There was a great deal of fuss while the orchestra arranged itself for this event. George appeared on the stage, pale and nervous, giving crisp directions to the movers who were pushing five pianos into place, and to the electricians who were arranging a loud-speaker to amplify the small electric fans that took the place of the airplane propellers. All these operations variously provoked fear, pity and amusement in the audience. Finally, George nodded his head, as a cue to Golschmann that everything was ready, and sat down at his piano with a grim expression on his face.
Within a few minutes, the concert became sheer bedlam. Above the mighty noise of the pianos and drums arose cat-calls and booing, shrieking and whistling, shouts of “thief” mixed with “bravo.” People began to call each other names and to forget that there was any music going on at all. I suffered with George, wishing that people would have at least the courtesy to stay quiet, but Golschmann was so furious he would not give up his baton, and continued to conduct imperturbably as though he were the dead centre of a whirlpool.
I caught the general fever of unrest myself.
“Do keep quiet, please,” I said to some of my particularly noisy neighbors.
“Shut your face, yourself,” they answered, and then started whistling, which is the supreme form of contempt in France.
Then, for an instant, there was a curious lull in the clamor and Ezra Pound took advantage of it to jump to his feet and yell, “Vous etes tous des imbéciles!”
He was shouted down from the gallery, of course, with many vulgar epithets, and the music continued monotonously and determinedly.
The Ballet began to seem to me like some monstrous abstract beast, battling with the nerves of the audience, and I began to wonder which would win out.…
The opposition reached its climax, though, when the loud-speaker began to function. It made as much noise as a dozen airplanes, and no amount of shouting could drown it completely. One fat bald old gentleman who had been particularly disagreeable would not be balked by this, however, and to the glee of the audience, lashed out his umbrella, opened it and pretended to be struggling against the imaginary gale of wind from the electric fans. His gesture was immediately copied by many more people in the audience until the theatre seemed decked with quite a sprinkling of black mushrooms.
Of course, when the Ballet was over, George got an ovation which was greater than the cat-calls, for everyone was willing to applaud a man who had at least accomplished something. He bowed and blushed and blushed and bowed and all his friends were very proud of him.
In the “Manifest der Musico-Mechanico” he published in De Stijl in 1924 (but wrote in Berlin in 1922), Antheil had envisioned a future music enriched with new sonics through the use of mechanical reproduction, a prediction that his experiments with synchronized multiple instruments and player-piano technology would encourage and support:
We shall see orchestral machines with a thousand new sounds, with thousands of new euphonies, as opposed to the present day’s simple sounds of strings, brass, and woodwinds. It is only a short step until all [musical performance] can be perforated onto a roll of paper. Of course, we will find sentimental people who will object that there will then be no more of these wonderful imprecisions in performance. But, dear friends, these can be added to the paper roll! Do not object; you can have what you want.
At that time the paper roll and the player piano were the most reliable mechanisms for accomplishing his ends. But the player piano, which had accounted for more than half of all pianos manufactured in the United States in 1919, was already in steep decline as the new technology of radio emerged to replace it, providing a far larger range of musical performances from an instrument that required no training or effort to operate. Five thousand radios sold in 1920 became 2.5 million sold in 1924; 30 radio stations in the United States in 1922 had become 606 radio stations in the United States by 1929. In 1932, with the disaster of the Great Depression, Americans bought only two thousand player pianos.
Player pianos might be obsolete. The player-piano roll, however, was an early system of digital control, like the punched-card control system of the early-nineteenth-century Jacquard loom from which it ultimately derived. Antheil did not forget its usefulness. “And what will the music of the future be?” he asked in an essay written in Tunis during the summer following the Paris Ballet mécanique performance. “It will be machinery … never fear that. But silent machinery, dreams, spaces which the heart cannot fill.”
