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.

Ornstein soon made his mark as a composer as well. Works such as Wild Men's Dance and Suicide in an Airplane aroused critical controversy as a result of Ornstein's new compositional vocabulary, which included startling dissonances, percussive sonorities, and driving rhythms. Critics sometimes grouped him with Schoenberg and Stravinsky as leaders of the modernist movement. Ornstein's reputation was not limited to the United States; in 1913-14, he undertook a European concert tour. He created a sensation in Berlin, Paris, and London, and he became friends with leading musicians and critics, such as Ferruccio Busoni and M.D. Calvocoressi. After returning home Ornstein continued to perform regularly, and he was widely regarded as one of the most important young musicians in America. Frederick H. Martins published a short biography in 1918, Leo Ornstein: The Man, His Ideas, His Work .

In 1918 Ornstein married Pauline Mallet-Prévost, who had also been a piano student of Bertha Tapper. They had two children. Ornstein usually composed by dictating the music to his wife, so most of the manuscripts in the Ornstein Papers are in her hand.

Despite his extraordinary pianistic talents, Ornstein did not enjoy the stress, travel, and social obligations of life as a touring virtuoso. He began to curtail his concert schedule in the early 1920s, and by the early '30s, he had withdrawn from the concert stage altogether. Instead, he turned to pedagogy; for several years he was a member of the faculty at the Philadelphia Musical Academy. He later established the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia, where he taught until his retirement in the mid-1950s. He and his wife later settled in Brownsville, Texas and then in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He died in Green Bay on February 24, 2002.

After Ornstein stopped performing in public, his music also faded from view. Although he continued to compose prolifically, he came to favor a less radical style than the one that had brought him into the limelight. Meanwhile, a new generation of modernist composers came to the fore, and by the 1950s, Ornstein was largely forgotten. Towards the end of the twentieth century, there were signs of an Ornstein revival, however. His son Severo Ornstein published many of his works under imprint of the Poon Hill Press, and several have been recorded. Historians now recognize Ornstein as a pivotal figure in the early history of musical modernism.

From the guide to the The Leo Ornstein Papers, 1892-1989 (inclusive), (Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University)