Leo Ornstein

A Wild Man’s Dance               

Leo Ornstein was a Russian-born Jew and classical music prodigy who immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. He attained international fame as a virtuoso pianist while still a teenager by introducing American audiences to the modern music of Schoenberg, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Ravel, as well as to his own compositions. His early compositions for the piano, such as Danse Sauvage and Suicide in an Airplane were even more radical and inventive than Schoenberg’s. Upon listening to Ornstein play these compositions, music critic of the 1910s James Huneker wrote, “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.”

Ornstein’s music embodies a relentless American energy that captures a spiritual openness to the future. Composing beyond the edge of musical conventions, he followed his subjective muse and allowed his intuition and imagination free rein. In her book Making Music Modern, Carol Oja describes Leo Ornstein as “the single most important figure on the American modern-music scene in the 1910s.”

At the height of a remarkable but brief concert career from 1910 to the late 1920s, Ornstein gave up his barnstorming to devote himself to composing with the assistance of his wife and lifelong collaborator Pauline Malle-Prevost. Though having disappeared from the public stage, Ornstein continued his musical career as a teacher and composer. The couple established a music school in Philadelphia where Leo taught until the mid 1950s. He resumed composing in the 1960s and continued until the death of Pauline in 1985, when he ceased composing for a time. Then in 1988, at the age of 96, living near family in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Ornstein returned to composing with the Piano Sonata No. 7. Two years later, he completed his final work, the remarkable Piano Sonata No. 8.

Do Not Go Gently captures renowned concert pianist Marc-André Hamelin playing Ornstein’s Piano Sonata No. 8. A Marc-André Hamelin CD recording of Leo Ornstein’s compositions for piano, including Suicide in an Airplane, Danse Sauvage and Piano Sonata No. 8 is now available under the Hyperion label (CDA67320). 

A full-length biography, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices, by Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahn, was just released from Indiana University Press in Septemeber 2007. Both Broyles and Von Glahn appear in the program offering a depth of perspective on his music and life. Ornstein died before the program was completed, and his biographers contributed many well-researched details.

Also prominently featured is Vivian Perlis from the Yale School of Music and Founding Director of the Oral History, American Music Project. Perlis is credited with having re-discovered Ornstein in the 1970s living and composing in a trailer park in Brownsville, Texas. Archival footage of her first interviews with Ornstein about his creative process, recorded when he was in his 80s, is included in Do Not Go Gently. After living in relative isolation for decades, it is impossible to miss the excitement in Ornstein when he talks about his creative process. 

For more information

Poonhill.com, a website dedicated to Ornstein and his music, includes audio files, downloadable scores and links to albums

Oral History, American Music, Yale University

Books

Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music by Vivian Perlis (ISBN: 0300106734)

Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices by Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahn (ISBN: 0253348943)

Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s by Carol J. Oja (ISBN: 0195162579)

To get the music

Marc-André Hamelin plays the featured compositions in the album Leo Ornstein by Hyperion Records