His Ballet mécanique encountered a far more hostile reception in New York in 1927 than it had in Paris in 1926. Donald Friede, a wealthy young American publisher who had the unusual distinction of having been thrown successively out of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, invited Antheil to give a concert in Carnegie Hall, assumed all expenses, and assured Antheil he would make a profit on the venture. Antheil agreed and arrived with Boski in March 1927 for the 10 April event.
Boski was amazed at New York; it seemed to her both remote and ultramodern:
When I first came to New York with George on that famous Ballet Mecanique outing, we were often taken to night clubs, speakeasies, to Harlem, all of which left me with a feeling of a fascinating, rather savage land, an ancient Babylon projected into the future. The skyscrapers were like deep canyons, and New York had a particular, deep acrid smell, fanned by the wind from the river, steam heat coming out from underneath the pavement like so many fires and smoke coming from Hades.…
I could not get over the “newness” of everything in N.Y. Furniture, rugs, entrance halls with doormen in elegant uniforms, the buildings all new (at least where we lived) and the smell of newness. Like tomorrow. It was really futuristic, at least the way some European artists visualized the cities of the future.
Friede, at twenty-five in 1927 a year younger than Antheil, was good at publicity and spared no expense. Ford Madox Ford wrote a profile of Antheil for Vanity Fair. Man Ray and Berenice Abbott photographed the heralded young composer. Miguel Covarrubias and William Cotton drew caricatures. James M. Cain, at that time an editorial writer for the New York World, panned the concert in advance, sight unseen, then reversed himself and praised it after meeting the Antheils and sitting through a rehearsal. “The eleven grand pianos,” Friede writes—one for Antheil, ten for his slaved counterparts—“made a magnificent picture in the huge Welte-Mignon [piano] studios.… Even the mechanical problems proved to be not too difficult. We found an electrician who undertook to make the battery of electric bells that we needed. We commissioned a wind machine with a regulation airplane propeller. And we started our search for a real fire siren.” They had more difficulty with the Jazz Symphony, since it turned out that the pianist and conductor W. C. Handy couldn’t read an orchestra score.
The concert sold out within twenty-four hours of its announcement. “Everybody wanted to meet Antheil,” Friede notes, which meant almost nightly parties during the Antheils’ entire stay in New York. The most memorable, says Friede, was at “Theodore Dreiser’s enormous studio on Fifty-seventh Street,” where Dreiser pumped Antheil dry of information about his music and his life. More intimately, a Harlem choir led by the composer and choirmaster Hall Johnson crowded into Friede’s apartment one evening and sang spirituals until guests and chorus both were exhausted.
Unintentionally, Friede had paved the way for disaster with all his publicity. “The trouble was that I was doing for a musical event what I would normally do for a book. And I did not realize that one by one I was alienating all the critics, all the people who were really important to [Antheil], all the people who had contributed toward making it possible for him to write his music without any financial worries, by turning a serious performance into a circus.”
The performance itself, on a Sunday evening, was something of a circus. The real airplane propeller in use in the performance had been aimed downstage, directly at the audience, instead of upstage, where the blast of air it generated could collide and disperse. “When it reached full power,” writes Frie
de, “it was disastrous. People clutched their programs, and women held onto their hats with both hands. Someone in the direct line of the wind tied a handkerchief to his cane and waved it wildly in the air in a sign of surrender.” The percussionist quickly slowed the motor, “but the damage had been done. Laughter is contagious, and besides we had spent weeks building up the fact that there had been riots in Paris at the first performance of this number. Now everybody … wanted to get into the act. The riot they put on, however, was completely synthetic. [The conductor] turned to glare at the noisemakers, and they shut up at once. Then the more conservative members of the audience decided that they had had enough. They started to leave in droves. It was an agonizing experience for Antheil, and I, back in my box once more, could not help but feel for him. I knew he wished, as I did most fervently, that we had never heard of each other.”
