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The outlines are less bold and jagged and clear-cut. Some of the convulsive intensity, the fury, has passed out of the rhythmic element. The melodies are less acidulous, the moods less unbridled. No doubt, something happier has entered into his music, something more voluptuous and smooth. The 'cello chants passionately and dreamily in the two sonatas Ornstein has written of late for it.
And Ornstein has found the world very hostile. He has found America absolutely unprepared for his art, possessed with no technique to cope with it. He has very largely been operating in a void. It is not so much that he has been tried and found wanting. He has not even been heard. Because the musical world has been unable to follow him, it has dismissed him entirely from its consciousness.
Here, before Strawinsky and Ornstein, before Moussorgsky, even, was a music barbarous and radical and revolutionary, a music beside which so much of modern music dwindles. It has, primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire.
The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and rules and procedures.
And we are positive that there will shortly come from him weighty musical forms with colors as burning and deep as those of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that Leo Ornstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemed and still seems bound. Bloch Once before, East and West have met and merged.
Ornstein does not seem to be putting himself into them with the same directness and completeness with which he put himself into his earlier work. Moreover, occasionally there come from his pen works into which he is not putting himself at all.
The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord, and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in the most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certain sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the emotional flight of the composer.
It probably began to strive for greater scope, duration, development, complexity. And so, in order to gain greater intellectual control over his outflow, to learn to build piles of a bulk that require an entirely different workmanship and supervision than do preludes and impressions, Ornstein doubtlessly has been withholding himself, diminishing the intensity of his fire.
Ornstein, chief physician of the Greek army, describes a Greek of twenty-six who had a hairless, conical tail, free only at the tip, two inches long and containing three vertebrae. He also remarks that other instances have been observed in recruits. Thirk of Broussa in 1820 described the tail of a Kurd of twenty-two which contained four vertebrae.
Here is an entirely paradoxical situation; a set of interpreters who exist, it would seem, only for the purpose of delivering to us the art of the past. What would we think of an actor who could make no effect save in the tragedies of Corneille? It is such as these who have kept Leo Ornstein from writing an opera. Berlioz forewarned us in his "Memoirs."
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