Chapter VIII

The fact that Schoenberg has written a handbook of theory, explaining, after a fashion, his method of composition has misled some people. “Schoenberg is a learned musician,” writes Mr. Aldrich (“New York Times,” December 5, 1915), “and his music is built up by processes derived from methods handed down to the present by the learned of the past, however widely the results may depart from those hitherto accepted.... There results what he chooses to consider ‘harmony,’ the outcome of a deliberate system, about which he theorizes and _has written a book_” (the italics again are mine). Against this train of reasoning (further on in the same article it becomes evident that Mr. Aldrich is annoyed with Strawinsky because he has not done likewise) it is pleasant to place the following paragraph from Chorley’s “Modern German Music”: “Mozart, it will be recollected, totally and (for him) seriously, declined to criticize himself and confess his habits of composition. Many men have produced great works of art who have never cultivated æsthetic conversation: nay, more, who have shrunk with a secretly entertained dislike from those indefatigable persons whose fancy it is ‘to peep and botanize’ in every corner of faëry land. It cannot be said that the analytical spirit of the circle of Weimar, when Goethe was its master-spirit did any great things for Music.” Do not misunderstand Strawinsky’s silence (which has only been relative, after all). It is sometimes as well to compose as to theorize. Some of the great composers have let us see into their workshops (not that they have all consistently followed out their own theories) and others have not. In one pregnant paragraph Strawinsky has expressed himself (he is speaking of _The Nightingale_): “I want to suggest neither situations nor emotions, but simply to manifest, to express them. I think there is in what are called ‘impressionist’ methods” (“Mr. Strawinsky, on the other hand, is a musical impressionist from the start”: R. A. again) “a certain amount of hypocrisy, or at least a tendency towards vagueness and ambiguity. That I shun above all things, and that, perhaps, is the reason why my methods differ as much from those of the impressionists as they differ from academic conventional methods. Though I often find it extremely hard to do so, I always aim at straightforward expression in its simplest form. I have no use for ‘working-out’ in dramatic or lyric music. The one essential thing is to feel and to convey one’s feelings.”

This idea of natural expression becomes associated in any great composer’s mind with another idea, the horror of the _cliché_. Each new giant desires to express himself without resorting to the thousand and one formulas which have been more or less in use since the “golden age” of music (whenever that was). Natural expression implies to a certain extent the abandonment of the _cliché_, for, under this principle, if a rule or a habit is weighed and found wanting it is immediately discarded.

