Despite his 1914 marriage to Dorothy Shakespear, Pound always had a keen eye for women, equating seduction with artistic creativity. Dorothy was aware of her husband’s philandering but chose to overlook it. In the fall of 1922, when he was 36, he spotted 26-year-old American violinist Olga Rudge, and later began a love affair with her that lasted until Pound died in 1972. Rudge was a well-known concert violinist working often with Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti and pianist Renata Borgatti. Pound, who occasionally worked as a music critic, wrote a review of one of her concerts, but the two didn’t meet formally until 1923 at the home of playwright and novelist Natalie Barney. Even though Pound and Rudge moved in different social circles, they hit it off sexually and intellectually, and Rudge even performed some music Pound had composed.

Olga Rudge, while sentimentally involved with Pound, lived in Venice in a small house given to her by her father in 1928. Pound visited her there when he could get away from Rapallo, a trip of about 168 miles, one way, and he nicknamed the Venice house the “Hidden Nest.”

In  February 1927, Rudge met with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was also a fair violinist, and the two discussed the differences of music for violin and music for piano. Starting in 1931, she and Pound organized and played often in the Concerti Tigulliani, in Rapallo. The concerts allowed Rudge and Pound to promote the music of the then-almost-forgotten Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi, introduce Bela Bartok’s String Quartets to Italian audiences, and to play publicly music written by Pound.

Since during the tough economic times of the 1930s, music performers also suffered, in 1933 Olga took a job in Siena as secretary in the Academia Musicale Chigiana, a center of advanced musical studies founded in 1931 by Count Guido Chigi Saracini. Rudge, with the occasional assistance of Pound, started and transcribed original manuscripts of Vivaldi’s music, identifying over 300 new pieces, and in 1938 founded the Centro Studi Vivaldiani within the Academia Chigiana.

Ezra Pound, then, was not only a superb poet and a superior literary critic, but a music scholar and composer – and he believed himself to be a political economist and monetarist, beliefs that led him to see conspiracies to control economic output and finances in the capitalist countries … and, fatefully, to side with Fascism as a political system that, theoretically, could put the brakes on the free market excesses.

Having studied in the 1920s the cultural theories of German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who believed that culture is the product of particular races, Pound concluded that Mussolini was the genuine embodiment of Italian culture: he had overthrown rapacious plutocrats, made politics into an art form, and supported a revival of culture. He stated: “Mussolini has told his people that poetry is a necessity of State, and in this displayed a higher state of civilization in Rome than in London or Washington.

Later, in February 1927, Olga Rudge played a concert at Mussolini’s residence. The Duce, as noted, was a competent violinist, and he enjoyed music. One contemporary report from Youngstown, Ohio, where Rudge was born, states, “Mussolini complemented [sic] Miss Rudge on her technique and musical feeling, saying that it was rare to see such depth and precision of tone, ‘especially in a woman.’” It was then that Pound got the grand idea that perhaps Mussolini could also be swayed to become a promoter of avant-garde writers and artists.

Pound also spoke of his Chinese studies and about the Confucian concept that in order to arrive at correct definitions and clarify one’s ideas, it is necessary to “put order into words.” Mussolini did not really understand what Pound was saying and asked him: “Why do you wish to put order in your ideas?” a reply that Pound found acute and genial.

In Venice, Pound and Olga had to contend with myriads of visitors, all of whom wanted to see and talk to the old, eccentric poet. During the last few years of his life, he had stopped speaking, except to intimates when strictly necessary, and his occasional sallies with spoken words had assumed an oracular undertone. When in a rare interview he was asked why he spoke so little, he answered: “I did not enter into silence, silence captured me.”

His funeral was a sedate affair, with only close relatives in attendance, except for his wife Dorothy, who was unable to travel from London to Venice. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the casket to the island Cemetery of San Michele, where he was buried in the Protestant Section, near where 1987 Nobel laureate poet Joseph Brodsky is buried and not far from the Greek-Orthodox section where composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev also rest.

Dorothy Shakespear Pound died in London in 1973, but Olga Rudge lived on in her house in Venice for the next 24 years after Pound’s death, passing away in 1996 at the age of 101. She inherited most of Pound’s papers, correspondence, and books, and became an active defender of his literary and personal reputation, participating in the social and cultural life of the lagune city. She indicated several times that it was her intention to establish a foundation to house Pound’s artifacts and papers, but she never got around to it. In 1986, when she was 91 and apparently getting forgetful, some of her alleged friends appear to have taken

- Imruskáról itt találtam valamit. Bartók, Liszt, Ezra . Velence és Nápoly.