Ornstein is a mirror held up to the world of the modern city. The first
of his real compositions are like fragments of some cosmopolis of caves
and towers of steel, of furious motion and shafts of nitrogen glare
become music. They are like sensitive surfaces that have been laid in
the midst of the New Yorks; and record not only the clangors, but all
the violent forms of the city, the beat of the frenetic activity, the
intersecting planes of light, the masses of the masonry with the tiny,
dwarf-like creatures running in and out, the electric signs staining the
inky nightclouds. They give again the alarum of dawn breaking upon the
crowded, swarming cells; seven o'clock steam whistles on a winter morn;
pitiless light filtering over hurrying black droves of humanity;
thousands of shivering workers blackening Fourteenth Street. They
picture the very Niebelheim, the hordes of slaves herded by giants of
their own creation, the commands and cries of power in the bells,
whistles, signals. The grinding and shrieking of loaded trains in the
tubes, cranes laboring in the port, rotary engines drilling, turbines
churning are woven through them. Blankets of fog descend upon the river;
menacing shapes loom through it; rays of red light seek to cut the mist.
Flowers that are gray and black blossom on the ledges of tenement
windows giving on bare walls. And human souls and songs that are gray
and black like them bloom in the blind air, open their velvet petals,
their lustrous, soft corollas, from crannies and windows into this
metal, this dun, this unceasing roar.
For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all
this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up
through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is
the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw
European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew
had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave
clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from
out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been
seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore,
refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or
parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of
rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert
stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion
restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a
provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the
music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the
body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the
call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old
prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is
viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges
encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and
overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again
regarded. Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded
figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings
and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein
speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and
woeful language of the Old Testament.
But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all
beings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the men
who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange,
black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one
discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16,
is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not
youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the
expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels,
itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its
sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The
spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness of
youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce
understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried.
Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the
black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the
oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive
activity into which he has been born. It is such solitude that speaks in
the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, its
cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one
standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled
passions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to
the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure
muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the
"Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The
bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance
of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in
the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of
themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their
poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember
what once we felt.
The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of
Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a
wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no
vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he
feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and
rules and procedures. Harmony with him is something different than it is
with any other composer. Piano colors of a violence and garishness are
hurled against each other. The lowest and highest registers of the
instrument clash in "Improvisata." Rhythms battle, convulsively, almost.
In portions of the "Sinfonietta," five rhythms are to be found warring
against each other. Melodic curves, lines, sing ecstatically over
turbulent, mottled counterpoint in the piano and violin sonatas. The
violin sonata is something of an attempt to exhaust all the
possibilities of color-contrast contained in the little brown box. In
the first "Impression de Notre-Dame," the piano is metallic with the
booming bells. In the second, it is stony, heavy with the congested,
peering, menacing forms of gargoyles. In the accompaniment to the song
"Waldseligkeit," it seems to give the musical equivalent for the
substance of wood. No doubt, to one who, like Ornstein, regarded music
only as a means of communication, as speech of man to man, and occupied
himself only with the communication of his sensations and experience in
briefest, directest, simplest form, there must have come moments of the
most terrible self-doubt, when all the anathemas of the fathers of the
musical church thundered loud in his ears, and other men's forms and
proportions seemed to make his shrivel. It was doubtless thankfulness to
William Blake, that other "mad" inventor of wild images and designs,
that other "rager in the wilds," for fortification and sustenance, that
made him preface his violin sonata with the Argument of "The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell," and defend himself with the verses:
"Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grew,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees....
"Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
"Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam."
And certainly, for us, whatever the pundits claim, the wilds of Leo
Ornstein are not so raging and lion-infested. For while one speculates
whether these pieces are music or not, one discovers that one has
entered through them into the life of another being, and through him
into the lives of a whole upgrowing generation.
At present, however, some of those qualities that were so clearly
visible in Leo Ornstein during the first years in which he disclosed
himself are somewhat obscured. Something not entirely reassuring has
happened to the man. A great deal of the music that he has been
composing of late wants the bite his earlier work had. The colors are
not so piping hot. The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut.
Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of the
rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less
unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music,
something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and
dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it. The
racial element is softened, become gentler and duskier and more
romantic. The Jew in it no longer wears his gaberdine. If he wears a
prayer-shawl at all, it is one made of silk. The Jeremiah of the desert
has given way to the young, amorous, dream-filled poet, a poet of the
sort that arose among the Jews in Spain during the years of the Moorish
ascendency. Yet, a certain intensity, a certain originality, a certain
vein of genius, has undergone eclipse in the change. Something a little
brilliant, a little facile, a little undistinguished, has introduced
itself, even into the best of the newest pieces. The texture is thinner,
the tension slacker. Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into
them with the same directness and completeness with which he put
himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from
his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all. A choral
society of New York a year or two ago produced two small _a capella_
choruses of his that might have been the work of some obscure pupil of
Tchaikowsky's. The piano sonatina of the Funeral March, although by no
means as insignificant, is nevertheless uncharacteristic in the
resemblances it bears the music of Ravel. One thing the earlier
compositions are not, and that is, derivative. Ornstein, they make
plain, had benefited by the achievements of Debussy and Moussorgsky and
Scriabine. But they made plain as well that he had developed a style of
his own, a style that was, for all its crudeness and harshness,
personal. In becoming again a disciple he reverts to something that he
seemed to have left behind him when he wrote his clangorous "Dwarf
Suite."