“Routine (_cliché_) is highly esteemed and frequently required; in musical ‘officialdom’ it is a _sine qua non_,” writes Busoni. “That routine in music should exist at all, and furthermore that it can be nominated as a condition in the musician’s bond, is another proof of the narrow confines of our musical art. Routine signifies the acquisition of a modicum of experience and art craft, and their application to all cases which may occur; hence, there must be an astounding number of analogous cases. Now I like to imagine a species of art-praxis wherein each case should be a new one, an exception.” Even so early a composer (using early in a loose sense) as Schumann found it unnecessary, at times, to close a piece with the tonic; and many other composers have disregarded the rule since, leaving the ear hanging in the air, so to speak. Is there any more reason why all pieces should end on the tonic than that all books should end happily or all pictures be painted in black and white? In music which Mozart wrote at the age of four there are chords of the second (and they occur in music before Mozart). In books of the period you can read of the horror with which ears at the beginning of the nineteenth century received consecutive fifths. Some of the modern French composers have disposed of the _cliché_ of a symphony in four movements. Chausson, Franck, and Dukas have written symphonies in three parts. What composer (even the most academic) ever followed the letter of a precept if he found a better way of expressing himself? Moussorgsky avoided _cliché_ as he would have avoided the plague. He took all the short cuts possible. There are no preambles and addendas, or other doddering concessions to scientific art in his music dramas and his songs. He gives the words their natural accent and the voice its natural inflections. Death is not always rewarded with blows on the big drum. The composer sometimes expresses the end, quite simply, in silence. In all the arts the horror of _cliché_ asserts itself so violently indeed that we find Robert Ross (“Masks and Phases”) assailing Walter Pater for such a fall from grace as the use of the phrase, “rebellious masses of black hair.” Of course some small souls are so busy defying _cliché_, with no adequate reason for doing so, that they make themselves ridiculous. And as an example of this preoccupation I may tell an anecdote related to me by George Moore. “For a time,” he said, “Augusta Holmès was interested in an opera she was composing, _La Montagne Noire_, to the exclusion of all other subjects in conversation. She talked about it constantly and always brought one point forward: all the characters were to sing with their backs to the audience. That was her novel idea. She did not seem to realize that, in itself, the innovation would not serve to make her opera interesting.” Strawinsky’s horror of _cliché_ is by no means abnormal. He does not break rules merely for the pleasure of shocking the pedants. In each instance he has developed, quite naturally and inevitably, the form out of his material. In _Petrouchka_, a ballet with a Russian country fair as its background, he has harped on the folk-dance tunes, the hurdy-gurdy manner, and, as befits this work, there is no great break with tradition, except in the orchestration. _The Firebird_, too, in spite of its fantasy and brilliance, is perfectly understandable in terms of the chromatic scale. In _The Sacrifice to the Spring_, on the other hand, unhampered by the chains which a “story-ballet” (the fable of these “pictures of pagan Russia” is entirely negligible) inevitably imply, he has awakened primitive emotions by the use of barbaric rhythm, without any special regard for melody or harmony, using the words in their academic senses. There is no attempt made to begin or end with major thirds. Strawinsky was perhaps the first composer to see that melody is of no importance in a ballet. _Fireworks_ is impressionistic but it is no more so (although the result is arrived at by a wholly dissimilar method) than _La Mer_ of Debussy. But it is in his opera, _The Nightingale_, or his very short pieces for string quartet, or his Japanese songs for voice and small orchestra that the beast shows his fangs, so to speak. It is in these pieces and in _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ that Strawinsky has accomplished a process of elision, leaving out some of those stupidities which have bored us at every concert of academic music which we have attended. (You must realize how much your mind wanders at a symphony concert. It is impossible to concentrate one’s complete attention on the performance of a long work except at those times when some new phrase or some new turn in the working-out of a theme strikes the ear. There is so much of the music that is familiar, because it has occurred in so much music before. If you hear tum-ti-tum you may be certain it will be followed by ti-ti-ti and a good part of this sort of thing falls on deaf ears.... There are those, I am forced to admit, who can only concentrate on that which is perfectly familiar to them.) As a matter of fact he gives our ears credit (by this time!) for the ability to skip a few of the connecting links. Now this sort of elision in painting has come to be the slogan of a school. Cézanne painted a woman as he saw her; he made no attempt to explain her; that pleasure he left for the spectator of his picture. He did not draw a fashion plate. The successors of Cézanne (some of them) have gone much farther. They draw us a few bones and expect us to reconstruct the woman, body and soul, after the fashion of a professor of anatomy reconstructing an ichthyosaurus. Strawinsky and some other modern musicians have gone as far; they have left out the tum-ti-tums and twilly-wigs which connect the pregnant phrases in their music.... This does not signify that they do not _think_ them, sometimes, but it is not necessary for any one with a receptive ear (not an _expectant_ ear, unless it be an ear which expects to hear something pleasant!) to do so. In fact this kind of an auditor appreciates these short cuts of composers, gives thanks to God for them. Surprise is one of the keenest emotions that music has in its power to give us (even Hadyn and Weber discovered that!). It is only the pedants and the critics, who, after all, do not sit through all the long symphonies, who are annoyed by these attempts at concentration and condensation. (I say the pedants but I must include the Philistines. It is really _cliché_ which makes certain music “popular.” The public as a whole really prefers music based on _cliché_, with a melody in which the end is foreordained almost from the first bar. Of course in time public taste is changed.... The transition is slow ... but the composer who follows public taste instead of leading it soon drops out of hearing. The _cliché_ of to-day is not the _cliché_ of day before yesterday. According to Philip Hale, Napoleon, then first consul [1800] said to Luigi Cherubini, “I am very fond of Paisiello’s music; it is gentle, peaceful. You have great talent, but your accompaniments are too loud.” Cherubini replied, “Citizen Consul, I have conformed to the taste of the French.” Napoleon persisted, “Your music is too loud; let us talk of Paisiello’s which lulls me gently.” “I understand,” answered Cherubini, “you prefer music that does not prevent you from dreaming of affairs of state.”) Strawinsky, working gradually, not with the intention to astonish but with no fear of doing so, dropping superfluities, and all _cliché_ of the studio whatsoever, arrives at a perfectly natural form of expression in his lyric drama, _The Nightingale_, in which there is no working-out or development of themes; the music is intended to comment upon, to fill with a bigger meaning, the action as it proceeds, without resorting to tricks which require mental effort on the part of the auditor. The composer does not wish to burden him with any more mental effort than the mere listening to the piece requires and he strikes to the soul with the poignancy of his expression. (The foregoing may easily be misunderstood. It does not mean necessarily that there is no polyphony, that there are no parts leading hither and thither in the music of Strawinsky. It does not mean that dissonance has become an end in itself with this composer. It simply means that he has let his inspiration take the form natural to it and has not tried to cramp his inspiration into proscribed forms. There should be no more difficulty in understanding him than in understanding Beethoven once one arrives at listening with unbiased ears. The trouble is that too many of us have made up our minds not to listen to anything which does not conform with our own precious opinions.)

At the risk of being misunderstood by some and for the sake of making myself clearer to others I hazard a frivolous figure. Say that Wagner’s formula for composition be represented by some expression; I will choose the simple proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.” Humperdinck is content to change a single detail of this formula. He says, musically speaking, “Make _wheat_ while the sun shines.” Richard Strauss makes a more complete inversion. His paraphrase would suggest something like this, “Make brass while the band brays.” Strawinsky, wearied of the whole business (as was Debussy before him; genius does not paraphrase) uses only two words of the formula ... say “make” and “sun.” Later even these are negligible, as each new composer makes his own laws and his own formulas. The infinity of it! In time the work of Strawinsky will establish a _cliché_ to be scorned by a new generation (scorned in the sense that it will not be imitated, except by inferior men).

