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To his credit, Antheil shared his income from performing with fellow artists. “George was a tremendously generous person and somewhat childlike,” his future wife would say of him, “and he helped a lot of artists at this time by buying paintings, inviting them to dinner, even supporting a few. It was all rather odd because he himself had no money, except what he made off the concerts, but there was some arrangement with his manager that he was paid in dollars, and dollars were at an incredible rate of exchange in the midst of the worst inflation.”

Igor Stravinsky, one of Antheil’s idols, turned up in Berlin that summer. He had been negotiating since the end of the Russian Revolution to reunite with his mother, still living in what was now the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities had finally agreed to allow her to emigrate, and she was due to arrive on a Soviet ship at Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), then a German port on the Baltic Sea, ninety miles northeast of Berlin. The Russian composer, who knew he had to meet his mother on the dock and personally shepherd her through German immigration or risk her deportation back to the U.S.S.R., had expected to wait in Berlin for no more than a week. Repeated delays in the ship’s departure kept him waiting there for two months. When Antheil presented himself one morning at the Russischer Hof as an American composer and an admirer, Stravinsky welcomed him. They had breakfast together; Antheil showed Stravinsky the most Stravinsky-like of his compositions; Stravinsky asked him to lunch the next day. “Thereafter,” Antheil perhaps exaggerates, “for two straight months, he and I had lunch together (and also, more often than not, breakfast, dinner, and supper), talking about everything in the contemporary world of music.” In particular they talked “about mechanistic and percussive music,” which was the kind Antheil was beginning to compose. When Stravinsky’s mother finally arrived and the composer prepared to return with her to Paris, he offered to arrange a piano concert there for Antheil. “You play my music exactly as I wish it to be played,” Antheil recalled him saying. “Really, I wish you would decide to come to Paris.”

And so Antheil would, but not just yet. Settled that late autumn in a furnished apartment in the Berlin suburbs, waiting out the weeks until his midwinter concert tour would begin, he bought himself “an enormous fur coat made of Siberian cat,” learned that the German fighter ace Rudolf Schultz-Dornburg, now the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, wanted to perform his First Symphony, and fell in love with the young Hungarian woman who would share his life, “a certain girl called Boski.”

Boski (pronounced BESH-key) Markus was named after Elizabeth of Austria—Sissy, the same whom Hedy would play in Vienna in 1933. “I happened to be born in a little summer resort outside of Budapest,” she recalled, “which was the summer residence of the Empress Elizabeth of Hungary-Austria… so my parents very imaginatively named me Elizabeth, which in Hungarian is Erzsebet or abbreviated: Boski.” Antheil first saw her in a café near his apartment; she was simply dressed, “dark, had high cheekbones, but otherwise was delicately, rather sensitively beautiful.” He asked around about her. A mutual acquaintance waved him off—she was “related to various well-to-do Viennese and Budapest families,” the woman told him, but had “turned radical and run away from her family.” She had been involved with the Communist revolution in Hungary after the war “and barely escaped Budapest with her life after its downfall.” She was “only eighteen or nineteen, wild, untamable,” a student at the University of Berlin. “She will hate you for an American capitalist,” the woman concluded. A man who liked a challenge, Antheil was sold.

He invited Boski to the premiere of his First Symphony, assuming she’d be impressed, but she didn’t like his music and left early. Undaunted, he arranged with their mutual friend to meet the two women for dinner two days before Christmas. He was due to leave on the midnight train to Paris, where Stravinsky had made good on his promise to set him up with a concert during Christmas week. When the mutual friend stepped out to make a phone call, Antheil sprang his plan on Boski: Christmas together in Paris. Nothing improper, he promised, just good fun. She confounded him by accepting the date but rejecting the location: the French were still denying visas to the citizens of their former Great War enemies, of which Hungary was one. Antheil was stuck. Either he played truant from performing for Stravinsky, or he revealed to Boski that their trip to Paris was an addendum to a concert commitment. “I was thunderstruck,” he writes. “Boski Markus had said ‘All right.’ That was the main thing. Let Stravinsky wait.”

Stravinsky did not take kindly to waiting. He substituted a French pianist, Jean Wiener, whom he praises in his autobiography without mentioning Antheil. But George and Boski began a lifelong relationship across a Christmas spent on the farm of an aunt of his in Poland.

It took the rest of the winter to work past Boski’s resistance. “She represented much of that war-torn, disillusioned Europe of 1923,” Antheil writes; “I, a young, hopeful, but utterly naïve America of the same period.” Boski recalled that “everybody was terribly poor at this time in Germany, and very, very bitter.” The losses of the war, the punitive reparations that the victors had demanded, the worsening hyperinflation, all contributed to the German mood, which was turning violent. The Weimar Republic’s foreign minister Walther Rathenau, though a nationalist himself, had been assassinated by two ultranationalist army officers the previous June. The small but burgeoning Nazi Party was mobilizing ever-larger rallies. Boski’s conflict between head and heart was so severe that she deliberately overdosed on morphine in the early spring. Antheil, guilt stricken, took the near suicide for a sign he should quit concertizing and begin full-time composing. When Boski was back on her feet, he pledged himself to her and proposed they move to Paris and live together.

They did not move immediately. Antheil had several more concert engagements to fulfill, money in the bank. Across the spring he also found time to write a sonata he called Death of Machines and another, for his new love, called Sonata Sauvage. “When I later played it in Paris,” he writes, “[it] caused a riot; if one may consider music able to represent anything visual, one might poetically consider that it was a portrait of her… because I habitually visualized her as a Mongolian-Hungarian amazon riding over an ancient ‘pusta’ full tilt.” Pusta in Hungarian means plain, a broad grassland like the buffalo plains of North America. Boski was petite for an Amazon, barely five feet tall.

———

“We arrived in Paris in the middle of June,” she remembered, “and the first night we were there, we went to the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt to see and hear the Diaghilev ballet performing Stravinsky’s Les noces. What a magical beginning.” Les noces—The Wedding—had given Stravinsky great trouble. He put the libretto together himself, mining a collection of old Russian wedding songs. Conceiving a dance cantata—a ballet with song—he originally tried to score it for full orchestra, “which I gave up almost at once in view of the elaborate apparatus that the complexity of the form demanded.” Next he tried a smaller ensemble. “I began a score which required massed polyphonic effects: a mechanical piano and an electrically driven harmonium, a section of percussion instruments, and two Hungarian cimbaloms [that is, concert hammered dulcimers].” He worried that it would be difficult to synchronize the mechanical instruments with singers and the instruments played live by musicians. To see if the combination worked, he orchestrated the first two scenes. He was unhappy with the result; it “was all pure loss,” he said, and he “did not touch Les noces again for four years.” When Diaghilev asked for a new ballet for his Paris-based Ballets Russes, Stravinsky resuscitated Les noces, this time instrumenting it for multiple pianos, timbals, bells, and xylophones, “none of which instruments gives a precise note.” Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava, choreographed it. (“In contrast to her brother,” Stravinsky writes acidly in his 1936 Autobiography, she was “gifted with a real talent for choreographic creation.”) Les noces was performed that June 1923 to great acclaim. “Absolutely breathtaking,” Boski praised it, “and the glitter and joyousness of the audience, after bleak Berlin, was like champagne.”