Patrick Bade
George Antheil: The Bad Boy of Hollywood Music

Patrick Bade | George Antheil: The Bad Boy of Hollywood Music | 03.10.24

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- Well, George Antheil gloried in the image of being a bad boy. As you can see, he titled his autobiography, “Bad Boy of Music.” Early in his career, he used to go around with a revolver in his pocket, and he would very ostentatiously put it on top of the piano at his piano recitals as a kind of warning to his audiences. Early, very early in his career, when he was still in his early 20s, he was hailed as a genius and the great white hope of modern Western music. Sadly, he didn’t really turn out to be that, but he was certainly multi-talented, an extraordinary personality, and I’ve greatly enjoyed rereading his biography. It’s got the most incredible cast list. He just encountered the good and the great, everybody who was anybody in the artistic elites on both sides of the Atlantic. And he has wonderful stories to tell, I don’t know how reliable they all are but they’re certainly very, very entertaining.

He was born in the town of Trenton in New Jersey, and he often talked about his accent, “New Joisey,” I suppose it would be, he would’ve called it, in 1900. And again, it somehow seems appropriate that he was born in the first year of the new century. And he says that he was born next to a very noisy machine shop, and that he could hear the sound of whirling machines as a small child, and this affected him later. He also tells a story about living next to the state penitentiary. This is the building. And he says that two elderly ladies moved into their building and they thumped away on the piano very loudly night and day. In fact, what they were doing was covering up the sounds of inmates of the prison who were digging a tunnel to escape. So he tells this story, which sounds all very convincing and very dramatic. He says that that’s what gave him a taste also for rather percussive piano music.

But right at the end of the book, he describes a conversation he had with his mother, who saw this story and said, “What are you saying? "We didn’t live next to "the penitentiary at all, "we were half a mile away.” So he sort of leaves that as a kind of open question, whether that was a true story or an invention. So he showed early musical talent. He was taken on as a pupil by the Swiss composer, Ernest Bloch, who was so impressed by his talent that he actually gave back all the fees that he’d paid him. And he was obviously a very colourful and engaging personality. And he attracted the attention of this woman, Mary Louise Curtis Bok. She was a very wealthy music lover and patron, commissioned many new works. She funded the setting up of the Curtis Institute. Together with the Juilliard, those are the two most important music schools in America. Later in life, she married the violinist, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. And so, she gave him a stipend of £150 a month, which was enough to live on, and she continued to fund him in various ways for 19 years.

He is appropriately grateful to her. He wouldn’t have had the career he had without her help. So this is Philadelphia, and the great local conductor there was Stokowski, and Stokowski took an interest in him. And when he was just 22, Stokowski planned to premiere his first symphony. But in what became something of a pattern in his life, he hopped off to Europe just before the premiere. So the premiere actually didn’t happen in Europe. He decided that he wanted to try a career as a piano virtuoso in Europe. And he made his debut in the very genteel Wigmore Hall; Still there, still beloved by chamber music fans. A rather sort of arts and crafts, as I said, rather genteel interior. And he played a programme that include Debussy, and Stravinsky, and some of his own works at the end. And quite surprisingly, really, he got very good reviews. His technique, by all accounts, was a pretty hefty one. He… Very percussive, he really thumped the piano. And he boasts on several occasions that he… That on several occasions, he actually injured himself with his playing and left a trail of damaged and destroyed pianos throughout his career.

So he’s this very abrasive character. And you can s… This little caricature on the left, you can see of a violin, but with a saw, and is… Is the drawing of a violin and the thing to play it with. So he’s that generation that came to the fore immediately after the First World War, or some of them, I suppose, just before, who are reacting against the Fin de Siècle, or the exquisiteness of late 19th century art. They’re reacting against the Belle Epoque, they’re reacting against Romanticism. And he says in his autobiography, he felt that contemporary music was too full of deadwood, of the expression of emotions which, although real before 1914, were now obsolete, sickening even. So this is a kind of sentiment that’s expressed by many artists, not just musicians, around this period, particularly the futurists. He has clear connections in his aesthetic with futurism, and one of the slogans of futurism was “Kill the Moonlight.” So he then moved on to Berlin, and initially he had the idea of applying to the great pianist, Artur Schnabel, for lessons.