That his music is vibrant and beautiful we may be sure and it has happened that all of it has been appreciated by a very worth-while public. He has done what Benedetto Croce in his valuable work, “Æsthetic,” demands of the artist. He has expressed himself ... for beauty is expression. “Artists,” says this writer, “while making a verbal pretence of agreeing, or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have always disregarded (these) _laws of styles_. Every true work of art has violated some established class and upset the ideas of the critics who have been obliged to enlarge the number of classes, until finally even this enlargement has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works of art, which are naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings, and--new enlargements.”

“It must not be forgotten,” says Egon Wellesz (“Schoenberg and Beyond” in “The Musical Quarterly,” Otto Kinkeldey’s translation), “that in art there are no ‘eternal laws’ and rules. Each period of history has its own art, and the art of each period has its own rules. There are times of which one might say that every work which was not in accord with the rules was bad or amateurish. These are the times in which fixed forms exist, to which all artists hold fast, merely varying the content. Then there are periods when artists break through and shatter the old forms. The greatness of their thoughts can no longer be confined within the old limits. (Think of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz.) There arises a category of art works whose power and beauty can be _felt_ only and not _understood_. For this reason an audience that knows nothing of rules will enthuse over works of this kind much sooner than the average musician who looks for the rules and their observance.”

Remember that Hanslick called _Tristan und Isolde_ “an abomination of sense and language” and Chorley wrote “I have never been so blanked, pained, wearied, _insulted_ even (the word is not too strong), by a work of pretension as by ... _Tannhäuser_....” “Fortunately,” I quote Benedetto Croce again, “no arduous remarks are necessary to convince ourself that pictures, poetry, and every work of art, produce no effects save on souls prepared to receive them.”

The clock continues to make its hands go round, so fast indeed that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of its course. For example, just before his death, John F. Runciman in “Another Ode to Discord” (“The New Music Review,” April, 1916) seemed to present an entirely new front. Here is a sample passage, “We have grown used to dissonances and our ears no longer require the momentary rest afforded by frequent concords; if a discord neither demands preparation nor resolution, and if it sounds beautiful and is expressive, there is no reason on earth why a piece of music should not consist wholly of a series of discords.... From Monteverde to Scriabine the line is unbroken, each successive generation growing bolder in attacking dissonances and still bolder in the manner of quitting them. I heard a gentleman give a recital of his own pianoforte works not long ago. They seemed to consist entirely of minor seconds--B and C struck together--and the effect to my mind was excruciatingly abominable. But that is how Bach’s music, Beethoven’s, Wagner’s, struck their contemporaries; and heaven knows what we shall get accustomed to in time. One thing is certain--that the most daring modern spirit is only following in the steps of the mightiest masters....”

We may be on the verge of a still greater revolution in art than any through which we have yet passed; new banners may be unfurled, and new strongholds captured. I admit that the idea gives me pleasure. Try to admit as much to yourself. Go hear the new music; listen to it and see if you can’t enjoy it. Perhaps you can’t. At any rate you will find in time that you won’t listen to second-rate imitations of the giant works of the past any longer. Your ears will make progress in spite of you and I shouldn’t wonder at all if five years more would make Schoenberg and Strawinsky and Ornstein a trifle old-fashioned.... The Austrian already has a little of the academy dust upon him.

_New York, April 16, 1916._

A New Principle in Music

A New Principle in Music

Although Igor Strawinsky plainly proclaimed himself a genius in _The Firebird_ (1909-10), it was in _Petrouchka_ (1910-11) that he began the experiment which established a new principle in music. In these “scènes burlesques” he discovered the advantages of a new use of the modern orchestra, completely upsetting the old academic ideas about “balance of tone,” and proving to his own satisfaction the value of “pure tone,” in the same sense that the painter speaks of pure colour. And in this work he broke away from the standards not only of Richard Strauss, the Wagner follower, but also of such innovators as Modeste Moussorgsky and Claude Debussy.

Strauss, following Wagner’s theory of the _leit-motiv_, rounded out the form of the tone-poem, carried the principle of representation in music a few steps farther than his master, gave new colours to old instruments, and broadened the scope of the modern orchestra so that it might include new ones (in one of his symphonies Gustav Mahler was content with 150 men!). Moussorgsky (although his work preceded that of Strauss, the general knowledge of it is modern), working along entirely different lines, strove for truthful utterance and achieved a mode of expression which usually seems inevitable. Debussy endowed music with novel tints derived from the extensive, and almost exclusive, use of what is called the whole-tone scale, and instead of forcing his orchestra to make more noise he constantly repressed it (in all of _Pelléas et Mélisande_ there is but one climax of sound and in _l’Après-midi d’un Faune_ and his other orchestral works he is equally continent in the use of dynamics).

