Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahn make clear that their biography of Leo Ornstein (1893–2002) was an eight-year labor of love. There is plenty of evidence here of the authors’ exhaustive efforts to reconstruct the sometimes elusive details of the fascinating life—which spanned the entirety of the twentieth century, and then some—of a figure whom most historians of musical modernism and music in the United States have relegated to scant mention. The authors make a passionate and convincing argument for Ornstein's importance as a figure in the development of a modernist musical aesthetic in the United States.
The biography opens very effectively with extended excerpts from the colorfully written diary of Ornstein's brother-in-law, Jacob Titiev. According to Broyles and Von Glahn, who provide prudent annotations and commentary throughout these excerpts, Titiev's narrative offers “the only record of Ornstein's years in Russia written by someone who was there with him” (6). The diary provides glimpses into Ornstein's early music studies, including those at the St. Petersburg Conservatory at the age of 10; a firsthand account of the pogroms against the Jews in the early years of the twentieth century, which led the Ornsteins to flee Russia; and a detailed description of the family's difficult journey to New York City, where they arrived early in 1906.
In New York the young Ornstein studied the piano at Frank Damrosch's Institute of Musical Art with Norwegian-born Bertha Feiring Tapper, who was influential in promoting her student's career up until her death in 1915. Tapper and her husband invited Ornstein to their summer home in Maine, where he met and played music with their circle of musician friends from Boston and New York, which included Franz Kneisel and Horatio Parker. Mrs. Tapper also took her protégé on two trips to Europe, in 1910 and 1913.
Up to that time, Ornstein was mostly known as a young Russian virtuoso with a very intense performance style who played a fairly traditional repertoire. Ornstein's reputation as a composer and performer changed, however, around the time of his return from the second trip to Europe, when he became identified as an ultramodernist. Suddenly Ornstein was introducing dissonance, extreme dynamic contrasts, and irregular meters, tempi, and moods into compositions for solo piano with evocative titles such as Danse sauvage and Suicide in an Airplane. He claimed not to have been able to explain the abrupt change in his personal aesthetic even to himself, insisting that for a while he “doubted [his own] sanity” (67).
For a time Ornstein's concert repertoire focused on his own ultramodernist compositions, but it quickly became apparent that audiences were not ready for a steady diet of such works. His repertoire transitioned into what became a wildly successful mix of the traditional and the ultramodern. Ornstein, for whom the authors make a claim as “the 1910s rock star” (143), maintained a demanding schedule of touring from 1915 to the end of the decade, with his popularity peaking in 1919 and then trailing off into the mid-1920s. With the decrease in his performing activities also came a general move toward a more conventional style in his compositions.
Along with his concert engagements, from roughly 1916 to 1925 Ornstein was associated with the Ampico (American Piano Company) reproducing piano, giving live demonstrations of the new technology and making piano rolls. The authors suggest that the sudden decline in popularity of player pianos by the mid-1920s might have contributed to Ornstein's decision to stop touring by 1925. Another factor in Ornstein's decision to end his concert career was probably his appointment to a teaching position at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, also in 1925. This turn toward teaching eventually led to an appointment at Temple University in 1935 and the opening of the private Ornstein School of Music in the same year.
Ornstein ran the school with his wife, Pauline Mallet-Prevost, whom he had met while studying with Bertha Tapper and had married in 1918. Mallet-Prevost's influence on the trajectory of Ornstein's career is reiterated throughout the narrative, usually in a negative light. “Mother wanted him all to herself,” the authors report the Ornstein children asserting in interviews “on numerous occasions” (86). Apparently, and for whatever reason, he acquiesced to his wife's desires, although by many accounts he showed enthusiasm neither for teaching nor for parenting.
By 1937 Ornstein had left the public eye completely and would not resurface until the 1970s. His disappearance meant not only that he had completely stopped concertizing, but also that his music faded from public notice. Henry Cowell explained that he left Ornstein out of his 1933 anthology American Composers on American Music “because [his music] has not influenced the general trend since 1920 at the latest, and because since about 1920 his style has become more and more conventional until it can no longer be considered original.”Footnote 1 Broyles and Von Glahn note that Ornstein was also omitted from important histories of U.S. music, including those by Gilbert Chase and H. Wiley Hitchcock.Footnote 2
In the late 1960s Vivian Perlis aided in efforts toward an Ornstein revival that was spearheaded by Mallet-Prevost, their son Severo, and nephew Peter. By the early 1970s, apparently unrelated pockets of interest in Ornstein's music had sprung up in New York City and Berkeley, California, and several recordings by a variety of performers were released in the mid-1970s. Although interest in his music waned again into the 1980s, Ornstein remained active as a composer into his late 90s. He died in 2002 at the age of 108.
