More than an Anthill
SIMON, JOHN
On Music More than an Anthill By John Simon IN his autobiography. Bygones, the poet-anthologist Louis Untermeyer reports that Ezra Pound "groaned when I relayed the quip about piling up...
...Thus Hindemith's Murderer, Hope of Womankind becomes Murder etc...
...He had sold his soul to the industry...
...Most objectionable are his errors in musical matters...
...Despite having grown up speaking English and German, his fascinating but factually unreliable autobiography crawls with mistakes in both languages...
...Vacationing in Rapallo, Antheil produced a detective novel called Death in the Dark under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, with some input from fellow tourists Pound, W.B...
...as always, belongs in a category of his own...
...Ultimately, George clicked in Hollywood, receiving a couple of remunerative film score assignments a year for the rest of his life...
...they are good examples of the early, revolutionary Antheil, nicely played by R. Szreder and B.J...
...What hurt Antheil was a sloppiness worse than that of his ill-fitting tailcoat...
...There is a gnomic and rather cynical appraisal of him by R. Murray Schäfer, the editor of Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism: "Antheil, who had pioneered forward until about his 25th year, spent the rest of his life pioneering backward...
...Though sometimes rébarbative, none of this is dull, and such pieces as Valentine Waltzes of 1949 are positively lilting...
...Similarly, the influential friend Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt emerges as Hans von Stuckenschmidt...
...Nevertheless, as Fennimore admits, George was "a great natural talent, ravaged and spent...
...played by the Bamberger Symphoniker under Christoph Poppen, with soloist Michael Rische, it is a fine example of Antheil's transition from enfant terrible to budding neoclassicist...
...Or again, "French wallpaper comes in two patterns, roseate syphilis and green gangrene...
...These and others—e.g., Erik Satie and some of Les Six—would attend and applaud Antheil's pandemonium-eliciting concerts...
...Metronome marks are spotty, tempo indications capricious...
...the composer Bernard Herrmann becomes Herrman...
...Art is not a question of precedence, but of excellence...
...On October 4, 1926 at the Champs Elysées Theater, Antheil played his Sonata sauvage, Airplane Sonata and Mechanisms, eliciting the biggest riot since The Rite of Spring, 11 years earlier...
...Dynamics and tempos existed in extremes...
...Pound rose and yelled, " Vous êtes des imbécilesV After that, despite someone's waving a handkerchief on a stick as a white flag of surrender, all hell broke loose...
...So did subsequent appearances in Budapest, Vienna and Berlin, where he settled for a year and got to know his venerated Igor Stravinsky, who at first enjoyed discussions with this American admirer...
...Antheil next turned to film scores, doing two for Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in New York before heading to Hollywood in quest of bigger fish...
...Still, shortly after the young couple moved into a cramped apartment above Sylvia Beach's renowned Shakespeare & Co...
...do not write bad commercial music all day and serious music at night...
...Sometimes more cheerfully than at others, she subsidized him with interruptions for 19 years, 11 of them spent in Europe...
...The wonderfully Hispanic-sounding ballet Capital of the World, based on a gloomy bullfight story by Hemingway, comes somewhat foreshortened on the first of the above CPO discs, and in full on Centaur 2293 (coupled with the Fifth Symphony), where Barry Kolman conducts the Slovak Philharmonic...
...The former was originally written for 16 pianos, now reduced to four (some say eight), player piano, xylophones, assorted conventional and unconventional percussion, and recorded airplane motor...
...Herewith a brief summary of the recorded works...
...Menagerie in F Sharp, Hans W. Heinsheimer— who as director of the mighty Universal Edition published Antheil's music in Europe, and once he joined the equally mighty Boosey and Hawkes in the U.S., published him again—describes a visit to the Antheil home in Laurel Canyon...
...Stravinsky's The Card Game becomes The Poker Game...
...later, neoclassical pieces, played by Guy Livingston, are on Wergo 6661 2. The abovementioned Verbit disc samples both periods...
