Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Hughes edited Le Testament from a photocopy of the 1923/1931 score supplied by the BBC in 1961; this lacked the two pages containing ‘Mère au Sauveur’ and ‘Suivez beauté’—which had possibly become separated in 1931—and so had to follow Schafer’s accompaniment (tubular bells) for the former, and provide his own for the latter. He also followed the Bridson misplacement of ‘Mère au Sauveur’. The two missing pages were discovered by Margaret Fisher in 1999, and revealed the correct order and accompaniment, and also that the Priest was to sing only the opening bars of ‘Suivez beauté’, with a simple cello and bass accompaniment—see EPRO 121, 262 n. 116.

  Since 1971 there have been several productions, all of them using the 1923/1931 Pound/Antheil score as edited by Robert Hughes. The most notable was the 1980 Holland Festival production performed by the ASKO ensemble, Reinbert de Leeuw music director and conductor, recorded and released as Philips Harlekijn 9500 927. A powerful rendering of Heaulmière’s aria sung by Anna Myatt, contralto, in a performance by the University of York Villon Music Theatre Ensemble directed and co-produced by Charles Mundye for the 1992 York Festival, is included on Other Minds Audio CD OM 1005–2, issued with an 80-page booklet (edited and written by Margaret Fisher), as Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound (San Francisco: Other Minds Inc., 2003). That disk also gives ‘Dictes moy’ (Villon) from the Holland Festival production; and ‘Dame du ciel’, ‘Père Noé’, and ‘Frères humains’ from the 1971 Western Opera Theater production.

  12. New, definitive, performance editions of Le Testament by Robert Hughes and Margaret Fisher were published in 2008 and 2011 in 2 volumes: (1) in 2008 a double volume, Ezra Pound: Le Testament, ‘Paroles de Villon’, comprising 1926 ‘Salle Pleyel’ concert excerpts [5 and 6 above], and 1933 Final Version complete opera [8 above]; (2) in 2011 Ezra Pound: Le Testament, a facsimile of the 1923 Pound/Antheil score [3 above], with extensive essays and notes, and accompanied by a re-release of the Fantasy LP recording on audio CD (see 11 above).

  C. Outline of Cavalcanti. A sung dramedy in 3 acts

  Because Harding worked in the Experimental Features section of the Drama Department and not in the BBC’s Music Department, Cavalcanti was developed as a music drama for radio. Pound called it ‘a sung dramedy in 3 acts’. ‘Dramedy’ was a word not to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Pound had used it in 1920 when (as ‘T.J.V.’) he reviewed a rubbishy play full of sentimental gush, stagey banalities ‘and a parody of every cliché’ of the daily newspaper serials. He took the ‘tempest of applause’ it received to mean ‘the last fading and hesperal flicker of British intelligence’, or else ‘a lifelong and ineradicable devotion to Miss Eva Moore’. The play left him sympathizing, he wrote, with ‘the babu who said there were three sorts of plays: Comedy, tragedy and dramedy’. That might tell us something about the ‘dramedy’ element in his Cavalcanti.

  The scenario is set up at the start of each act by the Announcer, and there is also some spoken dialogue within the acts. The plot is thin, almost non-existent; ‘but wother hell can you do with super-in-human refinemengts of the intellect’, Pound exclaimed to Agnes Bedford when pointing out that ‘the axshun’ of the second act was all to do with establishing the difficulty of ‘Donna mi prega’. That action consists of: Guido among his rowdy friends and deep in a game of chess; as a practical joke his page nails him by his shirt-tail to the bench; his friends with much laughter prevail on him to sing his philosophical canzone while they have him thus nailed down, though they then interrupt from time to time to declare they don’t understand it. The only point of the larky ‘action’ is to set the Canzone off against the friends’ incomprehension and their relative lack of seriousness.

