Leo Ornstein
“The Only True Blue, Genuine Futurist Composer Alive”
James Huneker.
Leo Ornstein
The amazing Leo Ornstein!... I should have written the amazing Leo Ornsteins for “there are many of them and each one of them is one.” Ornstein himself has a symbol for this diversity; some of his music he signs “Vannin.” He has told me that the signature is automatic: when Vannin writes he signs; when Ornstein writes he signs. But it is not alone in composing that there are many Ornsteins; there are many pianists as well. One Ornstein paints his tones with a fine soft brush; the other smears on his colours with a trowel. In his sentimental treatment of triviality he has scarcely a competitor on the serious concert stage (unless it be Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler). Is this the Caliban, one asks, who conceived and who executes The Wild Men’s Dance? The softer Ornstein is less original than his comrade, more imitative.... I have been told that Jews are always imitative in art, that there are no great Jewish composers. Wagner? Well, Wagner was half a Jew, perhaps. Certainly there is imitation in Ornstein, but so was there in the young Beethoven, the young Debussy....
Recently I went to hear Ornstein play under a misconception. I thought that he, with an announced violinist, was going to perform his anarchistic sonata for violin and piano, opus 31. They did perform one of his sonatas but it was an earlier opus, 26, I think. At times, while I listened it seemed to me that nothing so beautiful had been done in this form since César Franck’s sonata. The first movement had a rhapsodic character that was absolutely successful in establishing a mood. The music soared; it did not seem confined at all. It achieved perfectly the effect of improvisation. The second part was even finer, and the scherzo and finale only less good. But this was no new idiom. I looked again and again at my programme; again and again at the man on the piano stool. Was this not Harold Bauer playing Ravel?... One theme struck me as astonishingly like Johnson’s air in the last act of The Girl of the Golden West. There was a good use made of the whole-tone scale and its attendant harmonies, which sounded strangely in our ears a few seasons past, and a ravishing series of figurations and runs made one remember that Debussy had described falling water in a similar fashion.
This over the pianist became less himself—so far as I had become acquainted with him to this time—than ever. He played a banal barcarole of Rubinstein’s; to be sure he almost made it sound like an interesting composition; he played a scherzino of his own that any one from Schütt to Moszkowski might have signed; he played something of Grieg’s which may have pleased Mr. Finck and two or three ladies in the audience but which certainly left me cold; and he concluded this group with a performance of Liszt’s arrangement of the waltz from Gounod’s Faust. Thereupon there was so much applause that he came back and played his scherzino again. His répertoire in this genre was probably too limited to admit of his adding a fresh number.... At this point I arose and left the hall, more in wonder than in indignation.
Was this the musician who had been reviled and hissed? Was this the pianist and composer whom Huneker had dubbed the only real futurist in modern music? It was not the Ornstein I myself had heard a few weeks previously striking the keyboards with his fists in the vociferous measures of The Wild Men’s Dance; it was not the colour painter of the two Impressions of Notre Dame; it was not the Ornstein who in a dark corner of Pogliani’s glowed with glee over the possibility of dividing and redividing the existing scale into eighth, sixteenth, and twenty-fourth tones.... This was another Ornstein and in searching my memory I discovered him to be the oldest Ornstein of all. I remembered five years back when I was assistant to the musical critic of the “New York Times” and had been sent to hear a boy prodigy play on a Sunday evening at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Concerts by serious artists at that period seldom took place outside of recognized concert halls, nor did they occur on Sunday nights. But there was something about this concert that impressed itself upon me and I wrote more than the usual perfunctory notice on this occasion. Here is my account of what I think must have been Leo Ornstein’s first public appearance (March 5, 1911), dug from an old scrap book:
“The New Amsterdam Theatre is a strange place for a recital of pianoforte music, but one was held there last evening, when Leo Ornstein, the latest wunderkind to claim metropolitan attention, appeared before a very large audience to contribute his interpretation of a programme which would have tested any fully grown-up talent.
“It began with Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, included Beethoven’s Sonata Appassionata, six Chopin numbers, and finally Rubinstein’s D minor concerto, in which young Ornstein was assisted by the Volpe Symphony Orchestra. To say that this boy has great talent would be to mention the obvious, but to say that as yet he is ripe for such matters as he undertook last night would be stretching the truth. It should be stated, however, that his command of tone colour is already great and that his technique is usually adequate for the demands which the music made, although in some passages in the final movement of the Beethoven sonata his strength seemed to desert him.”
I never even heard of Leo Ornstein again after this concert at the New Amsterdam (his exploits in Europe escaped my eyes and ears) until he gave the famous series of concerts at the Bandbox Theatre in January and February of 1915, a series of concerts which really startled musical New York and even aroused orchestral conductors, in some measure, out of their lethargic method of programme-making. So far as he was able Ornstein constructed his programmes entirely from the “music of the future,” and patrons of piano recitals were astonished to discover that a pianist could give four concerts without playing any music by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, or Schubert.... Since these occasions Ornstein has been considered the high apostle of the new art in America, as the post-futurist composer, and as a pianist of great technical powers and a luscious tone quality (it does not seem strange that these attributes are somewhat exaggerated in so young a man).
