Olga Rudge
Olga Rudge (April 13, 1895 – March 15, 1996) was an American-born concert violinist, now mainly remembered as the long-time mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, by whom she had a daughter, Mary.
During the last 11 years of Pound's life, Rudge was his devoted companion, secretary, and nurse, as he sank into eccentricity and prolonged periods of silence.
In her declining years, an ongoing difficult relationship with Mary, her only child, left her vulnerable to the attention of parties with ulterior motives, resulting in the sad situation described in John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels, in which Rudge could not account for how Pound's papers and letters in her possession had found their way to Yale University.
Rudge died at age 100 and is buried next to Pound in Venice's Isola di San Michele cemetery.
Wanting to pursue a singing career, Julia moved to Europe with her three children when Olga was 10, living first in London and then in Paris.
Olga was educated at a convent school in Sherborne, Dorset, England, before studying in Paris under the violinist Léon Carambât of the Opéra-Comique.
At the end of the war in 1918, she began her career as an international concert violinist, under the auspices of Ildebrando Pizzetti and his patroness Katherine Dalliba-John.
Antheil and Rudge were to enjoy a long professional collaboration dating from this period, which also marked the beginning of her sexual relationship with Pound.
Rudge was now an established and successful soloist living in a luxurious apartment on Paris's respectable "right bank".
He strongly recommended she pay more attention to her patrons (something he himself never failed to do), and chided her for her lack of interest in the press comments concerning her concerts.
On July 9, 1925,[1] she gave birth to her daughter Maria, soon to be going by the English equivalent Mary, at the local hospital in the city of Brixen in the province of South Tyrol.
She resumed her career with a concert at the Salle Pleyel in 1926, where she played in the premiere of Pound's new opera, Le Testament de Villon.
Her association with Antheil continued with concerts in the capital cities of Europe, and at this time she began to specialise in the works of Mozart.
She also managed to continue her musical career, performing in the annual Concerti Tigulliani program organized by Pound at Rapallo.
Rudge and Pound were both keen readers of mystery and detective novels: this was the era of Agatha Christie, whose books earned her a fortune.
By this time, Pound was vehemently pro-Mussolini and had begun broadcasting his views on Radio Rome, with Rudge's support.
[8] Following the United States' invasion of Italy in 1945, Pound was arrested as a traitor and was held in an open cage in Pisa for 25 days.
In order to avoid a trial for treason, Pound was declared criminally insane and incarcerated in an asylum, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for twelve years.
She used friends and their many contacts in the literary world to mount a petition attesting to his character and that amongst other things he had never in fact been a member of the Italian Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista).
The couple stayed with Rudge's daughter by Pound, Mary, now married to Boris de Rachewiltz and living at Brunnenberg castle in Tirol.
The couple seldom left their Venice or Rapallo homes; however, they journeyed to London in 1965 for the funeral of T. S. Eliot and to the United States in 1969.
She was an essential guest at the city's profuse "dolce vita" gatherings, but continued to inhabit the same small house she had shared with Pound.
Encouraging young aspiring poets and artists, she often offered them free use of the top floor of her home in return for a small painting or dedicated poem.
Elocution, etiquette, and music lessons were met with fierce opposition; a violin that Rudge gave to her daughter was smashed against a chicken coop: in short, Maria found her mother distant, impenetrable, and authoritarian.
It had always been Rudge's intention to set up a foundation of some kind to house Pound's archives, but this was a task she always deferred, while continuing to assist scholars of his work and organize several exhibitions devoted to him.
In 1986, Rudge together with an American friend, Jane Rylands, and an attorney from Cleveland, Ohio, formed the "Ezra Pound Foundation".
The papers were later deposited in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, where they are housed today, and the Ezra Pound Foundation was dissolved.
[18] Rudge continued for a short while to live at "The Hidden Nest" until old age and infirmity forced her to leave Venice and make her final home with her daughter at Schloss Brunnenburg.
Rudge was fiercely proud always to have been financially independent of Pound, and continued her career as a concert violinist until the Second World War.
Shortly before his death, Pound wrote of Rudge: There is more courage in Olga's little finger than in the whole of my carcass ... she kept me alive for ten years, for which no one will thank her.