But that, in fact, never happened. He’s… This is Berlin. He gives quite vivid descriptions of it. This is post-First World War Berlin in the grip of terrible inflation, terrible poverty, women driven into prostitution just to feed themselves and so on; grim. And he actually didn’t like it very much. But what really made this stay in Berlin of several months was his connection with his hero, Igor Stravinsky, who remained his hero throughout the first part of his career. Stravinsky was there because he was awaiting from his… The arrival of his mother at the nearby Port of Szczecin. And she was negotiated to have a release from Soviet Russia, and there were lots of delays, and that kept Stravinsky around. And so, George Antheil saw him almost every day and forged initially quite a close friendship with him. And he was a young man of… I think “chutzpah,” that could have been his middle name. He really… As a young man, he was completely fearless. And he applied to have his first symphony premiered in the Berlin Philharmonic, this is what the Philharmonie looked like at the time, by a very distinguished German conductor, Rudolf Schulz-Dornburg, who conducted it. I mean, incredible, really.

A 23-year-old American boy who’d never had anything public performed, apart from the piano pieces he played at the Wigmore Hall, having his first symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. And it went down quite well. It got some quite good reviews… Mixed reviews, I would say. And he describes how the orchestra, this very, very distinguished orchestra, in the last movement, which is entitled “Ragtime,” they were actually laughing as they were playing it. And it is a very jolly music. But what I’d say is, like all of his music, essentially it’s derivative. That’s what I feel about him, that all he was… He became a very, very fine musical craftsman. He had an extraordinary facility. But his music was always really inspired by somebody else. I don’t feel that he ever developed a particularly distinctive, original voice. And so this “Ragtime” doesn’t sound very American. In fact, it sounds decidedly Russian. And those of you familiar with Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” will hear some clear echoes of that.

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But Stravinsky’s mother eventually arrived, and Stravinsky and his mother went to Paris. And Stravinsky promised to organise a concert. It was actually all set up in Paris for him to perform his own music. But once again, he actually copped out. He failed to turn up to Paris. And the reason he gives for that is that he had fallen in love with this young woman. She was a Hungarian, and her name was Boski Markus, and she was a niece of the great Austrian writer, Arthur Schnitzler. So he fell in love with her at first sight, and effectively stalked her and kind of wore her down. And she entered into a relationship with him, and they became lovers and companions for several years, and eventually married. And it was a marriage that lasted, and it seems to have been basically a very happy marriage. They had one son considerably later on. So, in fact, he went off to Budapest with her. And then later in 1923, he arrives in Paris. This is, I think, a photo.

Well, it’s some years later, but this is really how Paris would’ve looked when they arrived there. And he fell completely in love, both of them, with Paris. And so, there’s an awful lot about Paris in the book and everything he says about Paris, I very strongly identify with as I’m also very much in love with that city and can’t wait to get back there next Saturday. And so, this is Paris, of course, at a very exciting time. The Paris of what they call “Les Années Folles,” “The Crazy Years;” What in America is called “The Jazz Age.” A period of frenetic experimentalism, frenetic hedonism, and George Antheil fits perfectly into all of this. He’s living, of course, as every artist had to, every young artist at the time, in Montparnasse on the left bank, and he was frequenting Le Dome, where artists would congregate right up, I’d say, until the 1940s and 50s, that artists, writers, intellectuals lived out a lot of their lives in these cafes on the left bank.

And there’s a famous essay, of course, by Hemingway called “With Jules Pascin at Le Dome,” meeting the Bulgarian artist there, and the kind of rather loose and naughty atmosphere of these cafes. And he… The first music composed in Paris was a quintet. And he says in his autobiography that it’s called actually “Symphony For Five Instruments.” This was 1923. And he says, really, that this is inspired by his first impressions of Paris. He says, “It’s full of little themes "on our own street corner, "the cry of the old clothes man. "It is our summer of 1923.” It’s a very appealing, very attractive piece of music. One of my favourites, I would say.

