Olga Rudge

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Olga Rudge (born April 13, 1895 in Youngstown , Ohio ; † March 15, 1996 in Dorf Tirol , Italy ) was an American violinist and a life partner of the poet Ezra Pound .

She was a concert violinist of international repute. Her talents and reputation were later overshadowed by her lover Ezra Pound and his controversial remarks. In return, Pound was very loyal even though she was only one of several of his mistresses. He dedicated the last section of his epic poem The Cantos to her, expressing his respect and gratitude for the support that Pound received from her during his 13 years imprisonment in a mental hospital. (Pound had been charged with treasonous activities against the United States and supporting Benito Mussolini's fascist regime.) With little success, she also tried to defend Pound against the allegation that he was anti-Semitic , as his contemporary statements clearly show . For the last eleven years of his life, Rudge was his devoted companion, secretary and nurse as he sank into eccentricity and prolonged silence.

Rudge outlived Pound by 24 years and continued to live in the little Venice house she had shared with him. In her final years, an ongoing difficult relationship with Mary de Rachewiltz , her only child, made her negligent about Pound's estate. This situation is very clearly described in John Berendt's novel The City of Falling Angels . Rudge later could not explain how Pounds' manuscripts and letters could get to Yale University (and there to the beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library ). Her dwindling health eventually forced her to leave Venice and spend her last days with her daughter. Rudge died a month before her 101st birthday and is buried next to Pound in Venice in the cemetery on the island of Isola di San Michele .

Childhood and youth

Olga Rudge was born to J. Edgar Rudge, a real estate agent , and Julia O'Connell Rudge, a professional singer. To pursue her singing career, Julia moved to Europe with her three children when Olga was ten years old. They lived first in London, then in Paris. Olga was educated in a convent school in Sherborne , Dorset , England, before taking lessons with the violinist Léon Carambât at the Opéra-Comique in Paris .

After 1916 Rudge was already a renowned concert violinist. She gave many concerts to raise money for the British and French in the First World War to collect. Her brother Arthur died in 1915. At the end of the war in 1918, she began her career as an international concert violinist under the patronage of Ildebrando Pizzetti and his patroness Katherine Dalliba-John. In 1918, Pizzetti and Rudge went on a concert tour through Italy to perform modern Italian music .

Ezra Pound wrote a review of Olga Rudge's concert in the Aeolian Hall in London on November 10, 1920.

Career

Rudge first met the poet Ezra Pound when he wrote a review of one of her concerts. He admired the "delicate firmness of her fiddling" of her violin playing, but criticized the "piano whack" of her accompanist Renata Borgatti. Rudge didn't seem impressed by Pound's criticism. She continued her collaboration with Borgatti and pursued her interest in modern Italian music. She gave concerts with Borgatti and Pizzetti in the Sala Bach in Rome in 1921 and performed again with Renata Borgatti at the Salle Pleyel in 1922.

Around 1923 Pound began to develop his own musical interests. He set about writing his own opera and promoting the work of the American composer George Antheil . At that time, Antheil and Rudge already had a long professional collaboration. Her sexual relationship with Pound began at this time. Rudge was now an established and successful soloist . She lived in a luxury apartment in Paris, in the respectable “ Rive Droite ” district. She actually had nothing to gain from a connection with a bohemian and eccentric poet like Pound, who was definitely more at home in his views and works on the radical side ( Rive gauche - on the left bank). This willingness to defy convention threatened her reputation, but it was typical of her long affair with Pound. In December 1923 Rudge and Antheil gave a concert in the “Salle du Conservatoire” in which they not only played works by Mozart , Bach and Antheil, but also performed Ezra Pound's “Sujet pour violin” . In 1924 Rudge and Antheil played “Musique Americaine” in the Salle Pleyel. This concerto contained a work by Pound and Antheil's “Deuxieme Sonata” , which he dedicated to Rudge.

Unfortunately, there are no surviving recordings of concerts or pieces of music, but their abilities are documented in the music critics of their time.

In 1924, Pound and his wife, artist Dorothy Shakespear , moved from Paris to Rapallo , Italy. Since Rudge already had a long-term love affair with Pound, she visited him several times. From then on, Pound appeared to split his time evenly between Rudge and his wife, a situation that lasted until World War II . In the spring of 1925, Rudge was forced to cancel a planned concert tour to the United States when she was pregnant by Pound. In June 1925 she gave birth to her daughter Mary (Pound's only child) in the local hospital in Brixen in the province of South Tyrol . Trying to avoid the social stigma that an illegitimate child would have in Rudge's career, Olga paid a farming family in the South Tyrolean village of Gais to raise their daughter.