  There is more ado in the first act, and all to the same point. With some companions Betto, a bore, follows Guido into a cemetery where he is brooding upon his fatal love, and tries to compel him to be a guest at their dining club; Guido escapes by vaulting over a tomb and quipping that he would not fit in since Betto and his lot are in their proper element there among the dead. The incident is from Boccaccio’s Decameron, and it is related there to illustrate Guido’s isolated superiority. The build-up to the quip tells how his propensity to philosophical speculation set him apart from what his fellow Florentines regarded as the good life and made him decline membership of their clubs. Betto has to spell out to his friends that Guido meant ‘that plain unlettered dunces like us are no better than dead men compared with men of learning like him’. In Pound’s scenario Guido is next threatened by a gang of his enemies, and this time he escapes over the wall, kicking as he goes a huge flower pot off the wall and over their leader’s head. This is slapstick stuff, having nothing to do with what Guido sings, and that must be its point. He is the only serious character here, and he is surrounded by friends and enemies who are all fixed in the bathos and nonsense of low comedy. Between his realm of love and their unenlightened world there just is no interesting connection.

  The real action of the opera is in Guido’s songs and in Fortuna’s finale. 2 The Overture, establishing a serious mood in which a rising melody is countered by darkly reflective cadences, leads into Guido’s singing of how he is pained unto death in love’s pleasing flame; and yet, in his folly, thinks himself saved because a mistress passed through his heart and carried all hope away. One must adjust (as in Erasmus’ Praise of Folly) to a riddling point of view which inverts conventional expectation and resolves the contradictions of pleasure and pain in love by renouncing, not love itself, but what was hoped for from the mistress. Betto the bore, thinking to flatter Guido, sings him one of his conventional ballate in which the lover pleads for his mistress’ mercy. For his pains Betto is told that the song is ‘de - ri - va - tive!…Showing the influence of earlier and inferior authors’. Seriousness is restored with Guido’s ‘Era in pensier’, ‘Being in thought of love’, which picks up the theme of his opening song. He meets two maidens in a wood and one sings, teasingly, ‘There rains in us love’s play’. Guido takes them to figure refining love, and confesses his condition: his heart has slain him with a wound it took from a lady in Toulouse. The maids understand that the lady so looked in through his eyes that by Love’s power she cut her image on his heart, and that Love now resides there and looks out from his eyes with a splendour their eyes cannot sustain. Since you suffer so grievously, they tell him, recommend yourself unto Love. He can only confirm their diagnosis, saying that all he can remember is Toulouse, a lady with corded bodice, slender, whom Love called Mandetta, and that he took his death wound from the sudden lightning of her eyes. This is the statement of Guido’s predicament, and the opera’s real starting point. The sight of Mandetta has put an end to his ordinary life: what will he do now?

  He begins Act 2 with a resolution to keep faith with love though love show him no mercy, to serve though unrewarded; and in this spirit (which is Love’s gift) he finds that when pleasure pains, ‘There rains within my heart | such good sweet love | that I declare, “Lady, I am all yours”’. His friends then sing ‘In un boschetto’, ‘one of his lighter songs’ become popular in the streets, and they begin (according to Pound’s direction) ‘with a good deal of rowdyism’, though the words ‘gradually get the better of the horse-play’. The song celebrates another encounter in a wood, this time with a fair young shepherdess who is eager for a lover, and the singer thinks, ‘’twas but the time’s provision | To gather joy of this small shepherd maid’ as she draws him willingly to herself and gives him ‘sight of every coloured blossom’, to his unbounded joy. It is a charmingly innocent fantasy of the ‘classic’ kind, wholly without the complications of Guido’s way to ‘good sweet love’, and it serves to set the common or popular dream of love against his refined vision.

  There follows Guido’s singing ‘Donna mi prega’, his philosophical Canzone, at considerable length. Pound saw this as the ‘tour de force and danger zone’ musically. He reported to Agnes Bedford that Tibor Serly ‘thought melody came up to same point too
often’ and was ‘monotonous’; Bedford herself thought it ‘dull’. Pound’s defence was that the orchestration was ‘meagre’ because ‘this bit is mainly for radio’. But there is not much beauty and emotion in the singing to delight the ear; and the song seems to be going on not a little didactically about a meaning it insists only the already expert will understand.