Igor Strawinsky has not been deaf to the blandishments of these composers. He has used the _leit-motiv_ (sparingly) in both _The Firebird_ and _Petrouchka_. He abandoned it in _The Sacrifice to the Spring_ (1913) and in _The Nightingale_ (1914). His powers of representation are as great as those of Strauss; it is only necessary to recall the music of the bird in _The Firebird_, his orchestral piece, _Fireworks_, which received warm praise from a manufacturer of pyrotechnics, and the street organ music in _Petrouchka_. Later he conceived the mission of music to be something different. “La musique est trop bête,” he said once ironically, “pour exprimer autre chose que la musique.” In such an extraordinary work as _The Nightingale_ we find him making little or no attempt at representation. The bird does not sing like the little brown warbler; instead Strawinsky has endeavoured to write music which would give the _feeling_ of the bird’s song and the effect it made on the people in his lyric drama to the auditors in the stalls of the opera house. As for Strauss’s use of orchestral colour the German is the merest tyro when compared to the Russian. There is some use of the whole-tone scale in _The Firebird_, and elsewhere in Strawinsky, but it is not a predominant use of it. In this “conte dansé” he also suggests the _Pelléas et Mélisande_ of Debussy in his continent use of sound and the mystery and esotericism of his effect. Strawinsky is more of an expert than Moussorgsky; he handles his medium more freely (has any one ever handled it better?) but he still preaches the older Russian doctrine of truth of expression, a doctrine which implies the curt dismissal of all idea of padding.

But all these composers and their contemporaries, and the composers who came before them, have one quality in common; they all use the orchestra of their time, or a bigger one. Strauss, to be sure, introduces a number of new instruments, but he still utilizes a vast number of violins and violas massed against the other instruments, diminishing in number according to the volume of sound each makes. He divides his strings continually, of course; they do not all play alike as the violins, say, in _Il Barbiere di Siviglia_, but they often all play at once.

Strawinsky experimented at first with the full orchestra and he even utilized it in such late works as _Petrouchka_ and _The Nightingale_. However, in his search for “pure tone” he used it in a new way. In _Petrouchka_, for example, infrequently you will hear more than _one of each instrument at a time_ and frequently two, or at most three, instruments playing simultaneously will be sufficient to give his idea form. The entire second scene of this mimed drama, is written for solo piano, occasionally combined with a single other instrument. At other times in the action the bassoon or the cornet, even the triangle has the stage. And when he wishes to achieve his most complete effects he is careful not to use more than seven or eight instruments, and _only one of each_.

He experimented still further with this principle in his Japanese songs, for voice and small orchestra (1912). The words are by Akahito, Mazatsumi, and Tsaraiuki. I have not heard these songs with orchestral accompaniment (the piano transcription was made by the composer himself) but I may take the judgment of those who have. I am told that they are of an indescribable beauty, and instinct with a new colour, a colour particularly adapted to the oriental naïveté of the lyrics. The orchestra, to accompany a soprano, consists of two flutes (one a little flute), two clarinets (the second a bass clarinet), piano (an instrument which Strawinsky almost invariably includes in his orchestration), two violins, viola and ’cello. This form of chamber music, of course, is not rare. Chausson’s violin concerto, with chamber orchestra, and Schoenberg’s _Pierrot Lunaire_ instantly come to mind, but Strawinsky did not stop with chamber music. He applied his new principle to the larger forms.

In his newest work, _The Village Weddings_, which I believe Serge de Diaghilew hopes to produce, his principle has found its ultimate expression, I am told by his friend, Ernest Ansermet, conductor of the Russian Ballet in America and to whom Strawinsky dedicated his three pieces for string quartet. The last note is dry on the score of this work, and it is therefore quite possible to talk about it although no part of it has yet been performed publicly. According to Mr. Ansermet there is required an orchestra of forty-five men, each a virtuoso, _no two of whom play the same instrument_ (to be sure there are two violins but one invariably plays pizzicato, the other invariably bows). There are novelties in the band but all the conventional instruments are there including, you may be sure, a piano and an infinite variety of woodwinds, which always play significant rôles in Strawinsky’s orchestration. And Mr. Ansermet says that in this work Strawinsky has achieved effects such as have only been dreamed of by composers hitherto.... I can well believe him.

He has made another innovation, following, in this case, an idea of Diaghilew’s. When that impresario determined on a production of Rimsky-Korsakow’s opera, _The Golden Cock_, during the summer of 1914 he conceived a performance with two casts, one choregraphic and the other vocal. Thus Mme. Dobrovolska sang the coloratura rôle of the Queen of Shemakhan while Mme. Karsavina danced the part most brilliantly on her toes; M. Petrov sang the rôle of King Dodon, which was enacted by Adolf Bolm, etc. In order to accomplish this feat Mr. Diaghilew was obliged to make the singers a part of the decoration. Nathalie Gontcharova, who has been called in to assist in the production of _The Village Weddings_, devised as part of her stage setting two tiers of seats, one on either side of the stage, extending into the flies after the fashion of similar benches used at the performance of an oratorio. The singers (principals and chorus together) clad in magenta gowns and caps, all precisely similar, sat on these seats during the performance and, after a few seconds, they became quite automatically a part of the decoration. The action took place in the centre of the stage and the dancers not only mimed their rôles but also opened and closed their mouths as if they were singing. The effect was thoroughly diverting and more than one serious person was heard to declare that the future of opera had been solved, although Mme. Rimsky-Korsakow, as she had on a similar occasion when the Russian Ballet had produced Fokine’s version of _Scheherazade_, protested.