Nearly a year later (December 15, 1915, to be exact) Ornstein gave another concert at the Cort Theatre in New York. Here are my impressions of that occasion, noted down shortly after:
“Leo Ornstein, a few years ago a poor Russian Jew music student, is rapidly by way of becoming an institution. His concerts are largely attended and he is even taken seriously by the press, especially in England.
“He slouched on the stage, stooping, in his usual listless manner, his long arms hanging limp at his sides like those of a gorilla. His head is beautiful, crowned with an overflowing crop of black hair, soulful eyes, a fine mask. There are pauses without expression but sometimes, notably when he plays The Wild Men’s Dance, his face lights up with a sort of sardonic appreciation. He has discarded his sack cloth coat for a velvet jacket of similar cut.
“He began with two lovely impressionistic things by Vannin (Sanborn says that this is ‘programme for Ornstein’), The Waltzers and Night. A long sonata by Cyril Scott (almost entirely in the whole-tone scale, sounding consequently like Debussy out of Bach, for there was a fugue and a smell of the academy) followed. Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes twittered their sorrows prettily in the treble, and a sonatina by the same composer seemed negligible. Albeniz’s Almeria, a section of the twelve-parted Iberia, was a Spanish picture of worth. Ornstein followed with his own pieces, Improvisata, a vivid bit of colour and rhythm, and Impressions of the Thames, in which an attempt was made to picture the heavy smoking barges, the labours on the river, the shrill sirens of the tugs. The limited (is it, I wonder?) medium of the piano made all this sound rather Chinese. But some got the picture. A few laughed. The Wild Men’s Dance convulsed certain parts of the audience. It always does (but this may well be hysteria); others were struck with wonder by its thrill. Certainly a powerful massing of notes, creating wild effects in tone, and a compelling rhythm. In the Fairy Pictures of Korngold, which closed the programme, Ornstein was not at his best; nor, for that matter, was Korngold. They were written when the composer was a very young boy and they are not particularly original, spontaneous, or beautiful. The difficulties exist for the player rather than for the hearer.... Ornstein did not bring out their humour. Humour, as yet, is not an attribute of his playing. He has always imparted to the piano a beautiful tone; his touch is almost as fine as Pachmann’s. But his powers are ripening in every direction. Formerly he dwelt too long on nuances, fussed too much with details. His style is becoming broader. His technique has always been ample. There is no doubt but that he will become a power in the music world.”
Some time later I met Leo Ornstein and we talked over a table. He is fluid in conversation and while he talks he clasps and unclasps his hands.... He referred to his début at the New Amsterdam. “My ambition then was to play the concertos of Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky... and I satisfied it. Soon after that concert I went abroad.... Suddenly the new thing came to me, and I began to write and play in the style which has since become identified with my name. It was music that I felt and I realized that I had become myself at last, although at first, to be frank, it horrified me as much as it has since horrified others. Mind you, when I took the leap I had never seen any music by Schoenberg or Strawinsky. I was unaware that there was such a generality as ‘futurism.’
“I spent some time in Norway and Vienna, where I met Leschetitzky” (this incident is referred to elsewhere in this volume) “and then I went down to Paris. I was very poor.... I met Harold Bauer and one day I went to play for him. We had a furious argument all day. He couldn’t understand my music. But he asked me to come again the next day, and I did. This time Walter Morse Rummel was there and he suggested that Calvocoressi would be interested in me. So he gave me a note to Calvocoressi.
“Calvocoressi is a Greek but he speaks all languages. He read my note of introduction and asked me if I spoke French or English. We spoke a little Russian together. Then he asked me to play. While I played his eyes snapped and he uttered several sudden ejaculations. ‘Play that again,’ he said, when I had concluded one piece. Later on he asked some of his friends to hear me.... At the time he was giving a series of lectures on modern musicians, Strauss, Debussy, Dukas, Ravel, Schoenberg, and Strawinsky, and he included me in the list! I illustrated two of his lectures and after I had concluded my performance of the music of other composers he asked me to play something of my own, which I did....” Ornstein looked amusingly rueful. “The auditors were not actually rude. How could they be when I followed Calvocoressi? But they giggled a little. Later on in London they did more than giggle.
“I went to London because my means were getting low. I had almost no money at all, as a matter of fact.... In London I found Calvocoressi’s influence of great value (he had already written an article about me) and some people at Oxford had heard me in Paris. These friends helped; besides I played the Steinway piano and the Steinways finally gave me a concert in Steinway Hall. At my first concert (this was in the spring of 1914) I played music by other composers. At my second concert, devoted to my own compositions, I might have played anything. I couldn’t hear the piano myself. The crowd whistled and howled and even threw handy missiles on the stage... but that concert made me famous,” Ornstein wound up with a smile.