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Still very Stravinskian. Well, he moved into this building, which is number 10, Rue de l'Odéon, still on the left bank. And as you can see, the ground floor was the legendary bookshop, “Shakespeare and Company,” run by the American, Sylvia Beach. And this photograph shows Sylvia in front of the restaurant, and Antheil, who’s quite athletic, climbing up on the shop sign to get into his apartment over the decor. And this was really an extraordinary, clever thing to do. Sylvia Beach was actually his landlady. And of course, Sylvia… Shakespeare and Company was where everybody met. The elite of Paris intellectuals met there. And so, this introduced him to people who are going to be very important for his career. He said he met everybody who’s anybody. Cocteau became a big . There’s Cocteau on the left; There was Nancy Cunard, who was a friend; Man Ray.

But it’s the book, and it’s… I wouldn’t say it’s obnoxiously name dropping, but every single… These are the people he knew, these are the people he met with. Every page of the book is bristling with famous names of Paris, and later of America. And there is a really amazing description of one particular in his flat. Initially, they had one room, but as he became more… Two and three rooms. But you have to imagine these six men all sitting together in the same small room, in that flat. There’s Hemingway, top left; Ezra Pound, top middle; James Joyce, top right; Wyndham Lewis, bottom left; Ford Madox Ford, bottom middle; and TS Elliot. So you’ve actually got top avant-garde writers in the world together, at least in the English language. And over a couple of pages is a very entertaining description of their appearance, the way they dressed, the way they behaved, and their different accents, the different way they spoke. And I wish I had time to read the whole thing to you but if you can get hold of the book, I think you can really enjoy that.

And in fact, Ezra Pound, who really took him up, and Ezra Pound was one of the people who hailed the young George Antheil as a genius and published this book. As you can see, the title, “Antheil: The Treatise on Harmony.” I mean, in his own autobiography later, he says actually that Ezra Pound hadn’t got a clue and the book was a load of rubbish, but it still did him a lot of good. It attracted a lot of attention to him. This is Ezra Pound’s mistress, who was quite a fine violinist, called Olga Rudge. And Ezra Pound commissioned two violin sonatas from George Antheil for Olga Rudge. So while he was writing them, he seems to have suffered a bit of a creative block. So he and Boski went off to Tunisia, and there’s a very interesting… Tunisia in the journey. They were seeing at the magical little village of Sidi Bou Said. I’ve stayed there many times myself in the 1990s. It is a little paradise, really, on a peninsula, and it overlooks the ancient city of Carthage. And one day they were walking through Sidi Bou Said on the slope down towards Carthage, and they walked past this house. And from the garden, they heard the sound of zither, so they were very curious. And they just walked into the garden and introduced themselves to this man, Baron d'Erlanger, Baron Frédéric d'Erlanger.

He’s a very fascinating character. Again, multi-talented, rather as Antheil was. And he’s a very good painter, he could have really had a career as a professional painter. He’s quite a good musician. But what he’s most famous for is as a musicologist. And so, it’s rather interesting. Here is a man from German-Jewish background, a banking family, and he became the greatest expert in the world on Arab music and did an enormous amount for it, published huge multi-volume book on Arab music. He organised a conference in Cairo on Arab music, to which avant-garde composers from Europe and America came in 1931. And so, it’s… In a way, I find it a little sad and nostalgic to look back to a period when Arabs and Jews were not enemies from one another, when they very much embraced each other’s cultures. So while he was in Tunisia, he was very, very astute and clever at publicity. And there was a publicity stunt where there was a news story published that he was lost in the desert, and that was headlines in Paris.