The biography follows a more or less chronological path through this story. Two chapters cut through this flow. The first, Chapter 3, titled “Circles and Triangles and Networks and Nets,” traces the social worlds in which Ornstein became involved as a young man, focusing on the orbits he would share with Waldo Frank, Claire Raphael Reis, Paul Rosenfeld, and A. Walter Kramer, and their intersections with the Stieglitz Group. The title of the chapter is an apt description of the experience of reading it as well: one really gets the feeling of being caught up in the paths of those complex social configurations.
The second interruption in the chronology focuses on the complex issues of “Identity”—as Chapter 5 is titled—with which Ornstein grappled over the years and provides some of the authors’ most engrossing analyses of their subject. They examine the influenza pandemic of 1918, U.S. attitudes toward immigrants generally and anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik sentiments in particular in the early twentieth century, and the repercussions of World War I and the subsequent Red Scare in the United States. This background serves to illuminate Ornstein's struggle to negotiate his Jewish, Russian, and U.S. identities even at the height of his visibility as a performer and composer. The authors show that Ornstein abruptly stopped identifying as Russian in 1918, while embracing the compositions of Edward MacDowell and music of African Americans, apparently in an effort to emphasize his identification with his adopted homeland. A critical assessment of the “Jewish element” perceived in Ornstein's music is also explored in some depth in this chapter.
These two interruptions in the chronology force the authors to double back on themselves at points. In one particularly jarring instance, the better part of an entire paragraph in Chapter 2 (83) reappears verbatim in Chapter 3 (94). The resulting uneven and sometimes redundant narrative rhythm that reveals itself when reading through the biography cover to cover may be an accurate and somehow necessary reflection of the life story being told, and of the resources available to help recreate it, but it can make the reader yearn for a more fluid reading experience.
Chapter 7 includes a lengthy analysis of Ornstein's Quintette for Piano and Strings, op. 92, from 1927, and Broyles and Von Glahn have prepared a critical edition of the work for the Music of the United States of America (MUSA) series published by A-R Editions. The Quintette—comprising three substantial movements lasting three-quarters of an hour in performance—fuses aspects of both Ornstein's ultramodern and Romantic aesthetics, embodying echoes of Debussy, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, and Stravinsky. The constantly shifting musical landscapes of each of the three movements feature, by unpredictable turns, angular melodies suggestive of Eastern European folk tunes; passages featuring great rhythmic complexity, high levels of dissonance, and restlessly virtuosic figuration in the piano; and gauzily impressionistic respites from all the surrounding activity. The editors state that in early reviews “the Quintette was criticized both as being insufficiently modern—that is, ultramodern—and too far outside the bounds of traditional structural principles” (xxvii). Referring to the stylistic mix of the work in unpublished material probably written in the 1970s, Ornstein himself remarked that “the Quintette is not a polite piece,” nor is it “Avant Garde,” but that it reflected his desire that music be “spontaneous and thoroughly uninhibited” (xxviii).
It may be instructive to compare the analysis of the Quintette in the MUSA edition, on pages xxvii to xxxix, with the closely related text on pages 227 to 240 of the biography. The writing in the MUSA edition is much crisper and more direct than in the biography. A surprisingly unappetizing description in the biography of the Quintette as “a three-movement sonata that, rather than emphasizing conflict among the different thematic and harmonic areas, makes its expressive mark by approaching redundancy” (238–39), is more appealingly cast in the MUSA edition: “Instead of emphasizing the conflict and contrast typical of pieces composed according to the sonata principle, the Quintette makes its expressive mark by recasting closely related themes” (xxxviii). In the MUSA edition several details concerning Ornstein's importance to U.S. modernism—and the state of U.S. modernism while Ornstein was coming of age musically—vividly come to the fore. His “multiple creative personalities”—revealed by turns through ultramodern pieces, other works in a more Romantic vein, and a few “short, simple, tonal, and often diatonic” pieces that appeared under the pseudonym “Vannin” (xxiii)—are clearly distinguished. The clarity of the text in the MUSA volume is partly a function of its necessary concision, but surely also a function of sharper editing.
Three brief musical examples in the biography attempt to illustrate a comprehensive, twelve-page analysis of this little-known work. By contrast, the analysis in the MUSA edition has the added benefit of easy access to the entire score, and the musical examples within it are referenced clearly and directly. The introductory material in the MUSA volume also includes three plates from Ornstein's manuscript, revealing the composer's neat, spacious hand. Something of these qualities is echoed in the presentation of the MUSA score itself, which is crystal clear and easy to follow.
Broyles and Von Glahn's biography of Leo Ornstein and their critical edition of his Quintette are both welcome contributions to U.S. music scholarship. The former provides an account of Ornstein's life with a previously unavailable level of detail and demonstrates his place within the context of cultural activity in this country during the twentieth century. The latter presents us with a large-scale musical work that exemplifies Ornstein's pianistic virtuosity as well as his stylistic pluralism. It offers an insightful analysis of the music and an incisive summary of many of the key issues presented in the longer biography. Taken together these two volumes make a compelling argument for yet another—and lasting—renewal of interest in Ornstein's life and music.