She remained the lover of a married man, unconcerned about possible stigmata, and her connection with Pound remained unbroken. She resumed her career with a concert in the Salle Pleyel in 1926, where she starred in the world premiere of Pound's new opera ('' Le Testament de Villon ''). She continued her association with Antheil with concerts in the capitals of Europe, and during this time she began to specialize in Mozart's works. She was now one of the most acclaimed solo violinists of the era. She played in front of government officials and political leaders in Europe.

Her father bought her a small house on Calle Querini in Venice in 1928. She called it "The Hidden Nest" and she lived there for the rest of her life. It was in this house that she began to develop her maternal instincts and brought her daughter Mary to her home for occasional visits. It was the beginning of a difficult and complex relationship between mother and daughter. Mary's existence was a closely guarded secret: Pound didn't even reveal it to his own father until 1930. Pound was often with Olga when her daughter visited her in Venice. However, the couple often wanted to be alone, so Rudge rented a house in Rapallo near Pound and his wife, where the couple could live their affair unhindered by his wife and children. (Pound had a stepson, Omar, who was Dorothy's son with an unknown father, presumably an Egyptian).

The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression , all sectors concerned, including the music industry. Most of the visitors to concerts and performances were now also often in financial difficulties. To make ends meet, Rudge worked as a secretary at the Accademia Musicale in Siena in 1933 . She has also managed to continue her musical career, for example by staging the annual Concerti Tigulliani in Rapallo, organized by Pound. Around this time, Rudge and Pound became key figures in the Vivaldi Revival. In 1936 Vivaldi's mostly lesser-known works were played at the Concerti Tigulliani. In order to prepare for these concerts, Rudge studied many of Vivialdi's original scores that were kept in Turin . She tried to set up a Vivaldi society in Venice, but to no avail. In 1938 she founded the “Centro di Studi Vivaldiani” at the “Accademia Chigiana” , which was dedicated to Vivaldi's work.

As World War II approached, Rudge restricted her travel outside of Italy, her last performance in London being in 1935. By this time Pound was a staunch supporter of Mussolini and had started broadcasting his pro- fascist and anti-Semitic views with Olga's support To broadcast “Radio Rom”. In 1941 they both considered returning to the United States for the duration of the war. Pound finally decided against it, and so they stayed in Italy during the war. Pound's “misconduct” at this critical point was in not declaring loyalty to his homeland when it was at war. This haunted him from the end of the war to the end of his life. Likewise, Olga Rudge had to live with the suspicion that she was the lover of a traitor to her country.

War years

The war years were difficult for the couple. After the US entered the war, Pound and his wife Dorothy were declared enemies of the state in Italy, an ironic situation in the light of Pound's support for Mussolini. Their house in Rapallo was confiscated in 1943 and the couple had no choice but to move in with Olga. Thus the ménage à trois , which for a long time was just a public speculation, became a reality. Rudge sent her daughter back to Gais to live with her original guardian. She also had to give language classes to support the Pounds and their daughter. It was a very difficult time for the trio: while both women adored Pound, they hated each other. Pound's wife later wrote that "hatred and tension have permeated the house".

Following the US invasion of Italy in 1945, Pound was arrested as a traitor . His support for the fascists and broadcasts on Radio Rome led to charges of treason. Rudge was also arrested. She was released after the interrogation, but was not allowed to speak or communicate with her lover, and this was only several months later.

Although she was separated from her lover, the end of the war brought an improvement for Olga: her confiscated Venetian house was returned to her. To avoid a high treason trial, Pound was declared a mentally ill criminal and detained in a mental hospital (St. Elizabeth's Hospital), where he was held for twelve years. Rudge began the difficult task of trying to get him free. She used her friends and many contacts in the literary world for this. A petition stating, among other things, that he was never a member of the Italian Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) , should get Pound released to live in an American monastery . But all of their requests fell on deaf ears. At St. Elisabeth Hospital, Pound was treated well and was given a solitary cell where he could continue his work. His letters discouraged Rudge from visiting him, but she was eager to travel to America and ended up visiting him twice, once in 1952 and once in 1955. During this time, Pound received visits not only from his wife but also from loved ones. After the 1955 visits, their letters became cooler and more impersonal, and they rarely communicated from 1955 to 1959.

