BAD BOY OF MUSIC by GEORGE ANTHEIL THE NATIONAL BOOK ASSOCIATION HUTCHINSON & CO. (Publishers) LTD 4-7 RED LION COURT, FLBET ST., LONDON B.c.4 Fir,t Publi,h,d A"""t 1947 NATIONAL BOOK ASSOCIATIONEDITION April 1949 Considering that I am a person who lacks no possible human failing, I have been constantly amazed by Copland's generosity. Encountering a particular example of it one day, I said to him in wonder and curiosity: uwercn't you ever jealous of anyone'!" His reply was, "When I first went to Paris I was jealous of Antheil's piano playing-it was so brilliant; he could demonstrate so well what he wanted to do." From Oornr Levant's "A Smattering of Ignorance." CONTENTS I. BERLIN Chapter I Concert Pianist Page 9 11 Donaueschingen 13 111 Berlin 27 1v Igor Stravinsky 30 v Preliminary Studies in Life 38 v1 The Girl from the Dream 43 VII Music Critics 52 v111 Standard-Equipment Concert 57 1x Christmas in Poland 62 x Preparation for Paris 75 II. PARIS x1 First Evening 80 xn 12, Rue de l'Odeon 89 XIII Salons de Paris 95 xiv The Music of Precision 107 xv James Joyce and Others 116 XVI La Vie de la Boheme 126 xv11 Venus Returns to Tunisia 132 xv111 Parisian Apex 139 x1x Carnegie Hall of Unsacred Memory 150 xx New Start: Grand Opera for Germany 158 7 Ill. VI EN NA Page 170 ChapterXXI Viennain the Spring 175 XXII Idea at Twilight,or Rocks of the Sirens 184 XXUI Final Waltzesin the Prater 191 XXIV Two Grand Operas Premiered 201 XXV The DissolvingFish of Europe IV. NEW YORK XXVI New Yark is not Paris 211 V. HOLLYWOOD XXVII New York is not America 219 XXVIJl King of the Surrealistsunder an Umbrella 226 XXIX Peter Enters Family-and Consequences 237 XXX I Am Not a BusinessMan 244 XXXI My Brother's UntimelyDeath 253 XXXII Hedy Lamarr and I Invent and Patent a Radio Torpedo 254 XXXIII Turkey Talk by Bosk.i into Symphony Number Four 259 XXXIV SymphonyPerformance Again! 265 XXXV Mother Knows Best 269 XXXVI I've Learned . • . a Little 275 XXXVII Yesterdayand To-day and To-morrow 280 lnd•x 287 8 /'ART ONE BERLIN CHAPTER I CONCERT PIANIST THE sweat-great slithering streams of it-pours down you. It runs down your legs, down the leg that is pedalling the sostenuto pedal, down the other leg. It oozes out all over your chest, flows down the binding around your middle where your full-dress pants soak it up. It flows everywhere, down your arms, down your hands. You become afraid lest too much perspiration will wet your hands too much, make them slide on the black keys, which are too narrow; you are playing at about a hundred miles a minute. But somehow they don't. As long as they don't you know you're all right. You're going good, well-oiled like an engine. Not too much sweat, not too little. It's only when you suddenly stop perspiring that your forearms go dull. This is the one thing that every concert pianist dreads, has night­ mares about. You never can tell when it's going to happen; it happens once in a hundred concerts. but it happens. When it happens it starts with a stiffness in the upper forearm. Then it travels down the forearm to your wrist, your hand, your fingers. The Bach fugue or the Chopin sonata beneath those fingers commences developing faults-little ones, then big ones You feel the sudden surprise of the audience, its un­ favourable reaction. The sweat all over your body, inside of that heavy woollen black suit with a stiff shirt and collar beneath it, freezes. You crawl over the onrushing piano passages in slow motion. Your fingers are in ten little steel strait-jackets .... But to-night, thank God, you are sweating, sweating "like a hog." As you turn the corner on the Bach fugue and near the home stretch, you think. "What a way to make a living!" Later. when the piece is finished and you've gotten up and bowed and sat down again and mopped up your brow and your all-important hands, you think, "I wish I were a prize-fighter. This next round with the Steinway would be a lot more comfortable in fighting trunks .... " In the intermission, between group one and group two, you go to your dressing-room and change every stitch you have on you: und_er­ wear, shirt, tie, socks, pants and tails. Your other clothes are soaking wet. You are twenty-two years old, trained down to the last pound like 9 . .. moke or drink and you_work_ six to a boxer. You do not o,e,-c,it, s_th 3 special keyboard m which the eight hours a day at a _P':\°o::hat when you come to your conce!'