Special Report - A Mad Genius Passes

Special Assignment: A Mad Genius Passes
March 8, 2002
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, March 8 (UPI) -- How can you be shocked by the death of a 109-year-old man? I don't know, but I am.

Leo Ornstein, the musical madman of 1914, has died in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the word just now reached New York.

Then again, it's not so surprising that no one heard about his death for two full weeks. He outlived his era. He saw three centuries. All the music critics who called him insane when they heard his "Wild Men's Dance" have long since gone to their graves. Ornstein had lived in virtual obscurity since 1933. He had never cared much for reporters, or interviews, or fame itself. I sought him out 26 years ago in Brownsville, Texas, where he was living in a trailer park on the outskirts of town, and the first thing he told me was "I never give interviews."

But I got lucky that day. He was a big fan of the weekly Mexican Buffet at the Holiday Inn, and he invited me to come along with him and his wife Pauline, a Park Avenue debutante he had met 60 years earlier while both were students at the Institute of Musical Arts (now called Juilliard). He was 83 on the day we met, but his energy and dynamism were infectious. I remember him literally bounding out of the car. His wife was nursing an injured leg, so he hurried to her aid and helped her into the dining room.

The next hour evaporated under the spell of his frank, frenetic conversation--now jocular, now earnest and serious-- always with the ease of a man who knows his own mind and will happily tell you what he has discovered to be the truth. I had seen pictures of him in his heyday as a virtuoso pianist who played with every major symphony orchestra in the world, and the only difference was that his luxuriant jet-black hair had turned white and wispy. His passion for music was unchanged.

When I asked him about the "Wild Men's Dance," which caused critics on three continents to wonder whether he was sane, he said, "Well, I had never heard any modern music myself, so sometimes I thought I was insane, too! Schoenberg had not been heard yet. I had never heard any twelve-tone music. Twelve-tone music didn't exist. And all of a sudden I was writing this stuff and had no idea where it was coming from."

As he warmed to the interview, he recalled story after story, from czarist Russia (he was a prodigy who entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1902, at age 10, to study with Alexander Glazounov), to New York in its "Titanic"-era heyday (he studied with Bertha Fiering Tapper and made his New York recital debut in 1911), to the concert halls of Europe where he was toasted and feted like a little prince. But as he talked he kept coming back to his love of solitude. He was absolutely thrilled to have discovered the scorched palms and balmy days of Brownsville, at the southernmost tip of Texas, because no one had ever heard of him there.

"Absolutely no intellectual pretensions!" he exclaimed. "Here it's so unlike the cities. We're surrounded by working people--farm workers, 'the salt of the earth,' if you must use a cliche--and the privacy is total. Sometimes I wonder myself what I'm doing here so far away from everything, but the weather is so nice in the winter."

He lived just a stone's throw from the Mexican border, and each morning he arose at 5 a.m.--a routine he kept up for 55 years--to compose. To keep his edge, he read as little as possible about himself, modern music, or the rest of the world. "And I hear rather little music," he added. "I'm writing it, not listening to it. It's my business to write. It is someone else's business to listen."

His wife Pauline took the opportunity to gently scold him about his manner of composing. He preferred to hear a piece entirely in his mind, without writing it down, and then simply play it. He was so bored with the process of transcribing that many of his early works had never been written down at all, so Pauline had made it her life's work to prod and cajole him until he agreed to play his older works so that she could write them down. Even so, his memory had started to fail, and his first three piano sonatas were lost.

In the years after I met Ornstein, I cobbled together a little collection of albums and CDs--there's not much out there-- and became increasingly fascinated by his work. Yet I was never able to figure out why the musical world seemed to have passed him by so completely after some 20-odd years of adulation. In the years just before and just after World War I, Ornstein was to music what Picasso was to art. A self-styled "futurist" whose music was either a grating, cacophonous outrage or a revolutionary sensation (depending on whom you talked to), he was nothing if not controversial. He relished his role as avant- gardism's undisputed leader, and his work was actually heard more often than Schoenberg's because he insisted on putting it on his programs. Ornstein was known primarily as a dashing young virtuoso on the piano. He could play Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt with all the romantic longing of the 19th century--that's what drew the crowds--but he also included his own music whenever he could.

On that winter day in Brownsville, he was delighted to recall his youth as a heedless, if not much loved, revolutionary, but said his style had mellowed as he got older. "A young man at a certain age has an audacity, a devil-may-care attitude," he says, "and he's much more reckless than he would otherwise be. It's all just a grand uproarious time for him. Later he becomes more judicious, more critical."

Audacious is perhaps a mild word to describe the defiant young man in 1914--before "modernism" was even a musical term-- who gave four "futurist" concerts at the Bandbox Theatre in New York featuring the latest music from Europe (Ornstein had just toured there).