...In German, Anteil—formerly spelled Antheil—means sympathy...
...Unfortunately, slovenliness spoiled many things for this autodidact who almost never submitted to learning things properly...
...Bygones, the poet-anthologist Louis Untermeyer reports that Ezra Pound "groaned when I relayed the quip about piling up dissonances to make a mountain of an Antheil...
...His parents were both of German origin (George reinvented himself as Polish because in World War I Trenton to be German was anathema) and owned the modest Antheil's Friendly Family Shoestore...
...There followed a fallow period that the Antheils survived by writing a love advice column in Esquire and other publications, and by George writing political, endocrinological and assorted other articles—not to mention working with the movie siren Hedy Lamarr ("an intellectual genius") on a radio-guided torpedo that they patented...
...bookshop (George had to rent a hotel room for his piano), they were mingling with such shop habitués as Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Ford Madox Ford, to name but a few...
...if you must bea whore, do your whoring in some art other than music...
...Far from having suffered from contemporaneously written movie scores, Antheil seems to have profited from his cinematic music being absorbed, along with many other ingredients, into their collage-like structure...
...It was a synthesis of frenzy and precision, which went beyond all conventional virtuosity...
...But try to track down EMI Classics 66548, where it is performed by Joseph Levine and the Ballet Theatre Orchestra, the very forces of Capital of the World's 1953 premiere...
...Almost any work he wrote has delicious moments along with pompous ones...
...Strobel...
...In line with George's new passion, endocrinology, it involved detection through glandular secretions...
...The latter, however, taking umbrage at George's bragging that they were best friends and that the master was a great admirer of his music, cut Antheil dead...
...One was to be a concert pianist "where it was an honor," he writes in Bad Boy, "and where good piano playing was almost on a level with good crooning in America...
...George started playing the piano and violin at six...
...He also met H.H...
...Pound, who for a time was a raving Antheil enthusiast, comes in for some delightful razzing...
...Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, described George as short, flat-nosed, and unprepossessing except for his vitality and concentration...
...Repeat signs are written by dots and a double bar and with the words 'repeat three times' over the measures concerned...
...When the "nearly impossible" is accomplished, as in Marthanne Verbit's CD of selected Antheil piano music (Troy 146), the result is often thrilling...
...Kurt Weill's Mahagonny is termed incorrectly "a surrealist opera...
...But his strong piano playing progressed, and with it some radical composing...
...A page about his sometime friend Stravinsky captures perfectly—and amiably rather than vengefully—the Russian's inordinate hunger for money, and conspicuous spending whenever he had it...
...Meanwhile in Paris, the Antheil Piano Concerto, which heralded his turn to neoclassicism, flopped because his modernist allies considered it a betrayal...
...After an Antheil recital, he famously wrote: "I had never heard piano playing like that...
...Five of the six symphonies, with Hugh Wolff and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, are on CPO 777 040-2,999 604-2, and 999 706-2, all enjoyableNo...
...As he tells in Bad Boy of Music, Antheil was born in Trenton, New Jersey, across the street from a very noisy machine shop, but he rejects the notion that the futuristic machine music he was to write had to do with prenatal influence...
...Nor did the years he spent in France make his French any better...
...Here inspiration returned to George, who felt secure enough to compose music of all kinds: piano, chamber, symphonic, and concertante works...
...In 1936, Aaron Copland wrote: "George Antheil...
...Pound wrote a whole book about Antheil (plus not a little about himself) that the composer ridiculed: "Nobody could have been one tenth as good as Ezra made me...
...Rhythms of unbelievable difficulty and complexity were fused...
...do not have a money making job that leaves you exhausted...
...For this and much other information, I am indebted to Linda Whitesitt's The Life and Music of George Antheil, a solid doctoral thesis, albeit lacking in what the subject cries out for: a sense of humor...
...IN HIS memoir...