Rimsky-Korsakow wrote his opera to be sung in the ordinary fashion, and, in so far as this matters, it was perhaps a desecration to perform it in any other manner. However, quite beyond the fact that very large audiences were hugely delighted with _The Golden Cock_ in its new form, these performances served to fire Strawinsky with the inspiration for his new work. He intends _The Village Weddings_ to be given precisely in this manner. It is an opera, the rôles of which are to be sung by artists who sit still while the figures of the ballet will enact them. The words, I am told, are entirely derived from Russian folk stories and ballads, pieced together by the composer himself, and the action is to be like that of a marionette show in which the characters are worked by strings from above. It may also be stated on the same authority that the music, while embracing new tone colours and dramatic effects, is as tuneful as any yet set on paper by this extraordinary young man; the songs have a true folk flavour. The whole, it is probable, will make as enchanting a stage entertainment as any which this composer has yet contrived.

It is not only folk-tunes but popular songs as well that fascinate Igor Strawinsky. Ernest Ansermet collected literally hundreds of examples of American ragtime songs and dances to take back to the composer, and he pointed out to me how Strawinsky had used similar specimens in the past. For example, the barrel organ solo in the first scene of _Petrouchka_ is a popular French song of several seasons ago, _La Jambe de Bois_ (a song now forbidden in Paris); the final wedding music in _The Firebird_ is an _adagio_ version of a popular Russian song, with indecent words. He sees beauty in these popular tunes, too much beauty to be allowed to go to waste. In the same spirit he has taken the melodies of two Lanner waltzes for the dance between the Ballerina and the Moor in the third scene of _Petrouchka_. It would not surprise me at all to discover _Hello Frisco_ bobbing up in one of his future works. After all turn about is fair play; the popular composers have dug gold mines out of the classics.

Consistent, certainly, is Strawinsky’s delight in clowns and music halls--the burlesque and the eccentric. He has written a ballet for four clowns, and Ansermet showed me one day an arrangement for four hands of three pieces, for small orchestra, in _style music hall_, dated 1914. We gave what we smilingly referred to as the “first American audition” on the grand pianoforte in his hotel room. I played the base, not a matter of any particular difficulty in the first number, a polka, because the first bar was repeated to the end. This polka, I found very amusing and we played it over several times. The valse, which followed, reminded me of the Lanner number in _Petrouchka_. The suite closed with a march, dedicated to Alfred Casella.... The pieces would delight any audience, from that of the Palace Theatre, to that of the concerts of the Symphony Society of New York.

_New York, February 6, 1916._

Leo Ornstein

“_the only true blue, genuine Futurist composer alive._”

James Huneker.

Leo Ornstein

The amazing Leo Ornstein!... I should have written the amazing Leo Ornsteins for “there are many of them and each one of them is one.” Ornstein himself has a symbol for this diversity; some of his music he signs “Vannin.” He has told me that the signature is automatic: when Vannin writes he signs; when Ornstein writes _he_ signs. But it is not alone in composing that there are many Ornsteins; there are many pianists as well. One Ornstein paints his tones with a fine soft brush; the other smears on his colours with a trowel. In his sentimental treatment of triviality he has scarcely a competitor on the serious concert stage (unless it be Fanny Bloomfield-Zeisler). Is this the Caliban, one asks, who conceived and who executes _The Wild Men’s Dance_? The softer Ornstein is less original than his comrade, more imitative.... I have been told that Jews are always imitative in art, that there are no great Jewish composers. Wagner? Well, Wagner was half a Jew, perhaps. Certainly there is imitation in Ornstein, but so was there in the young Beethoven, the young Debussy....

Recently I went to hear Ornstein play under a misconception. I thought that he, with an announced violinist, was going to perform his anarchistic sonata for violin and piano, opus 31. They did perform one of his sonatas but it was an earlier opus, 26, I think. At times, while I listened it seemed to me that nothing so beautiful had been done in this form since César Franck’s sonata. The first movement had a rhapsodic character that was absolutely successful in establishing a mood. The music soared; it did not seem confined at all. It achieved perfectly the effect of improvisation. The second part was even finer, and the scherzo and finale only less good. But this was no new idiom. I looked again and again at my programme; again and again at the man on the piano stool. Was this not Harold Bauer playing Ravel?... One theme struck me as astonishingly like Johnson’s air in the last act of _The Girl of the Golden West_. There was a good use made of the whole-tone scale and its attendant harmonies, which sounded strangely in our ears a few seasons past, and a ravishing series of figurations and runs made one remember that Debussy had described falling water in a similar fashion.

This over the pianist became less himself--so far as I had become acquainted with him to this time--than ever. He played a banal barcarole of Rubinstein’s; to be sure he almost made it sound like an interesting composition; he played a scherzino of his own that any one from Schütt to Moszkowski might have signed; he played something of Grieg’s which may have pleased Mr. Finck and two or three ladies in the audience but which certainly left me cold; and he concluded this group with a performance of Liszt’s arrangement of the waltz from Gounod’s _Faust_. Thereupon there was so much applause that he came back and played his scherzino again. His répertoire in this _genre_ was probably too limited to admit of his adding a fresh number.... At this point I arose and left the hall, more in wonder than in indignation.

