tonight to a theater. She is a lovely + energetic person. There is so much to eat in Holland and it is all so good: everything is rich and full of butter. The cost of living is about like New York
The flowers—all kinds—not just tulips just about take your breath away. One of the most amazing things in Amsterdam is the red-light district which is the oldest part. The women at night sit in their rooms with the curtains pulled aside, just as though they were on a stage. They mostly spend the time sewing or knitting until someone stops. Then the curtains are drawn and for those on the outside the Act is over whereas actually it is only then beginning. All of this in a setting of canals + beautiful old churches. Amsterdam, I hear, is famous as the “city of women in shop windows.” The water in the canals is so poisonous that if you should fall in you would later get very ill if not die. They were always pushing Germans in during the war. More soon.
To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage
April 15, 1949 | Paris
Dearest Mother and Dad:
I have not quite recovered from the surprise of getting the Guggenheim.153 But I begin to. I sent you the telegram and then finally came to my wits and wrote a letter to Mr. Moe, the Secretary General, asking him to postpone the period of my tenure until my return to New York. I hope he agrees to do that. I am also sending him this afternoon a doctor’s certificate as to my health. And I corrected the biographical statement. If there is more for me to do, either you or he will let me know. I cannot believe that it happened and that I am not dreaming. How marvelous to be relieved of the financial problem!
Sunday we leave for Palermo, and until then have been loaned an apartment in a chic hotel near the Champs Elysees by a friend, Muriel Errera-Finck, whom I don’t think you met. She is charming and has gone to Mt. St. Michel for Easter and thought it just as well that we stay in the apt. She and her husband have taken very good care of us taking us to dinner, lunches, etc. We had a very good and cheap room on the Ile de St. Louis which is my favorite part of Paris, right behind Notre Dame, about 75 cents a day for 2, but here we are with a bad typewriter, a real bathroom elegance et al. Muriel is also trying to swing a concert in the home of the Comtesse de Polignac,154 which is the top of musical life in Paris, if not in Europe. I haven’t done anything about music in Paris yet, because I was so surprised about the Guggenheim which happened the first day here. In Brussels I met many composers and had a marvelous time; there may be a concert in October at the Palais des Beaux Arts there. I am going to have to have a suit made in Italy because my brown one and blue one wore out completely and all I have is the linen one and Dad’s Xmas one.
Paris is out of this world beautiful and the weather superb. Last night to the Jean-Louis Barrault Theatre and again tonight to see Hamlet. It is quite different from before not in itself (Paris), but in me. I love it. Merce works everyday in a studio near the Place Clichy and is trying to arrange a dance program for May there. The city is so beautiful and it is so easy to be alive here, almost too easy; you have to protect yourself I am sure by working, but right now in transit cannot work. It is difficult to imagine how America got to be so unEuropean; there is so much general understanding here about how things should be to be beautiful and make life a joy.
Forgive this letter and its incoherence and lack of news. I simply don’t know yet which way to turn.
To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage
1949 [ca. April 26] | Palermo
Dearest Mother + Dad:
The Festival155 proves so far to be not too worthwhile. There have been 8 works so far and only one, the Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg (which is scarcely contemporary music), has been surpassingly beautiful. There are many fine people here and I was interested last night to meet a Mr. Gradowitz from Israel who is very devoted to my music. I have been several times with Panufnik,156 a Polish composer whose work I admire; and so it goes. The town itself is as I wrote: dusty, filthy, noisy and full of beggars and people who try to get as much out of you as they can. The food is mediocre and one is semi-ill all of the time, + flat on his back the rest of the time. A rather unpleasant picture. As soon as you leave Palermo and go in the country everything improves and is quite beautiful. The hills are drier even than around L.A., rocky + covered with beautiful tiny dwarfed flowers: iris, poppies, etc. And every view of the Mediterranean is a joy: it is a deep blue but a bright turquoise color near the shores. And if you walk out on a stone pier where there are fishermen cleaning fish + people carrying nets or mending ropes, you can see right to the bottom—the water is so clear and transparent.
In the pension there is (as everywhere) a shortage of water, and that makes bathing, etc., almost a major problem.
It seems to take about 4 days for an airmail letter to reach me. From the 3rd to the 7th of May I will go to Milan where you could write c/o American Express (I don’t know their address), but you could find it out by asking the office in N.Y. There will be a festival of 12-tone music and I will review that too.
To Peggy Glanville-Hicks
April 27, 1949 | Paris
Dearest Peggy:
Your letter to Palermo came as a bird from heaven (how grateful I am!); I had sunk so low for the music here is devoid of the spirit and there is little of anything to provide recuperation, for everything is wrong. We went to visit a beautiful church and a movie was being made in it. ISCM luncheons in Benedictine cloisters! But now with your letter all seems changed and this is only a state preceding beauty. How easily one can forget (!) especially when plumbing is non-existent and food in some mysterious way poisonous.
I have had several talks with Panufnik, and find him very sensitive and charming. I looked at his scores and explained mine to him (he said he would not sleep that night).
So far in the festival: a magnificent performance of Pierrot Lunaire by Marya Freund (74 yrs. old)157 and a beautiful piano piece by Wladriner [?] Woronoff (a 12-tone white Russian living in Belgium).158 He is exciting because he studies poetry and has derived a rhythmic structure (in this piece) from the sonnet. Unfortunately, few heard the piece in the spirit I did.
The news about the Guggenheim is alarming and I am miserable that I am the only one of the friends to get it. I can’t believe that Alan didn’t get it. He is, fortunately, born an Armenian, however.
Your wildest intuitions about this festival could not equal what actually takes place. Programs are printed but take place other ways and other times. Midnight surprise concerts when everyone is overcome with fatigue. It is a kind of devilish magic stunt: music pulled out of a hat before or after one can Luigi Dallapiccola. Instead of India why not stay in N.Y.? Maggie should get herself posted in N.Y. I leave here to go to Milan for the “First Congress for Dodecaphonic Music.”159 I rather think it will be interesting. Out of these ashes? Why doesn’t someone start understanding Satie? Merton Brown has written a beautiful new piano piece. [Rudolf] Escher, of course, and maybe Victor Legley,160 a Belgian again.
I long so soon to be home again. The audiences here are getting smaller: people leaving because there is quite clearly nothing nourishing. Mr. Clark is a kind of idiot-king and his wife is a scarecrow. The Pit was ghastly. I find Mr. Gradowitz from Israel very fine,—we agreed that the ISCM should dissolve if it can only do this. He wants the next year’s festivities to take place in Tel-Aviv,—which would be conveniently near Egypt and India.
But it looks like the U.S.A. is out again next year, for “our differences” cannot be settled unless delegates arrive to settle them.
Europe is not a place now