Musicians and critics were shocked. Ornstein was an anarchist, a poseur and an abomination. Ornstein introduced to America the music of Schoenberg, Ravel, Scriabin, and especially Debussy (he would later be hailed as the best interpreter of Debussy in the world), and the critics didn't much care for any of it. But it was his own music--including the infamous "Wild Men's Dance"--that caused the uprising. "Ornstein represents an evil musical genius wandering without the utmost pale of tonal orthodoxy," wrote the critic for the London Globe, "in a weird No-Man's Land, haunted with tortuous sound, with wails of futuristic despair, with cubistic shrieks and post-impressionist cries and crashes."

The brouhaha was merely amusing to Ornstein. "New York is a place where they love new sensations," he recalled. "They even make it worse by mesmerizing themselves into believing that a thing is more of a sensation than it actually is. But you know, now that I think of it, you can't really blame the people for not understanding. At the time it was a new and startling thing for them. You could hardly expect them to penetrate to its essence immediately. These things take time and apprenticeship."

If the world needed an apprenticeship, Ornstein was determined to become its tutor. He continued his highly popular concert tours from 1911, when he was 19 years old, until 1933, when he was 41. If he had continued, he would no doubt have become a Rubinstein or a Horowitz, packing concert halls until arthritis set in. But with little fanfare and no public announcement, he simply quit. Vanished. He was tired, he said, of "the incessant practicing and the incessant travelling."

Ornstein actually quit performing precisely at the moment when "futurism" was fading, and perhaps that has something to do with his music being neglected. "All the travel and the night life was interfering with my work," he told me. He wanted to write. So he sought seclusion--first as a teacher in Philadelphia, where he founded the Ornstein School of Music in 1935. Then, after selling the school in 1958, he spent his "retirement" moving around--New Hampshire, Florida, Arizona, and the sunny Hispanic Texas town where I found him.

Unfortunately Ornstein's reputation as a composer declined through all those years. No one recorded his music, and when he was "featured" somewhere, it was only to consign him to the great ash heap of modernist "precursors"--stylistic innovators of no lasting importance.

"But let me emphasize this," he said with intense feeling when I asked him about his reputation. "I'm not really interested in inventing a style. I'm not making styles but writing music. Now when I wrote the 'Wild Men's Dance,' obviously all my previous training was inadequate. I found that I was writing a new music, so I abandoned all of my old conceptions and grabbed at anything that was available. But, you see, style was entirely a side issue. I remember being slightly irritated at the time when the emphasis was constantly on the style, and there is nothing worse than neglecting the music for the style. There is nothing in creation more damaging than to put your hopes in avant-gardism by itself. Music still must have substance; it's still what you say that matters."

Apparently someone did finally pay attention to what Ornstein was saying, because shortly after my interview, his amazing 1927 "Piano Quintet" and his "Three Moods for Piano" were released by Composers Recordings, Inc. Then the Louisville Symphony performed his "Nocturne and Dance of the Fates," followed by a Connecticut performance by Michael Sellers of his "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"--the first time it had been heard since Ornstein himself played it in 1925. Since then there have been surfacings of Ornstein pieces here and there, notably by the pianist Marthanne Verbit, who has recorded "Sonata for Piano No. 4," "Arabesques for Piano," and "Morning in the Woods," and the cellist Yehuda Hanani, who recorded his "Sonata for Cello." The American Symphony staged his piano concerto at Lincoln Center in the nineties, and he has increasingly turned up on symphonic programs, though very rarely on recordings.

It's not all "difficult" music. His futurist period only lasted from roughly 1914 to 1922, by which time he thought he had pushed the envelope as far as it would stretch. After he wrote his opus 31, "Sonata for Violin and Piano," he decided that he "had brought music just to the very edge, and since I have no suicidal tendencies at all, I simply drew back and said, 'beyond that lies complete chaos.'"

The result is that many of his later pieces--including, as it turns out, the string quartet he was constructing when I met him--are full of moments that could only be called classically romantic. And his final work--the "Eighth Piano Sonata," composed in 1990 when he was 98 years old--includes a second movement full of naive and unpretentious simplicity. It's called "A Trip to the Attic: A Tear or Two for a Childhood Forever Gone" and includes sections called "Lament for a Lost Toy," "A Half Mutilated Cradle," and "First Carousel Ride and Sounds of a Hurdy Gurdy." You would almost want to say it was a 98-year-old man going through a second childhood, except that the first and third movements are so powerful and jarring that he was obviously a composer for this age.

I had asked him in 1976 about his music somehow being too private for some listeners, but he dismissed the idea out of hand: "What you have heard is possible for anyone else to hear--I believe that." And he refused to speak of any personal influences on his work.