Was this the musician who had been reviled and hissed? Was this the pianist and composer whom Huneker had dubbed the only real futurist in modern music? It was not the Ornstein I myself had heard a few weeks previously striking the keyboards with his fists in the vociferous measures of _The Wild Men’s Dance_; it was not the colour painter of the two _Impressions of Notre Dame_; it was not the Ornstein who in a dark corner of Pogliani’s glowed with glee over the possibility of dividing and redividing the existing scale into eighth, sixteenth, and twenty-fourth tones.... This was another Ornstein and in searching my memory I discovered him to be the oldest Ornstein of all. I remembered five years back when I was assistant to the musical critic of the “New York Times” and had been sent to hear a boy prodigy play on a Sunday evening at the New Amsterdam Theatre. Concerts by serious artists at that period seldom took place outside of recognized concert halls, nor did they occur on Sunday nights. But there was something about this concert that impressed itself upon me and I wrote more than the usual perfunctory notice on this occasion. Here is my account of what I think must have been Leo Ornstein’s first public appearance (March 5, 1911), dug from an old scrap book:

“The New Amsterdam Theatre is a strange place for a recital of pianoforte music, but one was held there last evening, when Leo Ornstein, the latest wunderkind to claim metropolitan attention, appeared before a very large audience to contribute his interpretation of a programme which would have tested any fully grown-up talent.

“It began with Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, included Beethoven’s _Sonata Appassionata_, six Chopin numbers, and finally Rubinstein’s D minor concerto, in which young Ornstein was assisted by the Volpe Symphony Orchestra. To say that this boy has great talent would be to mention the obvious, but to say that as yet he is ripe for such matters as he undertook last night would be stretching the truth. It should be stated, however, that his command of tone colour is already great and that his technique is usually adequate for the demands which the music made, although in some passages in the final movement of the Beethoven sonata his strength seemed to desert him.”

I never even heard of Leo Ornstein again after this concert at the New Amsterdam (his exploits in Europe escaped my eyes and ears) until he gave the famous series of concerts at the Bandbox Theatre in January and February of 1915, a series of concerts which really startled musical New York and even aroused orchestral conductors, in some measure, out of their lethargic method of programme-making. So far as he was able Ornstein constructed his programmes entirely from the “music of the future,” and patrons of piano recitals were astonished to discover that a pianist could give four concerts without playing any music by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, or Schubert.... Since these occasions Ornstein has been considered the high apostle of the new art in America, as the post-futurist composer, and as a pianist of great technical powers and a luscious tone quality (it does not seem strange that these attributes are somewhat exaggerated in so young a man).

Nearly a year later (December 15, 1915, to be exact) Ornstein gave another concert at the Cort Theatre in New York. Here are my impressions of that occasion, noted down shortly after:

“Leo Ornstein, a few years ago a poor Russian Jew music student, is rapidly by way of becoming an institution. His concerts are largely attended and he is even taken seriously by the press, especially in England.

“He slouched on the stage, stooping, in his usual listless manner, his long arms hanging limp at his sides like those of a gorilla. His head is beautiful, crowned with an overflowing crop of black hair, soulful eyes, a fine mask. There are pauses without expression but sometimes, notably when he plays _The Wild Men’s Dance_, his face lights up with a sort of sardonic appreciation. He has discarded his sack cloth coat for a velvet jacket of similar cut.

“He began with two lovely impressionistic things by Vannin (Sanborn says that this is ‘programme for Ornstein’), _The Waltzers_ and _Night_. A long sonata by Cyril Scott (almost entirely in the whole-tone scale, sounding consequently like Debussy out of Bach, for there was a fugue and a smell of the academy) followed. Ravel’s _Oiseaux Tristes_ twittered their sorrows prettily in the treble, and a sonatina by the same composer seemed negligible. Albeniz’s _Almeria_, a section of the twelve-parted _Iberia_, was a Spanish picture of worth. Ornstein followed with his own pieces, _Improvisata_, a vivid bit of colour and rhythm, and _Impressions of the Thames_, in which an attempt was made to picture the heavy smoking barges, the labours on the river, the shrill sirens of the tugs. The limited (is it, I wonder?) medium of the piano made all this sound rather Chinese. But some got the picture. A few laughed. _The Wild Men’s Dance_ convulsed certain parts of the audience. It always does (but this may well be hysteria); others were struck with wonder by its thrill. Certainly a powerful massing of notes, creating wild effects in tone, and a compelling rhythm. In the _Fairy Pictures_ of Korngold, which closed the programme, Ornstein was not at his best; nor, for that matter, was Korngold. They were written when the composer was a very young boy and they are not particularly original, spontaneous, or beautiful. The difficulties exist for the player rather than for the hearer.... Ornstein did not bring out their humour. Humour, as yet, is not an attribute of his playing. He has always imparted to the piano a beautiful tone; his touch is almost as fine as Pachmann’s. But his powers are ripening in every direction. Formerly he dwelt too long on nuances, fussed too much with details. His style is becoming broader. His technique has always been ample. There is no doubt but that he will become a power in the music world.”

