Free Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes Page A

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 movethe 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 influencedin 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