All helped to drum up interest in what was going to be really the most important and famous work of his career. But before that, he… Which is the Ballet Mécanique, I’ll be talking about that in a… Immediately before that, he was invited to give a concert in the beautiful Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, it’s one of my favourite theatres in the world. If you get a chance to go to Paris and go to a concert there, do. They do operas as well as concerts there, and ballets. It’s a legendary theatre. Just after it opened in 1913, there was the famous premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” which caused one of the most notorious riots in French theatrical history. Later, in 1925, it was the theatre where Josephine Baker and the Revue Negre made their debut. But it was the where… In the early 20s, it hosted the Ballets Suédois, which, for two or three years, was a serious rival to Diaghilev Ballets Russes, staging avant-garde ballets. And so, he was… It was an evening of ballet but he was invited to give a concert, a short concert, to the audience who’d come for the ballet, and it turned into another famous riot. And… But what… I mean, he says in his book he didn’t know it at the time, only discovered afterwards, that the whole riot was completely staged. And you can actually see it ‘cause it was filmed.

He said he should have known because they had these big lights to light up the audience in order to film the riot that they knew was going to happen. And it was a film director called Marcel L'Herbier, who was making a film. I’ll show you some images from it in a minute. It was called “L'Inhumaine.” It came out in 1924. There was scene in the film where there is a riot 'cause, as you know, Parisians are famous for rioting. There’s nothing they like better than a good riot. And so, this was a very… You couldn’t possibly, of course, have afforded to really film this otherwise. So you had this very elegant, well-dressed audience. And then as George Antheil was playing his very discordant music, a riot breaks out in the audience and people are physically attacking each other. This really happened and the police had to be called in. And as I said, you can actually see this riot. Of course, the footage, the live footage of this riot that’s going on in Antheil’s concert was included in the film “L'Inhumaine.” And I do recommend that to you.

You can see it on YouTube. You can either see scenes from it or you can see the whole thing. And it’s a very fascinating and extraordinary movie. It stars Georgette Leblanc as a kind of femme fatale. She was actually a woman of a certain age. She’d previously been Maeterlinck’s mistress, and she was in her late 50s in fact by the time she filmed this movie. And various avant-garde artists were involved with the film. The modernist architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens; The cubist painter, Fernand Léger, designed the interior you see on the right; And the great couturier, Paul Poiret, designed clothes for Georgette Leblanc. So it’s an absolutely fascinating movie to watch. So the… Oh, this is… This is Antheil with machines that were used for his Ballet Mécanique, but… And so, this is something that’s in… I mean, he claims great originality for this. In fact, it wasn’t that original. This interest in modern machines goes back even before the First World War. Really, to 1909, and the Italian poet, Marinetti.

He published his manifesto, “Futurist Manifesto” on the front page of Le Figaro, in which he’s calling for modern artists to embrace modern life, that machines are more beautiful than antique statues, and noise, and pollution and frantic activity; These are the things that should be inspiring artists. And there is a painting on the right hand side by Severini that is… It’s a futurist painting expressing all of this. And there was even a futurist composer called Luigi Russolo. And he staged concerts with noises and machines that are integral part of the music. So as I said, this goes at… The First World War. This is from… This is a room that’s in a show that is I think just about to close, or has just closed, in Paris. Loved this show. I went actually six times altogether to this show. It’s called Paris l'Espirit Modern. It was at the Petit Palais in Paris. And there’s a whole room devoted to this excitement generated by machines just before and just after the First World War. So these are all machine… That’s the car you can see and the foldable bicycle, they date from 1913, and you have a pre-First World War aeroplane. And that was… Had only just been invited, Wright Brothers, 1903.

And the insert is of the French pilot, Louis Blériot, who made the first cross channel flight in 1909, I think it was. And this is a painting by Robert Delaunay, which is called Homage to Blériot. Antheil makes quite a lot of claims in his book that I think are not always substantiated. And he implies very strongly that other pieces of music which are celebrating machines and industry were inspired by his Ballet Mécanique, such as the “Le pas d'acier,” “the Steel Steps,” or “Prokofiev,” which you see on the left, which is actually the same year as Ballet Mécanique. It’s 1926. And even it says it about Honegger’s “Pacific 231,” which evokes the sound of an express train. But that was actually 1923, so it’s three years ahead of the Ballet Mécanique. And this is Satie’s “Relâche.” And so what he says in his autobiography about this is he says… About the machine aesthetic of the time, “It’s true at the time "I did consider machines very beautiful, "but my idea was rather to warn the age "in which I was living "of the simultaneous beauty and danger "of its own mechanistic philosophy and aesthetic.” So he’s very much in the swing of things.