Antheil was devastated, not least because of the reports he knew Mrs. Bok would hear and read. He wrote to her the next day, mentioning a second concert scheduled for Wednesday that was nearly sold out as well. “The unheard-of viciousness of the critical press,” he warned his patron, “which even went as far as prevarication in minimizing even the scandal of the performance, which was a great one … has earned me … no doubt justly from their viewpoint … the suspicion of the concert agencies, and scotched for the moment my return to America this autumn under any except circus auspices.” He had, he said, “no prospect except that of a sticky summer in Paris as a recreation from all this rehearsing, hatreds, ridicule, strain of appearing in public, etc. Worse, worse, worst of all there is no prospect now of my coming over in my piano concerto next season and earning some money. They do not want that … they want sensations, and I won’t do it at any cost.”
“This year I made two mistakes,” he wrote to her further a few days later: “I came to America too soon, and I had played a program of my earliest and most sensational works. [Now] I am leaving America again as an exile, and my heart is indeed breaking this time.” Of course he was seeking her support, and for a few more years she gave it.
Antheil sailed back to France with Boski and Friede before the end of April, he said, “heartsick and broke.” By then, he had decided he was finished with the kind of music, time structured rather than tonal, that Ballet mécanique represented. In his 1945 memoir, Bad Boy of Music, he would move the end of that first phase of his compositional career back to 1924, when he completed Ballet, three years before the Carnegie Hall disaster. In a letter to Mrs. Bok just before he sailed, however, he announced the decision that he later backdated:
America has received a blow … the length and viciousness … the absolutely unheard-of viciousness of the attacks of the critics … viewed from a distance is very enheartening. The Ballet Mecanique has floored them. Only yesterday a critic said that after the B.M. he cannot hear [the French-born American composer Edgard] Varèse anymore.
The B.M. being the height, and best expression of the kind of thing that all the rest of these people are trying to do, automatically kills interest in all the rest of it, and puts a stop to the movement forever, for it can never never be repeated. In their day Sacre du Printemps and Tristan und Isolde were the high points of their day, and as their beauty (or ugliness, just as you wish, they are the same) could not be repeated in another work, it represented the height of its movement, and consequently is deceased. The Ballet Mecanique is the end of a period: one can stand upon one’s head, or do what one likes, but it is there.
The timing of Antheil’s new phase, and its presumably intentional backdating in his autobiography, suggest that his decision to compose more conventional music was influenced in part by the brutal New York reception of his Ballet mécanique. Whether or not that was so, across the next six years, living once again in Paris, Antheil continued to flourish musically. “I changed my musical style radically in 1927,” he wrote in an autobiographical note some years later, “deciding upon a lyric style and the investigation of operatic possibilities. I embarked upon an opera, Transatlantic, which subsequently was accepted by the Frankfurter Opera a/M. and given there in May 1930. It was successful. I became involved in other theatrical productions, including music for a play, Oedipus, given at the Berlin Staatstheater, and another play, Fighting the Waves, by W. B. Yeats, given during this 1928–31 period at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin by Yeats himself.” He wrote a second opera as well, Helen Retires; a Concert for Chamber Orchestra; his Second Symphony and Second String Quartet; and, augury of a parallel career to come, a pseudonymous crime novel, Death in the Dark, that T. S. Eliot, by then an editor at Faber and Faber, published. No one ever said George Antheil was lazy.
A Guggenheim Fellowship sustained the Antheils in 1932, but they saw the larger European disaster forming. They moved to the Riviera that summer and rented a beautiful house:
The place was well calculated to make one forget. The Riviera, in 1932, was a gorgeous soundproofed paradise, utterly oblivious of the darkness gathering over the rest of Europe. Here a synthetic sun shone on glittering synthetic beaches full of synthetically happy people. I said to myself, “I don’t care. This will be the last fling before I leave Europe forever. In one, two, or five years there will be a war, after which the Europe I know will be no more. Excepting, of course, Paris—Paris will never, must never, perish. Paris sees only civilizations roll over and past her; she will forever remain the art city. But Europe, the Europe of my youth, it is finished for a long time. Here, then, the last orgies before the flood!”
Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship on 30 January 1933 turned the tide. “He decides the handwriting’s on the wall,” Antheil recalled the moment in the third person, “two months later he’s back in America to stay.”
So an ocean separated George Antheil from Hedy Kiesler Mandl just as she, in Vienna, began to test the locks on her golden prison.
[FOUR]
Between Times
In the late 1920s, after he had revitalized his family’s armaments business, Fritz Mandl began investing in Austrian right-wing politics. To advance his social status as well as his business interests, he cultivated in particular Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, an heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian throne who was a member of the Austrian parliament and a leader of the nationalist paramilitary Heimatschutz (Homeland Security) movement. Starhemberg, a year older than Mandl, had stood with Adolf Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923; the putsch’s failure put Hitler in prison and sent the disaffected prince back to Austria. By the end of the decade he had exhausted his family’s wealth. Thereafter Mandl supported him to buy his influence.
Mandl and Starhemberg converted the Heimatschutz movement into a private militia, the Heimwehr (Home Guard), which Mandl armed with surplus weapons shipped to Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik from Italy ostensibly to be reconditioned for the Hungarian army—as many as 100,000 Mannlicher rifles and two hundred Schwarzlose machine guns. A Vienna newspaper broke the story of the illicit diversion and the weapons were confiscated, but the Hirtenberger arms scandal helped inflame relations between the Left and the Right at a time when the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended parliament, invoked emergency rule, and outlawed the Socialist Party. “The Heimwehr and its principals, Starhemberg and Mandl,” a historian writes, “earned the undying hatred of the Austrian and international Left for their bloody role in the suppression of Vienna’s Socialists in February 1934.” Ostensibly (and cynically) searching for clandestine Socialist weapons caches, the Heimwehr provoked the Socialists into defending themselves in a series of bloody clashes centered on Vienna that resulted in more than a thousand casualties, including several hundred deaths.
After that brief civil war, Nazi sympathizers in Austria increased their agitation for a merger of Austria with Germany. Dollfuss turned to Mussolini for support. “Austria may be assured she can count on Italy at all times,” the Italian dictator responded in a speech on 18 March. “Italy will spare no effort to assist her.” Dollfuss push
ed through a new, dictatorial Austrian constitution styled on the Italian Fascist model, which took effect at the beginning of May. As a reward for the backing of Starhemberg’s Heimwehr, Dollfuss appointed the young prince as his vice-chancellor, and when Austrian Nazis assassinated Dollfuss in an attempted putsch on 25 July 1934, Starhemberg briefly became Austrian head of state. Mussolini rewarded Mandl the following year, and indirectly funded the Heimwehr, by assigning the lucrative munitions contract for his Ethiopian campaign to Hirtenberger.
“Mandl also sold arms to Bolivia during the Chaco War,” the historian writes—a brutal war fought from 1932 to 1935 between Bolivia and Paraguay—and reportedly armed both sides in the Spanish Civil War that began in July 1936. And despite his support of the Austrian nationalist Heimwehr, Mandl sold munitions and munitions development services to Nazi Germany during these years as well.
Mandl revealed at least some of his business activities to his wife. “He would often ask my advice about matters of importance,” Hedy recalled. “I think he asked me not only because he had, though he would not ever admit it, a respect for my judgment, but also because he knew that I was never afraid to tell him the truth. And a man in his position cannot often be sure that people will tell him the truth.”
He was not always happy with Hedy’s response, however:
Sometimes he would get flaming angry at me for speaking the truth to him. Once we had one of our most terrible battles because I told him that I couldn’t bear his power—I couldn’t bear it that he could buy everyone and everything. I told him that there were things he couldn’t buy, had he ever thought of that … that there are things no one can buy, devotion and loyalty and love—yes, and love, I said. And some day, I warned him, he would find this out and on that day he would be lonely and without friends. He was in a rage with me. But just the same he always came back to me for my opinion.