"There is a very real danger of trying to associate autobiography with what a person writes," he said. "Look at Wagner, writing something like Parsifal! What kind of religious experience has that man had? I still remember an incident when I was a young man and the critic Paul Rosenfeld came to visit me. He asked me to play something for him, which I did, and the piece was very very sad, the very essence of melancholy. So later when we were walking on the streets, he turned to me in puzzlement and said, 'I just cannot understand it. I look at your character, which is outgoing, vibrant, very much alive, and I cannot see anything in you that would create a piece like that. Why have you done it?' And of course I couldn't explain. I don't know what it is in me that creates those moods. I cannot explain it without going back to the origin of ideas--and no one knows how ideas originate."

Ornstein's youth was spent in a strict Jewish family in Krementchug, Ukraine--the family fled to America in 1907 as anti- Semitism was rising--and there's a thread of speculative Hebraic mysticism running through many of his works. But he wasn't aware of that, either, he said.

"Sometimes I will be working," he told me, "the notes will come, and it will all seem so obvious, so inevitable--almost childishly simple. But later some barrier appears between you and the music; you yourself are puzzled at what you could have thought. I remember that after I had first sent 'Wild Men's Dance' to my publisher in London, he sent me back a proof, and I looked at that proof and thought, 'My God! How did this ever come out of this head?' The remarkable thing is that I wrote all these things without hearing any modern music at all. I almost doubted my own sanity at one point. 'What is happening?' I said to myself. 'Why am I writing these things?'"

Although Schoenberg's reputation has long since surpassed Ornstein's, Ornstein was the acknowledged leader among modernists for many years. In 1918, when he was only 26 years old, a full- length biography of him was published by Frederick H. Martens. The critic James Huneker once wrote, "I never thought I should live to hear Arnold Schoenberg sound tame; yet tame he sounds-- almost timid and halting--after Ornstein, who is, most emphatically, the only true-blue, genuine, futurist composer alive."

Contrast that with the opinion of Virgil Thomson, writing a few years later, when he dismissed Ornstein's "Danse Sauvage" of 1915 as "the modernism of yesteryear."

Ornstein's ideas, by whatever name, sound modern to me, although that word has little significance anymore. His piano concerto has no key signature, includes many metrical shifts, and the exciting finale is in rapid 5/8 time. His very earliest works--the "Dwarf Suite" and "Impressions of Notre Dame and the Tamise"--were atonal, rhthmically complex, and included so-called "tonal clusters" long before they were supposedly invented by Henry Cowell.

Asked about the clusters that day, Ornstein laughed. "No question I was the first to use them. I remember this young Cowell lad hanging around, but I was the first to use clusters."

A "tonal cluster" is a chord made entirely of half tones, and in later years--as post-modern composers like John Cage came along--the cluster became little more than striking the keyboard with the fist. In fact, it was sometimes played that way, or with a board or other object.

"I'm apart from the present writers," Ornstein said curtly when I asked him about fist-playing. "I don't understand what they're trying to do. Let me emphasize again. I have this fear-- and always have--this terrible fear of getting over-stylized, of becoming so stylized that you are really writing style instead of something intrinsic."

After our lunch, the courtly Ornstein pronounced himself delighted with the interview. "But I'm sorry now that I have to go. I suppose I am admitting how old I am, but I have only so much energy for the day, I get rather tired in the afternoons, and I must get up tomorrow and work. This is very rare for me. I never give interviews."

I never saw him again, of course. His wife died in 1985, but he continued to compose. Not counting the pieces that were lost, he ended his life with 70 works for solo piano, four for four- hand piano, a piano quintet, 21 chamber pieces, 10 vocal pieces, and six orchestral works. Some of his early works, like "Suicide in an Airplane" and "Sonata for Violin and Piano" and "Nocturne" for clarinet and piano and the playful "Waltz for Piano #7," are frequently played as part of other programs, but most of his compositions are still rarely heard.

I have a theory about what happened to Leo Ornstein. His works languished, I think, partly because he lived in the age of publicity, and he had no publicist, no recording contract, no agent, and certainly no Sol Hurok-style producer to interpret him for the masses. The second reason he was not taken seriously is that he was a child prodigy and a brilliant concert pianist. All those years of adulation in concert halls undercut his reputation as a serious composer. (Most people in the music world would have been astonished to know that he composed every day of his life.) It would be like Laurence Olivier, after 30 years on the stage, wanting to be taken seriously as a playwright. People are skeptical that the two talents can reside in the same body.

I'm convinced that they did, though, and there are signs that a few others do as well. Earlier this year one of Ornstein's early compositions, "A la Chinoise," was recorded by none other than Jenny Lin, the young Taiwanese pianist who is the Ornstein of her own era. Thank God Pauline wrote it all down. Someday, I suspect, we'll hear it all.

Not that Ornstein would have cared much. "If my music has any value," he once told The New York Times, "it will be picked up and played. If it has no value, it deserves its neglect."

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