This is in the air at the time. And this ambivalent feeling towards industry machines, is also… To very famous movies. There’s Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” top left, and Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” In both movies, you can see that the directors and the designers are in love with the aesthetic of the machine. The machines are beautiful, but they’re also depicted as dangerous and dehumanising. Here is some of the equipment that is needed for a performance of Ballet Mécanique, including propellers. But musically, I think it’s very, very heavily indebted to Stravinsky again, particularly these here images of Stravinsky’s ballet, “Les Nosce,” dating from 1923, which was actually the very first thing that Antheil saw when he came to Paris. He arrived just in time for the premiere of Le Noces. And so, Le Noces is a very mechanistic, very aggressive, very percussive piece, and its scored for two grand pianos and percussion. So he was going to do that but outdo it.

So in fact, he really when… His original idea for this was… I’m going to give you the list of the instruments, I think it’s something like eight. Where is it here? Eight pianola pianos, and a xylophone, and propellers, and a siren. So top left, you’ve got an image of Stravinsky’s “Le Noces,” and bottom right, an image of a performance of the Ballet Mécanique. Its premiere was actually not in a public theatre. It was in the private palace of a wealthy American woman and it caused an absolute sensation. And this is a modern recording of the Ballet Mécanique of George Antheil.

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That really marked the apogee of his reputation as the cutting edge and the enfant terrible of the avant-garde. And at the same time, Fernand Léger, the cubist artist, made a film, which is considered very important actually in the history of film, which was supposed to go with the ballet. It was actually a silent film, so I suppose the idea was that the music should be performed live with it. But if we get time at the end, I’m going to play you a bit of that film with George Antheil’s music to go with it. So from with… Much admired, causing great excitement, both in France and Germany. And so, 1926 to 1933 is a very extraordinary period in German culture. This is period at the end of the Weimar Republic. Hitler’s waiting in the wings, becoming increasingly threatening. But it’s an exciting period of experimentation, not least in opera houses. And between 1926 and 1933, this is the great period of what the Germans call the Zeitoper. “Zeit” just means “time” or “contemporary.” And these at Zeitoper, these are operas that don’t deal with historical subjects.

They’re dealing with contemporary subjects and they’re trying to be as modern as possible. And there was a whole lot of them in this period. Probably the most successful was Krenek’s opera, “Jonny spielt auf” in 1927. And then, there was an opera called “Maschinist Hopkins” by Max Brand in 1929. There was Hindermith’s “Neues vom Tage.” The whole lot of these operas. And so, George Antheil, he wrote an opera called “Transatlantic,” and he was very proud of the fact that it included scenes with an ocean liner. It had elevators, had revolving doors. And he boasted that his was the first opera to have an aria sung by a naked soprano in a bathroom. As I shall show in a minute, that was again not true. That he was following, in fact, Hindemith. So this is Krenek’s “Jonny spielt auf.” “Mahagonny,” that’s another Zeitoper, but it’s set in a kind of imaginary America, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. This is “Maschinist Hopkins.” Ah, yes. This is “Neues vom Tage” from by Hindemith.

This was shown in 1929, so it’s actually the year before the premiere of “Transatlantic,” and as you can see it has a soprano in her bath. And I think I’ve mentioned this before, it was this scene that so outraged Hitler. Hitler was very prudish actually, and was scandalised by the idea of a undressed soprano singing an aria in her bath. So that was a success, and… In 1930, and should have led to great things for him. It should have gone from theatre to theatre, it should have really established him as an opera composer. But of course, Hitler intervened, and so the whole idea of the Zeitoper, it just was… Overnight, that was finished really. And he went back to America. He wanted to really establish his American reputation. And he set up a performance of Ballet Mécanique at the Carnegie Hall. But as he confesses in his autobiography, he really overdid it with the pre-publicity.

