Ezra Pound threw himself into the composition of his first opera, Le Testament de Villon, with the gusto only a wildly self-assured amateur could have. The wonderful results transcend its uncertain beginnings. Anyone with a developed taste for the absurd is bound to adore Le Testament. The libretto is mostly made up of poems and fragments by François Villon, a fifteenth century French poet exiled from Paris on suspicion of murder. The rest is in a fake ghetto dialect Pound invented: "Wot the hell are you doin' Frankie?/Ah, Geez! I'm makin' my will!" Inappropriate as the contrast of languages seems, it illustrates one of the main themes of the opera: the isolation of the great. When François/Frankie speaks in dialect, he's lowering himself in order to be understood. Yet the truth is, Villon spent countless hours in the seediest parts of renaissance Paris. The plot of Le Testament appropriately takes place mostly in a tavern neighboring a brothel and the cathedral of St-Julien-le-Pauvre. Drinking and carousing surround a sober Villon while he scratches away at his will ("testament") among figures such La Hëaulmiere (an aged ex-prostitute), his mom, Bozo the brothel keeper, anonymous drunks, and a lusty priest. It ends with the whole gang swinging on the gallows singing a chordal, farewell motet. If, as Virgil Thomson said, it's "not quite musician's music," Le Testament is all the better for it. Highlights include the harsh lament for lost youth by La Hëaulmiere and the choral drinking song "Pere Noé," celebrating Noah and other biblical drunks. Throughout the one-hour opera, the vocal lines are hard-edged declamations with occasional (accidental?) melodious passages. They are unpredictable, long-winded, and full of jolting, freakish rhythmic emphases, one section pouring into the next without any repetition. The instrumentation is for 17 instruments, but recordings have included up to 30 instruments, or only two—cello, nose flute, and percussion are among the constants. Usually only one or two instruments at a time will accompany the singer, or choir, but sometimes there is a homorhythmic chord-block of instruments making the atmosphere otherworldly and dark, such as in his mom's aria "Dame du ciel." The infamous rhythmic complexities of Le Testament are more from George Antheil's self-serving transcription than from Pound's mind, but Antheil's faux polyrhythms and constant metrical changes between time signatures such as 17/32 and 27/16 help carry Le Testament toward the Dada Olympus where it resides.

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