Who precisely was responsible for the now-classic art film Ballet mécanique has been a subject of debate for more than eighty years. Murphy and Man Ray evidently contributed more mise-en-scène and footage than the French artist Fernand Léger, to whom the film is usually credited. What no one disputes is that Antheil signed on later in 1923 to write the film score and produced a score that was twice as long as the film and never cut or synced to fit. Boski’s recollection of the informality of the film’s production is probably as accurate as any. “Even though the idea of the film and music called Ballet mécanique was to be a joint conception of Léger, Dudley Murphy and George,” she writes, “it seems to me everyone, in their individual manner, went their own way. George got so enthused about composing the music that any synchronization between objects of the film and tone clusters and tempo of music must be considered purely coincidental. But this was nothing that bothered us in those days, things didn’t have to ‘fit’ as they do in commercial pictures, as long as essentially they had an esthetic connection.”
Before Antheil could begin work on the film music, he wrote Rudge’s two sonatas and practiced them extensively with her. Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap’s partner and the editor of the Little Review, invited him to perform on the opening program of the Ballets Suédois—the Swedish Ballet company—on 4 October 1923. Antheil knew the occasion was second in importance only to the Ballets Russes as an annual Parisian cultural event. He signed on to play several of his recent compositions: the Sonata Sauvage, his Airplane Sonata, a two-minute, four-movement sonatina called Death of Machines, and his Mechanisms, composed for the player piano. (“George was writing his Mechanisms for a hard new age,” Boski recalled of its composition the previous year, “and I still remember his talking about the future when one central recording station would be blasting talks [and] music over a whole city.”)
In his memoirs Antheil would present the riot that broke out during his Ballets Suédois concert as spontaneous, but in fact it had been set up by another Parisian filmmaker, Marcel L’Herbier, to create a scene for a film he was making, L’inhumaine, which showcased the French opera singer Georgette Leblanc. Sylvia Beach’s partner, Adrienne Monnier, confirms that Antheil had not been informed in advance that he was intended to bait a riot: “Georgette Leblanc, back from America, knew through her friend Margaret Anderson that Antheil’s music always caused a scandal; and if it caused a scandal in New York, what was it going to be like in Paris!… Antheil had believed that they had seriously asked him to play his most ‘advanced’ music; when he saw the trick, he was not angry, he had a lot of fun.” L’Herbier had sent out several thousand concert invitations to notable Parisians. As a result, Antheil writes, “the theater, the famous Champs Elysees Theater, was crowded with the most famous personages of the day, among others Picasso, Stravinsky, [the French composer Georges] Auric, Milhaud, James Joyce, Erik Satie, Man Ray, Diaghileff, Miró, Arthur Rubenstein, Ford Madox Ford, and unnumbered others. They had not come to hear me, but to see the opening of the ballets.”
They heard very little. “The uproar was such,” Boski said, “that after [George] started to play one of his ‘mechanisms’ nobody could really hear very much…. The riot was tremendous. Not being George’s wife officially, I was seated way up in the balcony and was really scared, when people started to throw things and screaming and yelling, that they might hurt George. But he was used to this and kept on playing as cool as can be. He seemed too slight and almost childlike, calmly playing the piano, not paying the slightest attention to all the commotion.” Antheil registered the fighting around him but managed to hear what he hoped to hear as welclass="underline"
I now plunged into my “Mechanisms.” Then bedlam really did break loose. People now punched one another freely. Nobody remained in his seat. One wave of persons seemed about to break over the other wave. That’s the way a riot commences, one wave over the other. People were fighting in the aisles, yelling, clapping, hooting! Pandemonium!
I suddenly heard Satie’s shrill voice saying, “Quelle precision! Quelle precision! [What precision!] Bravo! Bravo!” And he kept clapping his little gloved hands. Milhaud now was clapping, definitely clapping.
By this time some people in the galleries were pulling up the seats and dropping them down into the orchestra; the police entered, and any number of surrealists, society personages, and people of all descriptions were arrested.
I finished the “Mechanisms” as calm as a cucumber.
Paris hadn’t had such a good time since the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Sacre du Printemps.” As Jack Benny would have said: “Boy, they loved me in Paris!”
A contemporary reviewer reveals that Antheil’s version of the riot leaves out a restaging that was called for L’Herbier’s film:
After the finish of the first movement of the “sonata” the Champs-Elysees was the scene of the greatest musical riot since the performance of the “Sacre du Printemps” eleven years ago. After the first movement no one heard a note, except in the infrequent lulls: The audience shouted itself quite hoarse with both indignation with the composer and indignation with the others in the audience who prevented them from hearing….
[Then] the master of ceremonies came out to announce that motion pictures would now be taken of the audience, and would they be so kind as to reproduce the riot which had just taken place when Monsieur Antheil had played. The audience, in a fighting spirit, was so kind, with the result that many famous faces were immortalized behind clapping and enthusiastic hands—those whose approval it is hardest to earn.
The scene of staged riot duly appeared the following year in L’Herbier’s film. Antheil accomplished his purpose as well. “Satie came out in my favor, and, as he and Cocteau were then the artistic arbitrators of Paris, I was famous overnight.”
There remained his concert with Olga Rudge, which was held at the Salle du Conservatoire in Paris’s 9th arrondissement on 11 December 1923. This event was probably the occasion that Aaron Copland recalled “where Antheil played, and Ezra Pound, with his striking red beard much in evidence, passionately turned pages.”
And then, finally, Antheil was free to spend the rest of the winter and spring composing the music for Ballet mécanique, except that by then it had enlarged in his mind beyond a film score into a showpiece. “My first big work,” he wrote to a childhood friend. “Scored for countless numbers of player pianos. All percussive. Like machines. All efficiency. NO LOVE. Written without sympathy. Written cold as an army operates. Revolutionary as nothing has been revolutionary.”
[THREE]
Mechanisms
The film Ballet mécanique premiered in Vienna on 24 September 1924, without George Antheil’s music. As late as March 1926, when the film was screened at the London Film Society, a note in the program apologized for the missing soundtrack: “Mr. George Antheil was engaged in the composition of music for this picture but, according to Mr. Léger, his music is not likely to be suitably ready for some time and a jazz accompaniment suggested by Mr. Léger will accordingly be played instead.” The music was written by then—Antheil recalled composing the greater part of it “during the winter of 1923–24”—but it had grown from a film score into a major composition. “The work had really sprung from previous inspiration,” Antheil explained, “derived from its three predecessors: the ‘Sonata Sauvage,’ the ‘Airplane Sonata,’ and the ‘Mechanisms’—to say nothing of my microscopic sonatina, ‘Death of Machines.’ But it was a work of greater length and orchestration; it also said more exactly what I wanted to say in this medium.”