He wanted to have a Parisian style riot, but really the… He even had… There were even provocateur paid to try and start a riot, but it all fizzled out. Americans were not impressed by it and they weren’t prepared to riot, and the whole thing was actually a complete flop. And this brings about really a crisis in his career where I think he feels that he’d had enough of being the bad boy in the cutting edge. And he really turns back musically towards much more traditional symphonic forms, and also more accessible, more popular types of music. So this is a piece written in 1936. It’s a rumba. And you can see… And it’s a much more accessible and easy idiom for the general audience.

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Well, Parisian intellectuals were not at all interested in his new more conservative style. He very quickly went out of fashion there. And back in America, he also found that nobody was really very interested in his music. And so, he really had to search around for other ways of making a living. I mean, he was married and they had a child, and they needed to support the child. And he showed a quite extraordinary inventiveness really in reinventing… He wrote a successful detective novel, called “Death In The Dark.” And he talks about this in his autobiography, and he says how all his intellectual writer friends helped him with it, he showed the manuscript to them. And there were annotations in the original manuscript by TS Elliot, and by Franz Werfel, and Ezra Pound, and all that kind of thing.

He said he wished he’d kept the manuscript 'cause it would be in valuable for all the annotations by all these famous writers. But probably the best earner for him in the late 20s was as a journalist, writing rather salacious and naughty articles for the gentleman’s magazine, Esquire. And that really kept him going financially through the late 30s. And then, he moves on to Hollywood, and we have a whole new cast of characters, of people he met in Hollywood. Salvador Dali became a friend. Ben Hecht was a very important friend for him. Cecil B. DeMille on the right hand side. And he earned quite reasonably as a film composer. In 1936, he wrote the music for Cecil B. DeMille’s film, “The Plainsman.” So that was quite a big success. He tells a very funny story… I mean, he’s very ambivalent really about being a film composer.

He’s adamant that film is not serious art. And he also felt that writing film music was bad for his creativity, that there was an inherent discord or clash between writing serious music and writing music for the films. Although, he also says that he does understand that films in America played a very important role in introducing audiences to symphonic music. He tells lots of funny stories about the crassness of Hollywood. One about when he was writing the music for “The Plainsman,” there’s a scene with an “Indian dance,” “Native American dance,” whatever you want to call it, and that the studio actually wanted him to use the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, which as he said was hardly appropriate for Native Americans. And his other very famous movie is actually quite a lot later, it’s after the war. And it’s “The Pride and The Passion” with Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Sophia Loren.

But so, he’s very sceptical about Hollywood, as many artists were. And my favourite story that he tells is about he and Ben Hecht were trying to help out the composer, Ersnt Krenek. He was a Czech composer who was very famous, very successful in Europe in the late 20s. I mentioned his opera, “Jonny spielt auf,” which was a huge success. But although he was not Jewish, the Nazis were very hostile to him and he was forced to flee, and he went to America. Of course, nobody in America really knew about him and he was having a very hard time. So Ben Hecht and Antheil went to Louis B. Mayer and tried to convince him to give a job at MGM to Krenek. And this is, according to Antheil, how the conversation went. They said, “yo…” Ben Hecht said, “Oh, Krenek, "he’s this great composer.” Goldwyn says, “Krenek? "Never heard of him. "What’s he written?” “One of the world’s greatest com… "Successful operas, "Jonny spielt auf.” “It made over a million in Germany before Hitler.” “Never heard of it.” “Well, he wrote "The Threepenny Opera.”“ Of course he didn’t, Kurt Weill did. "Never heard of it.” “And he wrote "Der Rosenkavalier,” interrupted Ben. “It grossed over two millions.”

