Leo Ornstein

Initially regarded as a child prodigy and enfant terrible, Leo Ornstein outlasted his admirers and critics alike; born in the nineteenth century, he lived into the twenty-first. His compositional career may well be the longest in music history; stretching over eight decades, it surpasses those of even such famously long-lived composers as Verdi, Stravinsky, and Havergal Brian.

Leo Ornstein was born in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchug in 1892 or 1893. (The exact date has not been firmly established.) The son of a rabbi, he began his musical studies at home. At the age of ten he entered the conservatory of St. Petersburg, where he studied with Anna Esipova and Alexander Glazunov. After the failed Russian revolution of 1905, the Ornstein family fled to the United States, settling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Ornstein continued his musical education at the Institute of Musical Art (later known as the Juilliard School), studying piano with Bertha Tapper and harmony with Percy Goetschius. He made his New York debut in 1911 and was immediately hailed as a supremely gifted pianist.

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