Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices Review

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Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices ReviewLeo Ornstein (1893? -- 2002)remains one of the most obscurely fascinating figures in American music. Born in Russia in about 1893, he was a child prodigy who studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In about 1905, his family fled Russia to escape the pogroms and emigrated to the lower east side of New York City. Ornstein studied music at a predecessor to the Juilliard School of Music and toured Europe in the early 1910s with his teacher, Bertha Fiering Tapper. During this time, Ornstein received a compositional "epiphany" and wrote some wildly dissonant, percussive piano pieces which established his reputation as the "bad boy of American music."
Upon returning to the United States, Ornstein, young and handsome, all of 5'4" with a mane of long black hair, became a charismatic pianist (With the outbreak of WW I, he never again toured Europe.) who played the standard repertoire together with his own and other modernist compositions. Ornstein had a successful career as a concert pianist until 1925. In the interim, he married Pauline-Mallet-Prevost, who was a fellow student at the conservatory, and the daughter of a wealthy family, highly different from Ornstein's own background. The marriage lasted over 60 years.
Suddenly, in 1926, Ornstein abandoned the life of a concert pianist for reasons that remain obscure. He taught at a conservatory in Philadelphia and ultimately opened his own studio. He did no more concertizing and ultimately became forgotten. In the 1950s, the Ornsteins retired from their studio and wandered around the United States, finally settling in a trailer in Brownsville, Texas and then moving to Wisconsin.
Ornstein was "rediscovered" in the 1970s, and was the subject of news features and a number of recordings. During this time, he continued to compose. Pianists Marc Hamelin and Janice Weber are among the artists who have recorded Ornstein's solo piano compositions, from the radical early works to the more conservative, virtually unknown pieces he composed late in life.
It is fortunate that there is a recent thoughtful biography of Ornstein, the man and the musician, "Leo Ornstein:Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices" (2007) by the musicologists Michael Broyles and Denise von Glahn. Their work is the product of eight years of research, including interviews with Ornstein's family, and study of his large output of music.
The book proceeds on many levels. It is a study of the composer's childhood in Russia and the immigration of his family to the United States, in company with many Russian Jews. It is also a study, in Ornstein's case, of assimilation and Americanization, and its consequences. We learn a great deal about the United States, up through WW I, and about musical life of the time. Finally, Broyles and von Glahn give an overview of Ornstein's music and detailed descriptions of some major pieces, especially the "Quintette" and the early radical piano works.
Underlying any consideration of Leo Ornstein is the question why he abrubtly abandoned his concert career in the mid-1920s for a life of obscurity. The authors offer a variety of answers, including Ornstein's aversion to risk-taking, and his desire for a peaceful mainstream life in America. They are critical of his marriage to Mallet-Prevost, for wanting to keep Ornstein to herself and to hinder the development of his career - a decision in which Ornstein at the least obviously acquiesced. It remains unclear to me whether the authors' criticism of Mallet-Prevost is well-founded.
The authors take a similar approach to the change in Ornstein's music from its early anarchy to its latter approach which Ornstein described as "expressivist". Ornstein became disenchanted with the development of modern music which he characterised as overintellectualized, experimental and formalist. His own music, in contrast, was emotive and spontaneous, wearing its heart on its sleeve. The authors are somewhat critical of Ornstein's technical skills as a composer and his difficulty in handling complex forms. They also raise questions, as they do in considering Ornstein's life, about the composer's abandonment of his Jewish-Russian roots, including his relative lack of contact with his family after he became successful, his desire to be mainstreamed into America, his isolation from other composers and intellectuals following the end of his career as a performer, and his aversion to risk-taking as factors that contributed to his obscurity.
Following my reading of this book, I listened to the Naxos recording of Ornstein's piano music by Janice Weber with renewed interest and appreciation. Broyles and von Glahn have written a meditative, troubling biography of a composer who deserves to be remembered and, more generally, of the changes and challenges faced by Jewish immigrants to the United States early in the 20th Century.
Robin FriedmanLeo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices Overview

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