  However, as Pound remarked in The Spirit of Romance, in the Tuscan canzone thought was predominant, not emotion. It was devoted, he wrote, to ‘supernormal pleasures, enjoyable by man through the mind’; and its drama was ‘mankind’s struggle upward out of ignorance into the clear light of philosophy’. Guido, in Act 2, can be seen to be engaged in that struggle, as, nailed to the bench by his jesting and uncomprehending companions, he sings out his passionate apprehension of the intellectual form of all-creating Light. And he does reach, for that moment, ‘into the clear light of philosophy’.

  Guido’s Canzone is immediately followed by a song of Sordello’s in the Provençal mode which he had brought into Tuscany, and the contrast is telling. Pound has Guido remark that Sordello’s song has a simplicity—and, one might well put in, a simple musicality—which his own Canzone lacked. ‘Tos temps serai’ expresses a sentiment close to that of Guido’s first song in Act 2: I will be ever constant in love (a soprano sings) because love causes me to serve the best and fairest of women, and it is to her honour that she does not advance me: her virtue is my reward. There is the difference that Sordello is in an interactive, mutual relation with his lady—her honour is vital to him, and also her holding him in honour; whereas in Guido’s song the vital relation is with an intellectualized Love. More significant than that discrimination, however, is the background to Sordello’s song. The point is made by the Announcer and again in the dialogue that Cunizza used to sing it. We need to know that she was also the inspiration of the song, having ‘formed [Sordello’s] genius’. Beyond that, she was for Dante and for Pound an icon of free and joyous loving. In his Cantos Pound records how her loving nature caused her to free her family’s serfs; and, in canto 36 following the ‘Donna mi prega’, he records how Sordello treasured her image in his mind above the five castles his king gave him. In complementary ways they exemplify love acting freely in their world, free of possessiveness, and free also of Guido’s intellectualizing. In a note, ‘Background—Florence at the end of the 13th century’, Pound remarked that ‘Sordello’s felicity and clearness [in his poetry] may well have been the despair of the men who 50 years after him tried to write philosophical verse’. That must set Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi prega’ in an equivocal light.

  The second act ends with Guido’s being served with a decree of exile, signed by his friend Dante, ‘for the tranquillity of the city’; and in Act 3 he dies in exile. Cavalcanti was, as a matter of historical record, exiled, along with the leading members of both warring factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, upon the orders of Dante acting as one of the Priors at the time; and he was brought down with malaria in ‘the swamp at Sarzana’. He did not die there, however, since Dante had him brought back to Florence when he learnt of his fever. Pound has him die in exile for operatic effect.

  The third act opens with another song of Sordello’s, sung this time (according to the Announcer) by ‘one of the stragglers of the French army’. ‘What use are eyes | that see not my desire’ is the refrain; while the two verses sing of dying from love. Guido, as if taking his lead from that, expands on the theme in his ‘death song’, ‘Quando di morte’, the twelfth ballata in which, as Pound had observed, ‘Guido turns to an intellectual sympathy…yet with some inexplicable lack—his sophistication prevents the complete enthusiasm.’ Then follows, as the culmination of the serious action of the opera, ‘Perch’io non spero’, ‘Because no hope is left me, Ballatetta, | Of return to Tuscany’. In this Guido accepts his death, and in a final and absolute commitment sends his soul, that is, his new person fashioned from desire, in care of the Ballatetta itself, to dwell with and adore the Lady he has served. But who is that Lady? If it were Mandetta of Toulouse then we might think that the opera was allowing him to reintegrate as he dies, if only in his own mind, what had been separated out in the middle act, the direct vision of beauty and the intellectual conception of it. However, the emphasis on the ‘sweet intelligence’ of the Lady would rather indicate that his desire is to dwell with Love as he had defined it in his ‘Canzone d’amore’. His paradise would be that of the Arab philosophers, a state in which the individual mind, refined into a rational soul, contemplates the universal intelligence and is at one with the light which has brought it into being.