That coolness between 1955 and 1959 is the only indication that she might have had something against the other girlfriends, but little is known of Olga's views of Pound's "other women." She had no choice but to tolerate his wife's existence. Marcella Spann, an English teacher, began to write to him in St. Elisabeth, and she went to see him. After his release, Marcella Spann accompanied Ezra and Dorothy back to Italy as his secretary. In 1964, Spann and Pound edited the volume Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry .

Years in Venice

In 1958, Pound was declared incapable of standing in court and his civil rights were revoked. He was released from St. Elizabeth on the condition that he return to Europe. He quickly returned to Italy with his wife, who also became his legal guardian. The couple stayed with Pound's daughter, Mary, who was married to Boris de Rachewiltz at the time and lived on the Brunnenburg in South Tyrol . Pound's health was ruined and he spent a year in the Martinsbrunn Sanatorium in Merano . It is believed that during his time at St. Elizabeth he was treated with mind altering drugs that permanently altered his personality for the worse. In the spring of 1962, Pound, "depressed and ill, put his fate in Olga's hands". For the rest of his life he lived with her part of the year in Venice, part of it in Rapallo.

The last eleven years of Pound's life have been marked by his eccentricities , including a self-imposed vow of near-silence that Rudge faced while fully organizing his life and working as his secretary. Many pupils and students wanted to visit Pound and tried to get into the little house. Rudge developed a test to distinguish the real from the curious prospects. She asked interested visitors to recite a line from one of Pound's works. Those who could were allowed in, all others were turned away. Life with Pound was not easy for Olga, but her belief in him was absolute.

When Pound's wife Dorothy withdrew from the triangle, Olga had Pound completely to herself for the first time. Pound only saw Dorothy twice in his last four years. The couple rarely left their homes in Venice or Rapallo, however they went to London for TS Eliot's funeral in 1965 and to the United States in 1969.

After Joseph Brodsky , together with Susan Sontag , visited Olga Rudge in Venice in 1972 and completely exculpated Rudge Pound and even Mussolini, he retrospectively stated that he had encountered a "fascist by conviction" here.

Pound was hospitalized immediately after his eighty-seventh birthday party and died on November 1, 1972. Olga held his hand. She organized his funeral in the Isola di San Michele cemetery in Venice. After his death, Olga received a large archive with his papers and artifacts. Dorothy Pound died the following year.

Life after pound

Rudge was 78 when Pound died, the beginning of the last phase of her life. She became one of the Venice-based celebrities, quick-witted, intelligent, and cultured. She sat on many of the city's boards and organizations that hosted charity events and galas. She was a frequent guest at dolce vita parties, but continued to live in the same little house she had shared with Pound. To encourage young, aspiring poets and artists, she often offered them free use of the top floor of their home in return for small paintings or dedicated poems. Often she was urged to write an autobiography, but all she replied was "writes about pounds." She saw it as her "raison d'être" to promote Pound's work and to defend his reputation against accusations of anti-Semitism and fascism.

Olga's relationship with her daughter Mary was always complex: at the time of the birth, she actually wanted a son. Although the child came to Tyrolean farmers after the birth, Olga was later surprised that the child had developed into a “dialect-speaking farmer girl”. Rudge tried to improve this situation by being with Mary permanently when the child was ten years old. Language lessons, etiquette, and music lessons met with fierce opposition from the girl; she smashed a violin that Rudge gave to her daughter on a chicken coop. Mary found her mother aloof, impenetrable, and authoritative. Her relationship with her father was better. It wasn't until she was a teenager that she found out that she was born out of wedlock. Pound asked Mary to translate his epic work The Cantos into Italian. This was the beginning of her lifelong passion and study of Pound's work, and Mary later referred to the Cantos as "my Bible". Mary wrote her autobiography Discretions in 1971 (the title is a play on Pound's autobiography Indiscretions ). The revelations in the book "deeply hurt" Olga and she and her daughter did not speak to each other for several years, although she remained in regular contact with Mary's children, Siegfried de Rachewiltz and Patrizia de Rachewiltz de Vroom. However, the mother and daughter later overcame their estrangement.

Venice, with its many steps and the lack of motorized road vehicles, is a difficult city for the elderly and infirm. Since her family lived several hours away by car, Rudge became dependent on friends and acquaintances who had to organize the necessary things in life for them. In the end, she lost her memory more and more.

