“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 move the 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 influenced in 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 of the darkness gathering over the rest of Europe. Here a synthetic sun shone on glittering synthetic beaches full of synthetically happy people. I said to myself, “I don’t care. This will be the last fling before I leave Europe forever. In one, two, or five years there will be a war, after which the Europe I know will be no more. Excepting, of course, Paris—Paris will never, must never, perish. Paris sees only civilizations roll over and past her; she will forever remain the art city. But Europe, the Europe of my youth, it is finished for a long time. Here, then, the last orgies before the flood!”
Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship on 30 January 1933 turned the tide. “He decides the handwriting’s on the wall,” Antheil recalled the moment in the third person, “two months later he’s back in America to stay.”
So an ocean separated George Antheil from Hedy Kiesler Mandl just as she, in Vienna, began to test the locks on her golden prison.
[FOUR]
Between Times
In the late 1920s, after he had revitalized his family’s armaments business, Fritz Mandl began investing in Austrian right-wing politics. To advance his social status as well as his business interests, he cultivated in particular Prince Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, an heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian throne who was a member of the Austrian parliament and a leader of the nationalist paramilitary Heimatschutz (Homeland Security) movement. Starhemberg, a year older than Mandl, had stood with Adolf Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923; the putsch’s failure put Hitler in prison and sent the disaffected prince back to Austria. By the end of the decade he had exhausted his family’s wealth. Thereafter Mandl supported him to buy his influence.
Mandl and Starhemberg converted the Heimatschutz movement into a private militia, the Heimwehr (Home Guard), which Mandl armed with surplus weapons shipped to Hirtenberger Patronen-Fabrik from Italy ostensibly to be reconditioned for the Hungarian army—as many as 100,000 Mannlicher rifles and two hundred Schwarzlose machine guns. A Vienna newspaper broke the story of the illicit diversion and the weapons were confiscated, but the Hirtenberger arms scandal helped inflame relations between the Left and the Right at a time when the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended parliament, invoked emergency rule, and outlawed the Socialist Party. “The Heimwehr and its principals, Starhemberg and Mandl,” a historian writes, “earned the undying hatred of the Austrian and international Left for their bloody role in the suppression of Vienna’s Socialists in February 1934.” Ostensibly (and cynically) searching for clandestine Socialist weapons caches, the Heimwehr provoked the Socialists into defending themselves in a series of bloody clashes centered on Vienna that resulted in more than a thousand casualties, including several hundred deaths.
After that brief civil war, Nazi sympathizers in Austria increased their agitation for a merger of Austria with Germany. Dollfuss turned to Mussolini for support. “Austria may be assured she can count on Italy at all times,” the Italian dictator responded in a speech on 18 March. “Italy will spare no effort to assist her.” Dollfuss pushed through a new, dictatorial Austrian constitution styled on the Italian Fascist model, which took effect at the beginning of May. As a reward for the backing of Starhemberg’s Heimwehr, Dollfuss appointed the young prince as his vice-chancellor, and when Austrian Nazis assassinated Dollfuss in an attempted putsch on 25 July 1934, Starhemberg briefly became Austrian head of state. Mussolini rewarded Mandl the following year, and indirectly funded the Heimwehr, by assigning the lucrative munitions contract for his Ethiopian campaign to Hirtenberger.