Leo Ornstein

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Nietzsche thought Wagner was the artist of decadence; Arthur Symons thinks he was a unique genius. Nietzsche regarded him as the great corrupter of music:—“he has made music sick”; Symons says that to find a parallel for Wagner’s achievement we must look back to the Greeks, to the age of Æschylus and Sophocles. Each one proved his point. It’s a bit confusing, and you begin to wonder what Art is.

Have you ever found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold through the whole art miracle? I never have and never expect to. Even in Pater’s The School of Giorgione you are merely told that since all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, toward that perfect identification of matter and form, the chief function of aesthetic criticism is to estimate the degree in which all the arts approach to musical law. But musical law is constantly changing; and the criterion of the degree to which matter and form become identical will be a sort of sliding scale. And what every one wants to know is how to gauge that scale. Can you think of a single art judgment in the whole realm of aesthetics that you can use as an infallible touchstone; with which you can make a mediocre poet realize why his work is bad instead of good? You can make him realize, by the desperate wildness with which you shriek “It’s not well done”, that something is wrong; but to save your life you can’t convince him that you are talking about anything except your own instinct—as you aren’t; and of course he feels that his instinct may be just as good as yours—which of course it can’t! Suppose you choose one of the best definitions ever thought of,—Mérimée’s “all art is exaggeration à propos”; you find that you’re just as badly off as before: by what standard is the à propos measured?

It was in this frame of mind that I heard Leo Ornstein’s music. First he came one night and played for us alone, on our Mason and Hamlin, in a half light and an atmosphere of intense excitement. None of us had decided beforehand that we should want to laugh or hiss or throw things at him, as they did in London two years ago. We expected something beautiful and we got it. He played his Impressions of the Thames, which he afterward described as a river of “towers and turrets and stars, of dark rushing water, of bridges and buildings, of desolate muddy banks, and then something which you cannot bear to look at any longer.” I can’t “see” music, so I only know that it was sound which interested and pleased and shook me. Then he played his Funeral March, which had something dark and vast in it; then some Ravel, the music of which interested me more than his playing of it; and finally the Schumann Arabesque, which he did so beautifully that I thought “Here is a man who plays just as he wants to, and probably comes nearer to what Schumann would have liked than all the strict interpreters with their flawless ‘taste’ have done.” It seemed to me that Ornstein did what he did with it—stretched its slenderness to a lovelier curve—in the interest of the piano; and that is the very best thing anyone can do with written music for the piano, even if the pedagogues can’t beat time to it.

So at the end I was beginning to think: perhaps this is the man who is to bring to the piano that something it still needs.

But the next morning, at his recital, I made an interesting discovery. Ornstein has brought nothing to the piano. He has brought something to the world of music: compositions which show that the piano music is more pliable than we had thought, and interpretations which show an exaggeration à propos. To the piano, as an instrument, he has brought what all the others have brought: virtuosity—and in this case a not exceptional virtuosity. This may sound like hair splitting, but it really is not.

Ornstein has done this: he has written some very interesting music, and he plays it as most composers of talent—perhaps of genius—would play their things if they had studied the piano as thoroughly as he. What is there in this to cause hysterics? The fact that it sounds different from the music you have been hearing? But that would seem to be a reason for interest, not merely for mirth. This reaction belongs in the same plane with patriotism and duty:—you laugh at what is strange, you love what is familiar, you obey what has been tested:—the three ready-made emotions, with which you can escape most effectively from art and life. So they howled at Ornstein. Two respectable women sitting near me, who would not have dared—what do I say? who would not have been able—to laugh at a minister’s treatise on good and evil or a president’s speech on loyalty to a flag, were so convulsed over Ornstein’s Impressions of the Thames that they moved their seats to the rear of the theatre where they could not be watched,—where they could merely disturb the pianist by their audible snortings. The critics have done the same thing—laughed at Ornstein’s own music and criticised scathingly his manner of playing familiar music. Ornstein’s interest, I am sure, is chiefly in what he has to say, and second in the way he says it. He is a composer-virtuoso. I had hoped he would be a piano-lover. That is the kind of artist I am looking for with more interest than I have for anything else in this world.

As for Ornstein himself, I think he is a sincere person who means to go on doing his work. I sometimes judge the sensitiveness of a nature by the intensity of expression that moves across the cheek-bones. You might look carefully at Ornstein’s face instead of judging him by the fact that his hair falls into his eyes when he plays. Of course he has been indiscreet enough to mention that he does not like Beethoven. Why that is unforgivable I can’t imagine. A man may surely like what he pleases. The high genius of a Mozart or a Haydn is a thing he feels intensely. He admires Chopin deeply as an artist who could do one thing very well and was content to let it go at that. Grieg he thinks is not a worthy mouthpiece for all that Norway has to give a musician. He loves Debussy, but thinks that Ravel is the greater man: “Debussy stands beside a pond and tells you beautifully of all he sees there; Ravel plunges into the pond and gives you the life of it.” Stravinsky and Scriabine are the two he cares for most, as I remember. “Schönberg has worked out his theory before he has worked out his art.” Something of that sort might apply to Ornstein himself, as in the case of his Chopin Nocturne in E Flat: I disliked his “exaggeration” in it as much as anything I have ever heard on a piano.

Oh, does no one realize what the unique beauty of a piano is, and that there are secrets of sound in it which have not yet been touched upon?