  In performance this mystery is complicated by Pound’s having Guido’s page (a boy soprano) sing the song with innocent clarity, though helped out (and thus interrupted) here and there by Guido’s mature baritone; and it is further complicated by his having Guido say that the boy must learn the song because there is a cypher hidden in the music and he won’t be let back into Tuscany unless he has mastered it. Margaret Fisher, with a fine combination of musical expertise and code-breaking ingenuity, locates the cypher ‘in the motif at bars 81–83’, that being ‘the first instance in which the opera’s motif resolves to its tonic note at the cadence’. She reads it off (by transposing the notes into the conventional pitch-names) as ut ut re mi fa sol fa mi re ut; then, by taking those syllables as Latin (ut), Provençal (re mi[r]), and the rest Italian, she finds so that to gaze intently gives me light, makes me king so. Well, as Fisher writes, ‘an opera director must have some toe-hold on the cipher’ since ‘the show must go on’, and hers is the only decryption on offer, and it does yield a credible gist of Guido’s poems. But it would be a mistake, I think, and a distraction, to make too much of it, as by seeking in it some secret revelation or message. The cypher is not the song, and Guido’s testament and mystery is surely in the song. The cypher is simply a password to get the page and the song into Tuscany, where the boy is to sing it and so pass on the tradition. He has still failed to master it, however, when Guido dies on the final note; and since the music is not written down we gather that the tradition stemming from Eleusis will have died with Guido.

  The goddess Fortuna then takes over in the opera’s finale, appearing as dea ex machina to declare that she is the Lady who rules mankind and its affairs. Entering into Guido’s jailer she declares this in his voice and (according to Pound’s notes) with his heavy and relentless energy; then she sings it again as herself, ‘immortal…inhuman, impersonal…so powerful as to be unconscious of opposition’. ‘Destiny’, Pound noted, ‘not volition’. Machiavelli, whose song this may be, would consider, in the penultimate chapter of The Prince, ‘How far human affairs are governed by fortune, and how fortune can be opposed’; and he would conclude that ‘fortune shows her power where there is no force to hold her in check’. In Dante’s world-view fortune was subject to the control of Providence; but Providence is excluded from Pound’s Cavalcanti as from Machiavelli’s counsels. In their modern world it is the force of human will, of volition, that should oppose Fortune’s power. And where that force is lacking, as in Guido’s failure to make the intelligence of love prevail in his world, things are left to unenlightened chance.

  D. EP, ‘Huey, God bless him’, an unpublished article intended for New Democracy, enclosed with a letter to Gorham Munson dated ‘13 or 14 Aug. [1935]’ (HRC)

  Social Creditors are the last people who ought to be obsessed by nomenclatures, and they should either be in the front rank of fighters for clearer terminology or be led out to the ducking stool.

  Meaning that we must understand what other people want (no matter what they call it) and that we must be and stay aware of what is going on.

  What Huey Long says and means today, Roosevelt says and does not mean in a year or two. I said in the New English Weekly that Frank D. cd. side step any third party by a feint to the left just before the next Presidential election. He has been pushed to make that feint already.

  The American highbrow etc. has und
erestimated our friend from Louisiana.

  Huey has not stressed the use of flow. He has not, I think seen the full power that lies in the constitutional right of congress to issue money.

  I can’t condense the summary of Jefferson’s economic beliefs (printed after p. 112 in My ‘Jefferson and/or Mussolini’, published in England, but not yet through the american barrage and sabotage.

  But, I accuse all the Social Credit papers of not having given enough publicity to Huey Long’s more vital formulations.

  Huey is no more befogged than 90% of the new economists. You still read even social credit essays which do not distinguish between property and capital.

  I don’t think Huey dissociates wealth and purchasing power. I mean in his own mind.

  Nevertheless when Huey demands

  ‘homestead allowance free of debt’,

  he is demanding something which we ought to recognize as a national dividend.

  when he demands not only free school books, but a guarantee that every child shall be assured of as much education as it wants or can stand, he is demanding a material dividend, and it wd. be hidebound social creditism to insist that this be given in the form of 30 cents worth of paper money.

  The education of the young is their best guarantee for maintaining a clean economic system after they get it.

  Huey’s whole emphasis on the rising generation is centuries ahead of Townsend’s plea for kindness to the decrepit (humane and charitable etc. as that may be.)

  Give a man health and knowledge in youth and you will save very considerably on his needs for an old age pension.

  Any man who means to be alive in 1936 and 1937 must pick his rulers not by where they are now, but by what they want and where they are going.