Writing in a prophetic mood in one of the manifestos George published during this period in avant-garde periodicals like the Dutch art journal De Stijl—as time went on, he would prove to be gifted at prophecy—he encapsulated the giddy, febrile Paris mood in a phrase. “One day in the future,” he wrote, “we will make God in the heavens with electric lights.”
Boski remembered fondly the Vienna of the late 1920s, where Hedy was dropping out of school and preparing to storm the film studio barricades and where they crossed paths again without meeting:
We went to Vienna for George to finish [an] opera there. We had quite a wonderful time in Vienna which I don’t believe was ever as charming as in the late twenties. Finances were better, people were happily indolent, enjoying themselves. We had an apartment in the Prater Strasse, not a fashionable district, but very comfortable and near the Prater [city park]. We more or less introduced our Austrian friends to a game called poker, which they took up with great enthusiasm…. They finally got so good that we had to watch our step. They were composers, writers, executives of Universal Verlag, then the most influential publishing house in Europe. Everybody was very young, mostly under thirty and full of enthusiasm.
…We went to the opera or concerts practically every night.
But darkness was drifting across Germany and beginning to spill into Austria, and Fritz Mandl rode the black wave. “Fritz was immersed in the family arms business,” Time would report of Hedy’s husband-to-be. “His firm had a sharp reputation for circumventing the restrictions of the Allied Control Commissions. His own politics were opportunistic…. He backed Prince Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg and his fascist Home Guard [and] bet on [the Austrofascist federal chancellor Engelbert] Dollfuss and [the Italian dictator Benito] Mussolini to stave off Hitler.” The politics of postwar Austria, a historian writes, “are unintelligible except to a virtuoso,” but it’s clear at least that Mandl’s politics lined his pockets; Hirtenberger arms would rearm Austria and Germany and fuel the Italian slaughter of Ethiopians in that 1935–36 colonialist excursion.
The high point of George Antheil’s musical career, much to his enduring chagrin, was the grand public premiere of his Ballet mécanique—the freestanding composition, not the film theme music—in Paris in the twenty-five-hundred-seat Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 19 June 1926. With his patron’s substantial support Antheil hired the French conductor Vladimir Golschmann, who conducted for the Ballets Russes, eighty-five musicians, and Paris’s largest concert hall. “The only serious problem,” writes one of Antheil’s biographers, “was a score that called for sixteen mechanical pianos, all to be operated by cables attached to a master keyboard. It is doubtful if that many [player] pianos existed in all of France, and even if they did, bringing them together on one stage would have been a daunting task. [As an alternative] Antheil assembled eight grand pianos, engaged eight players, and wired up an amplifier to the master piano he would operate. As for the nonmusical instruments the score required, local hardware stores supplied saws, hammers, and electric bells; and from a flea market came two airplane propellers that would help bring the Ballet to a noisy and windy climax.”
Some have questioned if Antheil actually intended his composition to include sixteen synchronized player pianos or was only exaggerating for effect. A letter to Mrs. Bok, his patron, accompanying a copy of the Pianola score, which he sent her in December 1925, settles the question in favor of the full complement of pianos. “This is the first edition of the Ballet mécanique,” Antheil wrote, “and is limited to 20 copies. It is the 16-pianola part alone, none of the xylophones, drums, and other percussion being written into or cut into this part. These are the master rolls which run the 16 pianolas electrically from a common control (switching on 16 or 1, as might be necessary to the sonority) together with which the other percussion is synchronized.”
Synchronizing the player pianos electrically might have solved the problem, but no such control system existed at the time. The “cables” of Antheil’s biographer isn’t right either. A nonelectrical system would have required elaborate pneumatics worthy of a mighty pipe organ, which was not something that could be assembled at relatively short notice for a concert. Antheil explained many years afterward that the essential problem was getting enough fortissimo out of the piano part. “The idea of [sixteen] pianos,” he wrote in 1951, “had been to swell or amplify the original [part] when ‘fff’ was desirable; today the same effect may be had through four pianos and one microphone.” He solved the problem in 1926 by using eight grand pianos played by eight pianists who could be directed to play in synchrony; the synchronization mechanism was thus the human brain.
The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées concert, on a sweltering June evening, was one of the touchstone events of the 1920s in Paris. Ezra Pound had marshaled all his forces. Among those who filled the large hall were James and Nora Joyce and their two children; tall, top-hatted T. S. Eliot with the Princess di Bassiano; the wealthy salonist Natalie Barney with her temple of friendships; Diaghilev; Constantin Brancusi; the Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky; Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier; the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine; the writers William L. Shirer and Stuart Gilbert; Antheil’s unbathed and somewhat unhinged Philadelphia friend Lincoln Gillespie; the French poet Pierre Minet; the Antheils’ concierge, Madame Tisserand, looking like a duchess in a black dress with a face powdered white with bread flour and seated next to a real one, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre; Man Ray and his mistress, Alice Prin, better known as Kiki of Montparnasse, the woman whose iconic face centered Léger’s film; and many, many more. Of several eyewitness accounts of the Ballet mécanique portion of the concert, that of Antheil’s droll protégé Bravig Imbs is unsurpassed:
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.