( keys are so hard to presli :iy to be riding a fleecy cloud, so easy 1s ~rand at nightyou seeBm,fte each concert, of course, you eat nothing ,ts keyboard acuon. e ore at all. 1 with you So does your manager. You have no tim.;f~':'gkl~~f0 ~:::anager see; to it that no young predatory females get y~~ !~;-a concert pianist. This was my life when I was twenty­ two years old. When I went to Europe it was not _veryl?ng after the 1914-18 war. 1 gave my first European concert m W1gmore.Hall, London on June 22, 1922.Soon alter I began the _concertI nottc!"1.that an elderly lady sat in the front row. I kept seemg her very d1stmctly. She had an enormousear trumpet in her ear _andshe ':"as _smdmg. I was playingChopin. The Chopm was gomg mto her ear trumpet and making her smile. I played a Mozart sonata. That made her smiletoo. Then I played some Schonbergand some pieces of ~y own. She looked mystified,shook the ear trumpet. Then she put 11 up to her ear again. listened,and looked very sour. She shook the ear trumpet again, this time but good. She listened again. No good. She shrugged her shoulders,put her enormousear trumpet in her bag and went out. Obviously,something was wrong with her ear trumpet. Further concertsin Europe were to depend upon the success of the Londonconcert It was a success.So my manager-a man who looked and Udkedso much like the film actor Sidney Greenstreet that from now on you can imagine him playing that role-booked me for Germany and points south-east. A few years earlier I had joined the United States aviation to becomea fig~tingl1yer in World World I. The war stopped before I got over, but n had been my original intention to shoot down as manY Germans as possible a~. giv~ the opportunity, to capture Kaiser WIiheimand Crown Prince Wilhelm during some spectacular feat 10 the last days of the war. Now I was about to go over into former enemy_country and, what was worse, to concertize in it. In all of my publicityfrom that time onwards I carefully omitted the fact that I ~ad at on~ume been acceptedfor combat duty in the budding United tates avra~on (then attached to the Signal Corps), and it still does not :[pearm any encyclopa:diaof music or musical dictionary. oreover, _I bought a small thirty-two automatic and when I arnved 10 Berlm I went to a tailor with a sketch for a' silken bolster 10 which was to lit neatly under my arm. (I had read ahout Chicago gangslcrs wearing their guns in this foshion.) Arching a brow. my Berlin t:iilor made the holster, which was comfortably padded. From then on my thirty-two automatic accompanied me everywhere, especially to concerts. Quilc a numlR·r of observers have commented on my coolness during v.,rious rin1ous concerts which I performed at during those first tumultuous years of the armistice between World War I 3nd \\'orld \\'ar 11. The rl!asonis \'cry simple: 1 was armed. In early 1923 I 011ccplayed a return engagement in Budapest which years later c:irncd me the highly valued friendship of Ben Hecht. Several weeks earlier I had played a concert at the Philharmonic in Budapest and the audience had rioted. That did not disturb me so much as the fact that because of this bedlam they had heard none of the music. So, at my second appearance, I walked out on the concert platform, bowed and spoke up: "Attendants, will you please close and lock the doors?" Alter this was done I reached in under my left armpit in approved American gangster fashion and produced my ugly little automatic. Without a further word I placed it on the front desk of my Steinway and proceeded with my concert. Every note was heard and, in a sense, I suppose I opened up the way in Hungary for modem music of a non-Bart6k-Kodaly variety. Years later, when I returned to America, Ben Hecht offered me the job of music director of the Hecht-MacArthur Productions after Oscar Levant had left it in despair. Ben says that when Oscar left him he suddenly recalled reading about the Budapest incident, investigated it, found it to be true and, as a result, decided that I alone was capable of filling any job abandoned by the immortal Oscar. I got the job and kept it. ... But that was in 1934, and we are still in 1923, when Hitler & Co. were cooking up their first shenanigans in Munich and were known to the concert-agency trade purely and simply as a bunch of hoodlums ...