"Venus in Africa" - Full Score Holograph Manuscript with Autograph Emendations Throughout

Venus in Africa. A One Act Play by Michael Dyne and George Antheil. 4to, original spiral bound card covers. 133 pp. N.p. [1954].

Full score and libretto for a romantic comedy, a one-act satirical opera set in an outdoor hotel café in North Africa with music by Antheil and the libretto by Dyne. A holograph signed photocopy, with extensive emendations in pencil and red crayon throughout. The markings apparently in both Antheil's and Dyne's hands, range from revisions of the text to changes in meter, pitch, tempo, dynamic, and various expressive markings and they appear on 48 pages of the score. Provenance: the author of the libretto, playwright Michael Dyne. The only other copy we have located is in the New York Public Library, and it also has emendations.

Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times (June 9, 1999) wrote "Whatever its shortcomings, there is a wacky vitality, a sort of slapdash originality, about 'Venus in Africa,' composed in 1954."

Antheil, the self-proclaimed "bad boy of music," the title of his autobiography, was born in Trenton, NJ and moved to Paris in 1923 where he mingled with the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Yeats, Stravinsky, Picasso, Dali, Gertrude Stein, etc. (6719)

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Manuscript Music

Opera

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