon’s words by Gustave Ferrari, to which Pound added an accompanying cello and bass; since Pound despised Ferrari’s ‘liking watered down duParc, Chausson post Debussy typical modern french puke’ (EP to Harding, 27 October 1931, CPMEP 54), he must here be savaging his watering down of Villon, as well as a church guilty of the Virgin/whore split;

  (11) Bozo the brothel-keeper, ‘hiccoughing drunk’, as are the trombones, sings how he loves and serves (‘Se j’ayme et sers’) and like a knight defends his lady, Fat Margot, ‘in this bordello where we live in state’—one is reminded of the Brecht–Weill Threepenny Opera; here, Pound wrote, ‘Villon casts out the dregs of his shame’ (SR 176);

  (12) The Gallant emerges from the brothel, a dying man, renouncing and cursing love—‘Je regnie Amours’—rather jagged, strained singing, to a sympathetic violin;

  VI Chorus ‘and ballyhoo’ of the mob of drinkers (13 = ll. 1238–65)

  (13) A second climax: ostensibly a prayer for the soul of the notorious drunkard ‘the late Master Jean Cotart’, the public prosecutor who let Villon off a murder charge; ‘noise and general pandemonium to increase as it goes along’, with counter-rhythms Charles Ives might have ventured; at one point ‘Solo instruments ad lib as in toughest possible jazz band. Timballes smacking the rhythm on tonic, dominant or wherever convenient. All against the imitation hurdy-gurdy formed by basson, cello and trombones’; in the second stanza Pound inserted ‘bits of provencal indecent melodies | hu et hu et hu et hu |…not a chaste rhythm’ (EP to D. G. Bridson, 15 September 1958, [Beinecke]); then between Villon’s second and third stanzas he inserted a fast-paced thirteenth-century trouvère aubade warning of approaching danger; at last the well-orchestrated cacophony fades upon a ‘dying belch’; after ‘a hush’ the backdrop is raised and there is a wonderfully assured change of mood, just a few bars very precisely calculated in tone and rhythm to introduce the concluding chorale;

  VII ‘Frères humains’

  (14) The epitaph in the form of a ballade which Villon made for himself and for the comrades with whom he was expecting to be hanged, set as a chorale for six voices (unaccompanied until the final bars), after the manner of fifteenth- to sixteenth-century homophonic motets (Josquin, Gesualdo, Tallis, Palestrina—not plain chant). See p. 21.

  B. A brief history of Le Testament or Villon

  1. Holograph sketches and drafts, mainly establishing the melodic line, date from about the end of 1919, continuing into 1921 (mostly in Beinecke).

  2. Pound/Bedford collaboration, October to December 1920, and June to August 1921: first version in the hand of Agnes Bedford (Beinecke). AB reported that EP was ‘impatient & bored & disapproving’ of this version (AB to Hugh Kenner, 1964, [HRC]).

  3. Pound/Antheil version of 1923, i.e. Antheil’s micro-fractional ‘re-notation’ of (2) in the autumn of 1923, completed 31 December 1923—score with music in Antheil’s hand and Villon’s words written in by Pound. Does not include Gallant’s ‘Je renye amours’. Guillaume li Viniers’s words and melody for ‘Mère au Sauveur’ were taken from Walter Rummel’s Hesternae Rosae (1912), but the accompaniment is Pound’s. The vocal melody of the Priest’s two lines of Villon’s ‘Suivez beauté’ was taken from Collection Yvette Guilbert in the arrangement of Gustave Ferrari. The score calls for ten solo voices, chorus, and seventeen instrumentalists who among them play an unusually diverse lot of instruments: ‘nose-flute, flute and piccolo (one player), oboe, saxaphone, bassoon, trumpet (for two bars only!), horn, two trombones, mandolin, violin, cello, three contrabassi, a variety of drums (including six tympani), bells, “bass bells” (sic)…gongs, sandpaper, dried bones and a percussionist whistling’ (Robert Hughes). (Score now in Beinecke, and known as the ‘Gold score’ from its binding—see 12 (2) below.)

  4. ‘Mort, j’appelle’ (Ythier) and ‘Je renye amours’ scored in simplified measures for voice and solo violin, performed by Yves Tinayre and Olga Rudge in Rudge–Antheil concert, 7 July 1924; then engraved and printed ‘for private circulation’ in 1926 as ‘Two Songs from Ezra Pound’s Opera Le Testament’.