He is a hard-working youth, serious, it would seem, to the heart. His published music is numbered into the thirties and his répertoire is extensive. He spends a great deal of time working hard on the music of a bygone age, although he finds it no stimulation for this one, but to be taken seriously as a pianist he is obliged to prove to melomaniacs that he has the equipment to play the classic composers. Of all the compositions that he learns, however, he complains of his own as the most difficult to memorize; a glance at The Wild Men’s Dance or more particularly at a page of his second sonata for violin and piano will convince any one of the truth of this assertion. The chords will prove strangers to many a well-trained eye. I wonder if so uncannily gifted a sight reader as Walter Damrosch, who can play an orchestral score on the piano at sight, could read this music?
Of his principles of composition the boy says only that he writes what he feels. He has no regard for the rules, although he has studied them enough to break them thoroughly. He thinks there is an underlying basis of theory for his method of composition, which may be formulated later. It is not his purpose to formulate it. He is sincere in his art.
Once he said to me, “I hate cleverness. I don’t want to be clever. I hate to be called clever. I am not clever. I don’t like clever people. Art that is merely clever is not art at all.”
With Busoni and Schoenberg he believes that there are no discords, only chords and chords... and that there are many combinations of notes, “millions of them” which have not yet been devised.
“When I feel that the existing enharmonic scale is limiting me I shall write in quarter tones. In time I think the ear can be trained to grasp eighth tones. Instruments only exist to perform music and new instruments will be created to meet the new need. It can be met now on the violin or in the voice. The piano, of course, is responsible for the rigidity of the present scale.”
Ornstein never rewrites. If his inspiration does not come the first time it never comes. He does not try to improve a failure. His method is to write as much as he can spontaneously on one day, and to pick the composition up where he left off on the next.
His opinions of other modern composers are interesting: he considers Ravel greater than Debussy, and speaks with enthusiasm about Daphnis et Chloë. He has played music by Satie in private but does not find it “stimulating or interesting.”... Schoenberg... “the last of the academics... all brain, no spirit. His music is mathematical. He does not feel it. Korngold’s pieces are pretty but he has done nothing important. Scriabine was a great theorist who never achieved his goal. He helped others on. But Strawinsky is the most stimulating and interesting of all the modern composers. He feels what he writes.”
Most of Ornstein’s music is inspired by things about him, some of it by abstract ideas. His social conscience is awake. He wanted to call The Wild Men’s Dance, Liberty (“I attempted to write music which would dance itself, which did not require a dancer”), but finally decided on the more symbolic title. “I am known as a musical anarch now,” he explained to me, “I could not name a piece of music Liberty—at least not that piece—without associating myself in the public mind with a certain social propaganda.” Just the same he means the propaganda. In the Dwarf Suite he gives us a picture of the lives of the struggling Russian Jews. These dwarfs are symbols.... He is fond of abstract titles. He often plays his Three Moods. “In Boston they did not like my Three Moods. They found my Anger too unrestrained; it was vulgar to express oneself so freely.... But there is such a thing as anger. Why should it not find artistic expression? Besides it is a very good contrast to Peace and Joy which enclose it.” The Impressions of the Thames I have already referred to. With the two Impressions of Notre Dame it stands as his successful experiment with impressionism. The Notre Dame pictures include gargoyles and, of course, bells.... I have not heard the violin and piano sonata, opus 31. Nor can I play it. Nor can I derive any very adequate idea of how it sounds from a perusal of the score. Strange music this.... Some time ago some one sent Ornstein the eight songs of Richard Strauss, Opus 49. The words of three of these songs (Wiegenliedchen, In Goldener Fülle, and Waldseligkeit) struck him and he made settings for them. Compare them with Strauss and you will find the Bavarian’s music scented with lavender. “In the Wiegenliedchen Strauss gives you a picture of the woman rocking the cradle for his accompaniment. I have tried to go further, tried to express the feelings in the woman’s mind, her hopes for the child when it is grown, her fears. I have tried to get underneath.” But the Berceuse in Ornstein’s Nine Miniatures is as simple an expression as the lover of Ethelbert Nevin’s style could wish. Not all of Ornstein’s music is careless of tradition. He was influenced in the beginning by many people. His Russian Suite is very pretty. Most of it is like Tschaikowsky. These suites will prove (if any one wants it proved) that Ornstein can write conventional melody.
Ornstein has also written a composition for orchestra entitled The Faun, which Henry Wood had in mind for performance before the war. It has not yet been played and I humbly suggest it to our resident conductors, together with Albeniz’s Catalonia, Schoenberg’s Five Pieces, and Strawinsky’s Sacrifice to the Spring.
Leo Ornstein was born in 1895 at Krementchug, near Odessa. He is consequently in his twenty-first year. He is already a remarkable pianist, one of the very few who may be expected to achieve a position in the front rank. His compositions have astonished the musical world. Some of them have even pleased people. Whatever their ultimate value they have certainly made it a deal easier for concert-goers to listen to what are called “discords” with equanimity. His music is a modern expression, untraditional, and full of a strange seething emotion; no calculation here. And like the best painting and literature of the epoch it vibrates with the unrest of the period which produced the great war.
June 14, 1916.