...The other was to pursue Anne, his young sweetheart, whose mother took her to Europe to escape from George's clutches...
...The 'bad boy of music...
...The early, futuristic machine music for piano is available on col legno 31880, played by Benedikt Koehlen...
...He did not, I dare say, groan because of a mispronunciation for the sake of apun (the German-American composer's surname actually rhymes with "isle"), but because he loved and championed the aggressively modern work ofthe self-styled Bad Boy of Music, the title of Antheil's autobiography...
...At concerts where he suspected a hostile audience and critics, he put the gun on the piano and had the exit doors locked...
...Time signatures appear when not needed and vice versa...
...And how about "If the Germans could only have found a satisfactory cheap process to remove the color in leaves, they would have made them gray...
...5, titled Joyous, especially so...
...A machine seemed to move across the keyboard...
...The marriage took place in Paris, whither George moved them to escape the inflation in Germany and be nearer to the esteemed Stravinsky...
...By 1933, with the rise of Nazism already pointing to another World War, the couple moved to New York, where for some time Antheil composed operas and ballets...
...When the youth came back after a while with Five Songs for Soprano and Piano After Adelaide Crapsey, Bloch took him on...
...Antheil, a small, wiry man in sloppily fitted tails, took a somewhat awkward bow...
...The last dozen years, until George's death from a heart attack in January 1959, were good ones...
...To Thomson's credit, he again revised his opinion in 1977, in American Music Since 1910: "His work after Ballet mechanique [sic] is increasingly professional...
...When after much vain searching he bumped into them, nothing much came of it...
...merely grew up to be a good boy...
...a mismanaged siren went off at the wrong time, and a fiasco ensued—although some, like William Carlos Williams, departed satisfied...
...He commuted to Philadelphia for music theory and composition lessons from Constantin von Sternberg, a Liszt disciple, who eventually directed him to Ernest Bloch in New York...
...He spelled her name Boski, and heaven only knows how he pronounced or mispronounced it...
...Stuckenschmidt, a rising major music critic...
...Whether a pitch is a line or a space is often unclear...
...In the later works, we often hear echoes of Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Sibelius, and others...
...soon a friend and booster, he pronounced George the only follower of Stravinsky who went beyond the master...
...An important innovator in Europe during the 1920s and somewhat less so in the early '30s, George Antheil (190059) was a significant figure in New York and Hollywood until his premature death at 58...
...Back home, George had found a wonderful patron, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who would found the Curtis Institute...
...But he also quotes two other important verdicts...
...OfNora Joyce and her famous husbandhe writes, "She didn't understand him, but she did better, she loved him...
...In 1926 Antheil seemed to have 'the greatest gifts of any young American now writing.' But something always seems to prevent them from full fruition...
...In a booklet note, Joseph Fennimore concedes virtuoso piano writing to Antheil, but continues: "The manuscripts in his hand are frequently illegible...
...The first two of three violin sonatas commissioned by Pound for his mistress, Olga Rudge, are on Pavane 7355...
...It is as if every important German had to be a "von...
...apparent repeated chords are senselessly inconsistent in spelling___Clefs are missing...
...As a result, his music, though not strongly current in repertory, does not die...
...But then, as Antheil said in his memoirs, "I had never believed in the eternal questions of who invented what first...
...In 1966, Virgil Thomson wrote: "My estimate of him as 'the first composer of our generation' might have been justified had it not turned out eventually that for all his facility and ambition there was in him no power of growth...
...4, called 1942, and No...
...Yeats, T.S...
...In Germany he met a young Hungarian Sinologist and Sanskrit scholar—a niece of Arthur Schnitzler—and, after a tempestuous courtship, lived with her for two years before they were married in 1923...
...Bok, plus whatever more he was able to coax out ofher in letters that mixed wheedling with brazenness, but never lacked the self-assurance worthy of a (self-) confidence man...