What this new period of Ornstein's composition represents it is not easy
to say. Probably, it is a period of transition, a time of the marshaling
of forces to a new and fiercer onslaught. Such a time of gestation might
well be necessary to Ornstein's genius. It is possible that he has had
to give up something in order to gain something else, to try for less in
order to establish himself upon a footing firmer than that upon which he
stood. His genius during his first years of creation was lyrical
purely. It was a thing that expressed itself in picturing moods, in
making brief flights, in establishing _moments musicaux._ He is at his
best in his piano preludes, in his small forms. The works composed
during this period in the larger forms, the violin sonata excepted, are
scarcely achieved. The outer movements of the Grand Sonata for
pianoforte, for instance, are far inferior to the central ones. Whatever
the merit of some of the individual movements of "The Masqueraders,"
Opus 36, and the "Poems of 1917," and at times it is not small, the
works as a whole lack form. They have none of the unity and variety and
solidity of the "Papillons" and the "Carnaval" of Schumann or the
"Valses nobles et sentimentales" of Ravel, for instance, works to which
they are in certain other respects comparable. As he grew a little
older, Ornstein's nature probably began to demand other forms beside
these smaller, more episodic ones. It probably began to strive for
greater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order to
gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to build
piles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship and
supervision than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubtlessly has
been withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire. In
order to learn to organize his material, he has doubtlessly
unconsciously lessened its density and vibrancy for the time being.
And, too, it may be the result of a change from a pain-economy to a
pleasure-economy. The adolescent has grown into the young man. The
adjustment may have been made. The poet is no longer forced to mint his
miseries and pains alone into art; he is learning to be glad. He may
again be seeking to find himself in a world grown different.
At the same time, there is a distinct possibility that the present
period of Ornstein's composition is not a time of preparation for a new
flight. There is a distinct possibility that it represents an
unwholesome slackening. After all, may it not be that he has flinched?
Stronger men than he have succumbed to a hostile world. And Ornstein has
found the world very hostile. He has found America absolutely unprepared
for his art, possessed with no technique to cope with it. He has very
largely been operating in a void. It is not so much that he has been
tried and found wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the musical
world has been unable to follow him, it has dismissed him entirely from
its consciousness. Scarcely a critic has been able to express what it is
about his music that he likes or dislikes. They have either ridiculed
him or written cordially about him without saying anything. There is
nothing more demoralizing for the artist. At present they are even
classing him with Prokofief. The virtuosi have shown a like timidity.
Scarcely a one has dared perform his music. Many have refrained out of
policy, unwilling to forfeit any applause. Others have no doubt quite
sincerely refused to perform any music that sounded cacophonous to them.
For the army of musicians is almost entirely composed of rearguard. Not
a single one of the orchestral conductors in New York has dared consider
performing his "Sinfonietta," to say nothing of the early and
comparatively accessible "Marche funèbre" and "A la chinoise." Of the
Philharmonic Society, of course, one expects nothing. But one might
suppose that the various organizations allegedly "friendly" to music,
eager for the cause of the "new" and the "modern," would see to it that
the musician whom such an authority as Ernest Bloch has declared to be
the single composer in America who displays positive signs of genius,
was given his opportunity. The contrary has been the case. D'Indy's
foolish war symphony, the works of Henry Hadley, of Rachmaninoff, of
David Stanley Smith, even of Dvorsky, that person who exists as little
in the field of composition as he does in Biarritz, have received and do
receive the attention of our powerful ones. It would be small wonder,
then, if an artist like Ornstein, who, like every real artist, requires
the contact of other minds and cannot go on producing, hopeless of
attaining performance and exhibition, had finally flinched and wearied
of his efforts, and suddenly found himself writing such music as the
intelligences of his fellow-craftsmen can reasonably be expected to
comprehend.
There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recent
works represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of his
energy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the United
States and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers and
playing to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was in
America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the
music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with
Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and
Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his
programs, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he has
been playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt and
Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing it
none too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's edge.
No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody or the transcription of
the Mendelssohn Wedding March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continually
without being punished. No one who does not love them can play the
Sonata Appassionata or the _Etudes symphoniques_ or the waltzes of
Chopin long without becoming dulled and spoiled. So with composition
become an interval between two trains, and expression an attempt to
please audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popular
pianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein
has lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant
form.
Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that great and
permanent harm should have been done him already. He was too vital and
sane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in the
first years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius.
If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist
than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general
way, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being. It is this
great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are
not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another
Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other.
It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers
and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life
will grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but the
result of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another;
that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will express
him in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly come
from him weighty musical forms with colors as burning and deep as those
of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that Leo
Ornstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemed
and still seems bound.