George Antheil - Berlin and Paris

Berlin and Paris

On May 30, 1922, at the age of 21, Antheil sailed for Europe to make his name as "a new ultra-modern pianist composer" and a "futurist terrible"." He had engaged Leo Ornstein's manager, and opened his European career with a concert at Wigmore Hall. The concert featured works by Claude Debussy and Stravinsky, as well as his own compositions.

He spent a year in Berlin, planning to work with Artur Schnabel, and gave concerts in Budapest, Vienna and at the Donaueschingen Festival. As he had desired, he achieved notoriety, but often had to pay the concert expenses out of his own pocket. His financial situation was not helped by Mrs. Bok's reduction of his stipend by 50 percent, though she often responded to requests to fund specific aspects of his concerts. He met Boski Markus, a Hungarian and the niece of the Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler who became his companion and whom he married in 1925.

In the fall of 1922, Antheil took advantage of a chance meeting to introduce himself to his idol Stravinsky in Berlin. They established a warm intimacy and the more established composer encouraged Antheil to move to Paris. He went as far as arranging a concert to launch Antheil's career in the French capital, but the younger man failed to show up, preferring to travel to Poland with Markus. The Antheils finally arrived in Paris in June 1923, in time to attend the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet Les Noces, but the relationship with Stravinsky did not survive for long. Stravinsky cut the younger man dead, having discovered that Antheil had boasted that "Stravinsky admired his work". The breach devastated Antheil, and was not ultimately repaired until 1941, when Stravinsky sent the family tickets to a concert he was giving in Hollywood.

Despite the inauspicious beginning, Antheil found Paris, at the time a center of musical and artistic innovation, to be a "green tender morning" compared to the "black night" of Berlin. The couple lived in a one bedroom apartment above Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Beach described him "as fellow with bangs, a squished nose and a big mouth with a grin in it. A regular American high school boy." She was very supportive, and introduced Antheil to her circle of friends and customers including Erik Satie, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virgil Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. Joyce and Pound were soon talking of an opera collaboration. Pound, in particular, was to become an extravagant supporter and promoter of Antheil and his work, comparing him variously to Stravinsky and James Cagney, and describing him as breaking down music to its "musical atom". Pound introduced Antheil to Jean Cocteau who in turn helped launch Antheil into the musical salons of Paris, and commissioned him to write three violin sonatas for his companion, Olga Rudge. In 1924 Pound published Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, as part of his campaign to boost Antheil's reputation. The book may have done Antheil more harm that good, and the composer was to distance himself from it in his memoir. Natalie Barney helped produce some original works, including the First String Quartet in 1925.

Antheil was asked to make his Paris debut at the opening of the Ballets suédois, an important Paris social event. He programmed several recent compositions, including the "Airplane Sonata", the "Sonata Sauvage" and "Mechanism". Halfway through his performance a riot broke out, much to Antheil's delight. According to Antheil "People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Pandemonium!... the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested...Paris hadn't had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. The riot was filmed and may in fact have been engineered, as the Marcel L'Herbier movie L'Inhumaine needed a riot scene set in a concert hall. In the audience were Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Francis Picabia. Antheil was delighted when Satie and Milhaud praised his music.

Reactions to his first performances were cool at best. His technique was loud, brazen, and percussive. Critics wrote that he hit the piano rather than played it, and indeed he often injured himself by doing so. As part of his "bad boy" behavior, Antheil provocatively pulled a revolver from his jacket and laid it on the piano.