Some time later I met Leo Ornstein and we talked over a table. He is fluid in conversation and while he talks he clasps and unclasps his hands.... He referred to his début at the New Amsterdam. “My ambition then was to play the concertos of Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky ... and I satisfied it. Soon after that concert I went abroad.... Suddenly the new thing came to me, and I began to write and play in the style which has since become identified with my name. It was music that I felt and I realized that I had become myself at last, although at first, to be frank, it horrified me as much as it has since horrified others. Mind you, when I took the leap I had never seen any music by Schoenberg or Strawinsky. I was unaware that there was such a generality as ‘futurism.’

“I spent some time in Norway and Vienna, where I met Leschetitzky” (this incident is referred to elsewhere in this volume) “and then I went down to Paris. I was very poor.... I met Harold Bauer and one day I went to play for him. We had a furious argument all day. He couldn’t understand my music. But he asked me to come again the next day, and I did. This time Walter Morse Rummel was there and he suggested that Calvocoressi would be interested in me. So he gave me a note to Calvocoressi.

“Calvocoressi is a Greek but he speaks all languages. He read my note of introduction and asked me if I spoke French or English. We spoke a little Russian together. Then he asked me to play. While I played his eyes snapped and he uttered several sudden ejaculations. ‘Play that again,’ he said, when I had concluded one piece. Later on he asked some of his friends to hear me.... At the time he was giving a series of lectures on modern musicians, Strauss, Debussy, Dukas, Ravel, Schoenberg, and Strawinsky, and he included _me_ in the list! I illustrated two of his lectures and after I had concluded my performance of the music of other composers he asked me to play something of my own, which I did....” Ornstein looked amusingly rueful. “The auditors were not actually rude. How could they be when I followed Calvocoressi? But they giggled a little. Later on in London they did more than giggle.

“I went to London because my means were getting low. I had almost no money at all, as a matter of fact.... In London I found Calvocoressi’s influence of great value (he had already written an article about me) and some people at Oxford had heard me in Paris. These friends helped; besides I played the Steinway piano and the Steinways finally gave me a concert in Steinway Hall. At my first concert (this was in the spring of 1914) I played music by other composers. At my second concert, devoted to my own compositions, I might have played anything. I couldn’t hear the piano myself. The crowd whistled and howled and even threw handy missiles on the stage ... but that concert made me famous,” Ornstein wound up with a smile.

He is a hard-working youth, serious, it would seem, to the heart. His published music is numbered into the thirties and his répertoire is extensive. He spends a great deal of time working hard on the music of a bygone age, although he finds it no stimulation for this one, but to be taken seriously as a pianist he is obliged to prove to melomaniacs that he has the equipment to play the classic composers. Of all the compositions that he learns, however, he complains of his own as the most difficult to memorize; a glance at _The Wild Men’s Dance_ or more particularly at a page of his second sonata for violin and piano will convince any one of the truth of this assertion. The chords will prove strangers to many a well-trained eye. I wonder if so uncannily gifted a sight reader as Walter Damrosch, who can play an orchestral score on the piano at sight, could read this music?

Of his principles of composition the boy says only that he writes what he feels. He has no regard for the rules, although he has studied them enough to break them thoroughly. He thinks there is an underlying basis of theory for his method of composition, which may be formulated later. It is not his purpose to formulate it. He is sincere in his art.

Once he said to me, “I hate cleverness. I don’t want to be clever. I hate to be called clever. I am not clever. I don’t like clever people. Art that is merely clever is not art at all.”

With Busoni and Schoenberg he believes that there are no discords, only chords and chords ... and that there are many combinations of notes, “millions of them” which have not yet been devised.

“When I feel that the existing enharmonic scale is limiting me I shall write in quarter tones. In time I think the ear can be trained to grasp eighth tones. Instruments only exist to perform music and new instruments will be created to meet the new need. It can be met now on the violin or in the voice. The piano, of course, is responsible for the rigidity of the present scale.”

Ornstein never rewrites. If his inspiration does not come the first time it never comes. He does not try to improve a failure. His method is to write as much as he can spontaneously on one day, and to pick the composition up where he left off on the next.

His opinions of other modern composers are interesting: he considers Ravel greater than Debussy, and speaks with enthusiasm about _Daphnis et Chloë_. He has played music by Satie in private but does not find it “stimulating or interesting.” ... Schoenberg ... “the last of the academics ... all brain, no spirit. His music is mathematical. He does not feel it. Korngold’s pieces are pretty but he has done nothing important. Scriabine was a great theorist who never achieved his goal. He helped others on. But Strawinsky is the most stimulating and interesting of all the modern composers. He feels what he writes.”