So Goldwyn brightened up a bit. “And he wrote Faust too. "Krenek wrote that.” “No kidding,” said Goldwyn. “I could see Krenek was going to get the job.” “And he wrote La Traviata too,” said Ben to clinch it. “So he wrote Traviata, did he?” Goldman’s face turned black. “Just bring that guy around here "so that I can get my hands on him. "Why, his publishers almost ruined me with a suit "just because we used a few bows "of that lousy opera. "We had to retake half the picture…” He found all this, I think, disheartening, and he… By the outbreak of the Second World War, he was really quite depressed by the lack of interest in his serious work. And he writes in his autobiography, “Now, in 1941, "I could at last label myself "a complete failure.” But he certainly had an extraordinary mind. And in June 1939, he wrote an article for Esquire, in which he very accurately predicted the Second World War and how it was going to happen. He predicted quite precisely that the war was going to start with Hitler invading Poland. He predicted Pearl Harbour almost to the month.

I think he was one month out of predicting when Pearl Harbour would happen. He predicted that Hitler would attack Russia but eventually he would lose the war. So absolutely, full on, right in his predictions. And the following year, he published a book called “The Shape of the War to Come,” which elaborated all these predictions. And on the strength of that, he actually became a war correspondent, and that was how he earned his living through much of the Second World War. 1942, of course, is the turning point of the Second World War. And he composed a symphony, which he subtitled “1942.” And he claimed that he began it on the very day that the victory at El-Alamein against Rommel was clinched. And he said he finished it on the very day that gave up to the Soviets. And so, this symphony, which helped to really reestablish his reputation, it was successful at the time. But it’s very, very indebted, I think, to Shostakovich and the Leningrad Symphony, that I know you’ve heard about earlier in this series.

Dennis has talked to you about the Leningrad Symphony. And it was, of course, the huge musical event of the Second World War was the composition of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, the smuggling of it out of the besieged city, and its premieres around the world. And as you can see, Shostakovich landed up on the cover of Time Magazine. So it got good reviews and it was successful. But many critics pointed out the very obvious debt to Shostakovich. It really does sound very much like Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphonies. With typical chutzpah, George Antheil said, “Oh no, no. "It’s not me copying Shostakovich, "it’s Shostakovich copying me.” 'Cause he claimed that a score of his opera, “Transatlantic” had been taken to Russia, and he thought that Shostakovich must have studied it. But here is the opening, very Shostakovich-like, of Antheil’s “1942” symphony.

♪ Music plays ♪

Now, we come to perhaps the most extraordinary episode in the life of George Antheil, and that is his work with the glamorous film star, Hedy Lamarr, in inventing a system for radio guiding of torpedoes. It is so unlikely this story, really. I think it’s fascinated many people. In fact, they first came into contact with one another because he claimed to be an expert on endocrinology, whatever that is, it’s to do with the glands, and she wanted advice on enlarging her breasts. And he thought she… She thought he could give it. And they met, they got on very well. Apparently she left her telephone number for him scrawled in lipstick on the windscreen of his car, and they started meeting up. How they got from how to enlarge breasts to how to radio guide torpedoes, I’m not quite sure. But she was, of course, an incredibly brilliant and smart woman, and she had been married to a… Although she was herself was Jewish, her first husband was an arms manufacturer in cahoots with the Nazis. And she was often sitting at the dinner table, listening to him discussing new types of weapons.

So this is where she picked up the idea for this kind of torpedo. And they worked out the system and they actually filed a patent for it. And this is the patent. And at the time, it was actually… You can see. Hedy Kiesler, that’s her real name. Hedy Kiesler Markey, and George Antheil. And at the time, it wasn’t actually taken up by the American Navy. It was later. And it also, the system, apparently, don’t ask me how, 'cause I don’t understand these things, was very, very important for developing the technology that made mobile phones possible. So it really is a very extraordinary story. This… His final symphony, Symphony No. 6, which is entitled “Liberty Leading The People,” inspired by this Delacroix painting, but I think I’m not going to play you that 'cause we’re running out of time. What I do want to play you is… He was prepared to try anything and he was pretty good. If he wasn’t a great genius, he was still very good at whatever he did. And right at the end of his life, he collaborated with the great Broadway actor and singer, Alfred Drake, who’s going to be the subject of my next lecture, and they created a musical together.

