Richard Pennycuick ([log in to unmask]) writes:
>The only other CM composer I knew of who passed 100 was Leo Ornstein
>(1892-2002), although I think there is some doubt about that.
No doubt at all. The doubt was attached to his exact age. As the family
left their paperwork behind when they fled from the anti-Semitic pogroms
in 1906, Ornstein was never sure whether he was 107, 108 or 109. I am
attaching my obituary of him from February of last year. A fascinating
composer and man.
Leo Ornstein's life is the stuff of fiction. A child prodigy
in his native Russia, he was driven into exile by anti-Semitism,
became an avant-garde composer and virtuoso pianist of
international renown by his early twenties, plunged into
obscurity at the height of his fame, was completely forgotten,
and defied old age: he may have been 109 when he died, making
him almost certainly the oldest composer ever.
Ornstein's first music lessons were with his father, a synagogal
cantor, and then with the composer-pianist Vladimir Puchalsky
(who later taught Vladimir Horowitz) in Kiev. The boy made
such rapid progress that at the age of twelve he was admitted
to St Petersburg Conservatoire, where he studied piano with
Anna Essipova and composition with Glazunov. But twelve was
younger than the official limit, and that is where the later
confusion about his age began: his father had added a couple
of years to gain him admission. When in 1906 the family fled
to the United States to escape the pogroms of Tsarist Russia,
they of course left the official documentation behind - and
so in later life Ornstein couldn't confirm his real age.
The Ornsteins settled in New York where, at the institution
that later become the Juilliard School of Music, Leo began
lessons with Bertha Fiering Tapper, who helped shape his
prodigious pianistic talents. He had already been composing
for some time - attractive, elegant, tonal pieces of considerable
craftsmanship - when he made his concert debut in 1911, and
around a year later, apparently unaware of such developments
elsewhere, he suddenly began writing music of such fierce
radicality that it attracted slighting comments about his
sanity; he even worried about it himself. His style now was
unlike anything else in music. He employed the piano as a
percussion instrument, pounding out savage rhythms and ferocious
cluster-chords with a primal energy that appalled the timid.
He embraced atonality independently of Schoenberg's parallel
experiments in Europe and rhythmic primitivism unaware of
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The titles of his pieces - among
them Danse sauvage and Suicide in an Airplane - reflected the
extremist brutality of the music and rapidly gained him
notoriety. By his early twenties he was one of the most
highly reputed of contemporary composers: in an article of
1915 Percy Grainger grouped him with Debussy, Ravel, Strauss,
Schoenberg and Stravinsky; Ferruccio Busoni was another who
acknowledged his importance. His music was associated with
the Italian futurists such as Marinetti and Russolo (inaccurately,
since he didn't share their artistic aims), the critic James
Huneker writing:
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.
His reputation was also as a pianist of fearless curiosity -
he gave the first US performances of music by Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Kodaly and others.
But his manic modernism was short-lived (nor was it
all-encompassing: the pianist Mark Gasser, who is preparing
a CD of Ornstein's music, describes the exquisite Suite Russe
of 1914 as "Bach meets Rachmaninov"). He explained later
that he felt his Violin Sonata of 1915 (which, when the
violinist Louis Krasner took it along to a chamber-music
class, got him thrown out) "had brought music just to the
very edge, and [...] I have no suicidal tendencies at all.
I simply drew back and said, 'Beyond that lies complete
chaos'". That realisation initiated what the Canadian
composer-pianist and scholar Gordon Rumson (in an article on
Ornstein in International Piano last spring, one of the first
serious examinations of his music in decades) describes as
a "third" period, beginning around 1922 during which [his]
musical language organised itself into a shimmering, luminous
gradation between simplicity and harshness. The melodies
have a Hebraic tint, and Ornstein does not shy from placing
dissonant and tonal music side by side. This shifting of
style is just one of Ornstein's creative tools. More
importantly, there is a directness of emotion that makes the
music genuinely appealing. It should also be noted that his
music is ideally written for the piano and is clearly the
work of a master pianist.
In 1922 Ornstein withdrew from the concert platform, too: his
music was not concerned with fad and fashion, but that was
how it was discussed, and he had had enough of controversy.
After his appointment as head of the piano department of the
Philadelphia Musical Academy in 1925, he settled there and
devoted the rest of his career to teaching, setting up the
Ornstein School of Music in the city in 1940 with his wife;
he retired in 1953.
But he continued to compose well into old age, producing a
generous body of piano music; his worklist also contains a
piano concerto (1925), a handful of other orchestral scores
(several were lost), songs and a number of important chamber-music
pieces, including three string quartets (the most recent
dating from 1976), a cello sonata (1918) that rivals Rachmaninov's
in gorgeous tunes, and a feistily energetic, epic piano quintet
(1927) that is a masterpiece. His large-scale Eighth Piano
Sonata, his last composition, was finished in September 1990,
when Ornstein was in his late nineties. That may well be a
unique achievement: Havergal Brian wrote the last of his 32
symphonies in 1968, when he was 92, and Berthold Goldschmidt
his Deux Nocturnes for soprano and orchestra at 93, but
Ornstein surpassed even those remarkable records. Many of
Ornstein's compositions would not be available to posterity
without the devoted perseverance of his wife, Pauline, also
a former student of Tapper's and a fine pianist in her own
right. Ornstein would often wait years between composing a
work and committing it to paper: he could hold cupboardsful
of music in his head, complete in every detail, and perform
them with complete confidence. Pauline pressed him to write
them down and eventually took over the task of doing so from
his dictation. Much to Ornstein's surprise, when they sat
down to notate the first three piano sonatas, he found he had
entirely forgotten them. And the musical world had entirely
forgotten him. Occasional recordings came and went, but no
one paid him any systematic attention - except his son, Severo,
a computer scientist and early Internet developer, who produced
a complete edition of the piano music and continues to work
on the rest of his output. Ornstein meantime seemed to have
decided against growing old: his hundredth birthday (however
imprecise the date) went by without thinning his hair or his
memory, and he was still giving interviews three weeks before
his death.
He lived long enough, indeed, to see the beginnings of a
revival of interest in his music. A biography is in preparation.
The pianists Janice Weber and Marc-Andre Hamelin have both
recorded CDs of his music; their appearance is imminent. They
will help rewrite the history of twentieth-century music just
as Ornstein helped write it in the first place. Martin
Anderson
Leo Ornstein, composer and pianist, born Kremenchug, Ukraine,
(?) 2 December 1892 or 1893, married 1918 Pauline Mallet-Prevost
(d 1985), 1 son, 1 daughter, died Green Bay, Wisconsin, 24
February 2002.
Martin Anderson
Toccata Press
www.toccatapress.com
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