  5. Further reworkings of the score by Pound in 1924 and 1925, culminating in a private performance for invited guests only in Salle Pleyel, 29 June 1926: ‘Paroles de Villon | Arias and fragments from an opera | le testament |…Musique par Ezra Pound’. On the programme (‘probablement’):

  Hommage ou ouverture, a six-note melody ‘based on a fundamental tone of D2 (five ledger lines below the bass clef)’ (CPMEP 35 n. 99), to be performed on a five-foot long alpenhorn;

  Et mourut Paris and Je plains (Villon), and Mort, j’appelle (Ythier), sung by Yves Tinayre, tenor, accompanied by Olga Rudge, violin;

  Motif’ a solo riff by Pound on kettle-drum;

  Faulse beauté (Gallant) and Heaulmière sung by Tinayre, accompanied by violin and harpsichord;

  Motifs de la foule [= ‘Père Noé’], sung by Tinayre and Robert Maitland, bass-baritone, with a mix-up (‘mélange’) of violin, harpsichord and trombones;

  Si J’ayme et sers (Bozo) sung by Maitland to the accompaniment of two trombones;

  Frères humains performed by the ensemble.

  The scoring for all the numbers was in relatively simplified measures, mainly in ⅝. The score for Heaulmière’s aria, arranged for tenor and solo violin, was printed (in facsimile of Olga Rudge’s manuscript) in two periodicals in 1938, and in GK in 1953. Performance edition (2008) in 12 below.

  6. 12 July 1926, private performance at the home of Mrs Christian Gross in Paris, by Robert Maitland accompanied by Olga Rudge, of Villon’s ‘Et mourut Paris’, ‘Je plains’, and ‘Dictes moi’ (EPRO 133). Beinecke has a manuscript score in Olga Rudge’s hand corresponding to this performance. Performance edition (2008) in 12 below.

  7. Broadcast version by BBC radio 26 and 27 October 1931. Pound sent the producer the unique Pound/Antheil score (3 above), with his added markings in coloured crayon, and wrote a dialogue scenario to turn the opera into a radio ‘melodrama’. However, the ‘small & scandalized orchestra’ (AB to Hugh Kenner, 1964, [HRC]), finding the 1923 score too difficult, freely departed from it, largely falling back on the 1924 and 1926 arrangements (4 and 5 above), or on the earlier Pound/Bedford score, resulting in a musically confused and unsatisfactory production. No complete score for this production has been located, and none may have existed. (See EPRO passim.)

  8. In 1933 Pound revised Le Testament once more and finally, ‘hopin to make it foolproof’ (EPEC 76), scoring all the numbers in basic measures,
except for the final two choral numbers (‘Père Noé’ and ‘Frères humains’), and leaving Heaulmière’s aria in the simple mixed measures of 1926. This, the third complete score, in Pound’s hand, is in the Beinecke (EPRO 227 n. 48; CPMEP 148 n. 10). Performance edition (2008) in 12 below.

  9. A second BBC radio production, 28 June and 31 July 1962. The 1931 scenario was used again; but the music of the Pound/Antheil score was edited by R. Murray Schafer, who, regarding it as ‘a total mess’, ‘weeded out Antheilisms’ (Schafer to Hugh Kenner, 25 August 1962 [HRC]); greatly simplified both metrics and orchestration, partly on the basis of the Pound/Bedford version; and himself added some additional music. Bridson, the BBC producer, assigned the ‘Voice from the church’ singing ‘Mère au Sauveur’ to the Priest, and put it before the Mother’s ‘Dame du ciel’ (EPRO 260 n. 97). Pound had nothing to do with the production, and judged it ‘a considerable mess’ (Pound to Bridson, as recorded by Bridson—cited in Carpenter 885).

  10. Performance version for the 1965 Spoleto Festival arr. Lee Hoiby and Stanley Hollingsworth based on 8 above.

  11. Performance edition of Pound/Antheil score prepared by Robert Hughes, premiered 13 November 1971 by Western Opera Theater conducted by Robert Hughes, in the Zellerbach Auditorium of University of California at Berkeley; recorded 18 and 19 November 1971, and issued in 1972 as Fantasy Records no. 12001. Instrumentation: flute/piccolo, oboe, alto saxophone, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone (2), percussion (3), piano, violin, cello, contrabass (3), mandolin.