...Yeet the book contains, besides all sorts of droll anecdotes (some of which even ring true), shrewd observations about music, the arts and people...
...something he wrote in the school paper prevented his graduation from Trenton High...
...Not quite...
...He was also a stimulating talker, although he could change his point of view on every subject every day...
...The scandal increased when, after some private performances, Vladimir Golschmann publicly conducted the Ballet mécanique on June 19,1926, along with the Symphonie en fa...
...they may be tributes, borrowings or coincidences...
...Antheil cannot get the name of the conductor of his career-making First Symphony right either: SchulzDomburg is changed into Schultz von Domberg...
...In a style neither harmonic nor serial that is sporadically asymmetrical and intentionally irregular, figuring out what's intended becomes nearly impossible...
...The Antheils, now augmented by a young son, Peter, finally moved into a charming house overlooking the Pacific...
...Two years later, he had to quit for lack of funds before he could finish his First Symphony...
...Responding to the catcalls...
...Too bad he paid so little heed to his own counsels...
...Eliot, Franz Werfel, and Gerhart Hauptmann...
...Furthermore, he says, he "files off the engine numbers, alters the body, repaints so thoroughly that even its owner wouldn't know the stolen item...
...And who could deny sympathy to so delightful a devil...
...The catchily jazzy Piano Concerto is available on Arte Nova 910140...
...George Balanchine and Martha Graham put on some of the ballets...
...I paraphrase: Do not spend too much time on other things...
...His initial concert, in London in 1922, with his own compositions included, created quite a stir...
...Her name was Böske Markus (Böske, with the s pronounced as sh, is Hungarian for Betty...
...do not deal with silly people during your daytime hours...
...In 1922, George decided to head for Europe for two reasons...
...Pieces of it are constantly being revived...
...He was, however, to get a few lessons from Alfredo Casella, then on tour in Philadelphia...
...and, ridiculously, Vaslav Nijinsky turns into Bronislav, through confusion with his sister, Bronislava...
...the operas remained unproduced, though Volpone is said to be rather good...
...Whether this is due to a lack of artistic integrity, or an unusual susceptibil ity to influences, or a lack of any conscious direction, is not clear...
...an airplane propeller and wind machine blew programs out of the audience's hands...
...That passage, reprised in Stuckenschmidt's autobiography, is much more frequently quoted than a later one: "In February, Antheil died, my good friend from the '20s, an eminent musical talent that was broken by work on Hollywood movies...
...The notorious Ballet mécanique, albeit in a somewhat tamer, revised 1953 version, and three other chamber or symphonic works are—with Daniel Spalding conducting the Philadelphia Virtuosi on Naxos 8.559060—a good introductory cross section of the oeuvre...
...It is an evocation of what sounds like an idyllic family life, down to "playing with Open Eyes, George's deformed little mongrel whom he lovingly calls 'the finest specimen of pure Mongolian fish hound.'" At this point Antheil was the fourth mostperformed American composer after George Gershwin, Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber...
...Chord clusters with rafts of accidentals may flat and sharp the same note...
...The success was superlative...
...Though Antheil's career suffered from overweening ambition, his music has many qualities of excellence...
...His reviews ranged from enthusiastic to contemptuous, but on he plowed, collecting his monthly $ 150 from Mrs...
...Consider, too, his advice on how to become and keep being a real composer...
...Bloch turned him away, finding his stuff empty and pretentious...
...Young Antheil carried with him a handgun in a specially made silken holster...
...The inexpert but megalomaniacal producer preceded it with enormous hype...
...There were difficult years ahead, notwithstanding occasional successes such as the opera Transatlantic (Frankfurt, 1930), ridiculing an American Presidential election—and the likely inspiration of George and Ira Gershwin's Of Thee Ï Sing...
...the stage was bedizened with huge, ludicrous and lascivious murals...
...The following April 27, Ballet mécanique^ New York premiere took place in Carnegie Hall, with the Antheils in attendance...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