The Ezra Pound Foundation

It was always Olga's intention to set up a foundation to archive Pound's work in some form, but that was a task she always put off while she continued to support researchers of his work and organize several exhibitions about him. In 1986 an American friend, Jane Rylands, and a lawyer from Cleveland, Ohio , joined Olga to set up the Ezra Pound Foundation. Rudge sold most of her archives and home to the foundation for about seven thousand dollars . After the foundation was established, Rudge's family complained that this was not their intention and that the house and the archive were worth significantly more. Part of the problem was that at 91, Rudge became more and more forgetful and no longer knew what they had agreed on. In April 1988, Rudge wrote to the Cleveland attorney informing him that she wanted to dissolve the foundation. He replied that such a request was not provided for under the law. The papers were later deposited in the Beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library , Yale University, where they are housed to this day and the Ezra Pound Foundation was dissolved. A box of papers documenting the transfer of the archive from the Ezra Pound Foundation is not open to the public.

The last few years

At the time the Ezra Pound Foundation was formed, Rudge's friends became more and more concerned about her. The sculptor Joan Fitzgerald contacted Rudge's daughter, her son-in-law and the grandchildren, who immediately came to Venice. They found out that the ownership of their home "The Hidden Nest" had not yet gone to the foundation and were able to hold it back, but the archive of letters, not only from Pound but also from other great writers of the time, had disappeared. Rudge continued to live in the “Hidden Nest” for a short time, until old age and her infirmities forced her to leave Venice and to take her final home with her daughter on the Brunnenburg . Her family - her daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren - looked after and protected her, and Olga died there at the age of 100 on March 15, 1996.

She was buried next to Pound in Venice. Sculptor Joan Fitzgerald, a close friend of the couple, has engraved the following verse on her simple gravestone: “O God, what great kindness have we done in times past and forgotten it, That thou givest this wonder unto us, O God of waters? (Night Litany) ”(“ O God, what great goodness we have done in the past, and forget that you are giving us this miracle, O God of the waters? (Night Litany) ”). An alternate epitaph for Olga could be the one Pound wrote in 1966, which should be placed at the end of the last Canto, no matter what he wrote in the meantime:

legacy

Rudge took great pride in the fact that she had always been financially independent from Pound and continued her career as a concert violinist until World War II. Her advocacy for Vivaldi's works , the compilation of a catalog of his works, and an article in the Grove Dictionary of Music went a long way in establishing his current popularity. She discovered and published 309 Vivaldi concerts that were either lost or forgotten. However, it was mainly her role as Pound's muse, lover and master that is why she is still remembered today. Anne Conover's book Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound (2001) is one of the few that Olga recognizes for her own efforts and her role as Ezra Pound's muse. Shortly before his death, Pound wrote of Rudge, “There is more courage in Olga's little finger than in my whole carcass. She kept me alive for ten years for which nobody will thank her. "

That her acts

Olga's acts

of beauty

be remembered.

Her name was courage

and is written Olga.

That you can be aware of your actions

Olga's actions

of beauty

remember.

Her name was courage

& writes to Olga

The courage Pound referred to was her resolute and public loyalty to him after the war, when Pound was largely isolated due to his anti-Semitic and pro-fascist attitudes.

Web links

Commons : Olga Rudge  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Find a grave, San Michele cemetery in Venice

literature

• Anne Conover: Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well ..." , Yale Univ. Pr., 2012, English, ISBN 978-0-300-19142-4
• The Venice Library of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge , Glenn Horowitz, ISBN 978-0-9654020-2-6

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Barbara C. Eastman, Literary Review of Canada, describes her as "gifted"
2. ^ Ezra Pound: The Cantos: Bilingual First Edition , Arche Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7160-2654-0
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} John Berendt: The City of Falling Angels , Piper Paperback, 2013, ISBN 978-3-492-30150-3
4. ^ Digital collection of the "Beincke Rare Book and Manuscript Library" at Yale University
5. ↑ Ezra Pound, Marcella Spann: Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry , New Directions Paperbook, 1964, ISBN 978-0-8112-0155-1
6. ^ Joseph Brodsky: Conversations , edited by Cynthia L. Haven. Jackson, Miss .: University Press of Mississippi Literary Conversations Series, 2003, p. 196.
7. ^ Anne Conover: Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-300-08703-9
8. ↑ ME Grenander: Book review - Pull down thy Vanity: Psychiatry and its Discontents .
9. ^ Mary de Rachewiltz: Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions , New Directions Paperbook, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8112-1647-0