Sadly, Antheil died prematurely, at the age of 59, of a heart attack. And the never came to fruition. But it got as far… So it wasn’t actually orchestrated, but the text was written by Alfred Drake and a friend of his, and the music was composed by George Antheil, not yet orchestrated. And they recorded a demo recording of the score. So this is Alfred Drake singing and it’s George Antheil playing the piano. And I’m really sad that this piece has never seen the light of day. We are incredibly privileged to be able to hear this 'cause this has never been published. This is a strictly private recording and I have been kindly lent it and given permission to use it by Alfred’s Drake’s daughter, Sam Popper. I was with her last night. We had long discussions about her father. And I think this is absolutely gorgeous. It’s such… Well, of course, very beautiful singing, but so melodic, so unexpected actually. And I really think this piece could have been a big hit if it had ever actually been performed on stage.

♪ Music plays ♪

♪ You smile at her ♪ ♪ She smiles at you ♪ ♪ And suddenly the world is ♪ ♪ Not the place you knew ♪ ♪ Clouds turn to silver ♪ ♪ And each goose becomes a swan ♪ ♪ And you are never lonely ♪ ♪ From that moment on ♪ ♪ Never to be lonely ♪ ♪ Think how it would be ♪ ♪ With somebody always there ♪ ♪ To agree or disagree ♪ ♪ Knowing that you’re needed ♪ ♪ And you need her too ♪ ♪ And maybe she’s been lonely ♪ ♪ For you ♪ ♪ Never to awake at night ♪ ♪ Holding only empty air ♪ ♪ Knowing all through the night ♪ ♪ She is there ♪

That’s absolutely gorgeous. I’d love to play you the whole thing. I’ll play you more of that actually in my next talk. But I want to finish tonight, if we can now, please, with an excerpt, a video excerpt, of Léger’s film, Ballet Mécanique, with George Antheil’s music to go with it. So can we have that please? Yeah, I do need to get that sound.

♪ Music plays ♪

I think this is not going to work very well. I think I’ll just go and… You can find that on YouTube for yourselves. So I’ll just answer the questions, if I can go back into the chat. Chat has disappeared. Can we get that again? I can’t see any chat going.

Q&A and Comments

Question, there it is, yes. “Efrem Zimbalist was a violinist,” that’s right. “His son was the actor,” that’s true. This is Margaret who looked up the symphony for five instruments on YouTube. Only the symphonies four, five and six. It had there… It is on a… That’s piece, you can find it. It’s on a CD which you can buy. This is Rita. “When I lived in Paris, "I frequented Shakespeare and Company every week.” But it wasn’t the same one, Rita. The one that exists now, which is down by the river, is actually not connected with the one between the wars, of Sylvia Beach’s. Still a lovely bookshop, but it’s not the same. Thank you, Ruth. Yeah, “Well, God, I’ve been caught up "in a few riots in Paris.” They have a mini revolutionary riot every weekend, really.

Let me see. Where are we? Michigan. The book is called “Bad Boy of Music,” and the name of the musicologist is Baron Frederic d-apostrophe-Elanger. Baron d'Elanger. Very interesting character. More needs to be known about him. And you’re quite right, yes, the “Rhumba” was very like .

Q: “Did he join forces?” A: No, I think he was probably too old by the Second Wor… Yes, he was in the First World War actually. He was briefly in the American forces at the end of the First World War, but I think too old by the Second World War, whereas his younger brother did join up and was killed.

Excellent short document, Rita. Thank you about Hedy Lamarr. And yes, many thanks to Sam Popper for helping me with this, and also with my next… I’ve got the most gorgeous things to play you on Wednesday. So do tune into that 'cause he’s such a wonderful singer, Alfred Drake. And Margaret, I’m so glad you like that song as much as I do. Yes, I know. I mean, it was really Hedy Lamarr. Apparently, she died in poverty, so she was really shafted over that one. Thank you, Rita. “The Paris introduction has strong similarities "to Gershwin’s American…” He knew Gershwin of course, and he mentions him. I think probably slightly jealousy, 'cause… Jealously, because Gershwin, in the end, turned out to be so much more successful and popular.

So onwards and upwards. On Wednesday, we’ll be hearing the fabulous Alfred Drake.