Most of Ornstein’s music is inspired by things about him, some of it by abstract ideas. His social conscience is awake. He wanted to call _The Wild Men’s Dance_, _Liberty_ (“I attempted to write music which would dance itself, which did not require a dancer”), but finally decided on the more symbolic title. “I am known as a musical anarch now,” he explained to me, “I could not name a piece of music _Liberty_--at least not _that_ piece--without associating myself in the public mind with a certain social propaganda.” Just the same he means the propaganda. In the _Dwarf Suite_ he gives us a picture of the lives of the struggling Russian Jews. These dwarfs are symbols.... He is fond of abstract titles. He often plays his _Three Moods_. “In Boston they did not like my _Three Moods_. They found my _Anger_ too unrestrained; it was vulgar to express oneself so freely.... But there is such a thing as anger. Why should it not find artistic expression? Besides it is a very good contrast to _Peace_ and _Joy_ which enclose it.” The _Impressions of the Thames_ I have already referred to. With the two _Impressions of Notre Dame_ it stands as his successful experiment with impressionism. The _Notre Dame_ pictures include gargoyles and, of course, bells.... I have not heard the violin and piano sonata, opus 31. Nor can I play it. Nor can I derive any very adequate idea of how it sounds from a perusal of the score. Strange music this.... Some time ago some one sent Ornstein the eight songs of Richard Strauss, Opus 49. The words of three of these songs (_Wiegenliedchen_, _In Goldener Fülle_, and _Waldseligkeit_) struck him and he made settings for them. Compare them with Strauss and you will find the Bavarian’s music scented with lavender. “In the _Wiegenliedchen_ Strauss gives you a picture of the woman rocking the cradle for his accompaniment. I have tried to go further, tried to express the feelings in the woman’s mind, her hopes for the child when it is grown, her fears. I have tried to get _underneath_.” But the _Berceuse_ in Ornstein’s _Nine Miniatures_ is as simple an expression as the lover of Ethelbert Nevin’s style could wish. Not all of Ornstein’s music is careless of tradition. He was influenced in the beginning by many people. His _Russian Suite_ is very pretty. Most of it is like Tschaikowsky. These suites will prove (if any one wants it proved) that Ornstein can write conventional melody.

Ornstein has also written a composition for orchestra entitled _The Faun_, which Henry Wood had in mind for performance before the war. It has not yet been played and I humbly suggest it to our resident conductors, together with Albeniz’s _Catalonia_, Schoenberg’s _Five Pieces_, and Strawinsky’s _Sacrifice to the Spring_.

Leo Ornstein was born in 1895 at Krementchug, near Odessa. He is consequently in his twenty-first year. He is already a remarkable pianist, one of the very few who may be expected to achieve a position in the front rank. His compositions have astonished the musical world. Some of them have even pleased people. Whatever their ultimate value they have certainly made it a deal easier for concert-goers to listen to what are called “discords” with equanimity. His music is a modern expression, untraditional, and full of a strange seething emotion; no calculation here. And like the best painting and literature of the epoch it vibrates with the unrest of the period which produced the great war.

_June 14, 1916._

THE END

“BORZOI” stands for the best in literature in all its branches--drama and fiction, poetry and art. “BORZOI” also stands for unusually pleasing book-making.

BORZOI Books are good books and there is one for every taste worthy of the name. A few are briefly described on the next page. Mr. Knopf will be glad to see that you are notified regularly of new and forthcoming BORZOI Books if you will send him your name and address for that purpose. He will also see that your local dealer is supplied.

ADDRESS THE BORZOI
220 WEST FORTY-SECOND STREET
NEW YORK

THE NEW BORZOI BOOKS

_Published by_ ALFRED A. KNOPF

TALES OF THE PAMPAS By W. H. Hudson, author of “Green
Mansions.” Including what Edward Garnett calls “the finest
short story in English.” Three-color jacket. $1.25

A DRAKE! BY GEORGE! By John Trevena. A perfectly
delightful tale of Devonshire, with plot and humor a-plenty. $1.50

THE CRUSHED FLOWER From the Russian of Leonid Andreyev.
Three novelettes and some great short stories by this master. $1.50

JOURNALISM VERSUS ART By Max Eastman. A brilliant
and searching analysis of what is wrong with our magazine
writing and illustrations. Many pictures of unusual interest. $1.00

MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY From the Russian of Alexander Kornilov.
The only work in English that comes right down to the present
day. Two volumes, boxed, per set. $5.00

THE RUSSIAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING From the Russian of Alexandre
Benois, with an introduction by Christian Brinton and
thirty-two full-page plates. The only survey in English. $3.00

SUSSEX GORSE By Sheila Kaye-Smith. A wonderfully vigorous and
powerful novel of Sussex. A really masterly book. $1.50

RUSSIA’S MESSAGE By William English Walling, with 31
illustrations. A new and revised edition of this most
important work. $2.00

WAR From the Russian of Michael Artzibashef, author of
“Sanine.” A four-act play of unusual power and strength. $1.00

MORAL From the German of Ludwig Thoma. A three-act comedy that
is unlike anything ever attempted in English. $1.00

MOLOCH By Beulah Marie Dix. Probably the most thrilling play
ever written about war. $1.00

THE INSPECTOR-GENERAL From the Russian of Nicolai Gogol,
author of “Taras Bulba.” The first adequate version in English
of this masterpiece of comedy. $1.00

THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT A handsome holiday edition of George
Meredith’s Arabian Entertainment. With fifteen beautiful
plates and an introduction by George Eliot. Quarto. $5.00

_All prices are net._

220 WEST FORTY-SECOND STREET, NEW YORK

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Note

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation was standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following changes:

Page 44: “Greig’s _Peer Gynt_” “Grieg’s _Peer Gynt_”
Page 73: “_l’Heure Espagnole_” “_L’heure Espagnole_”
Page 77: “colour of Zurburan” “colour of Zurbaran”
Page 77: “Juan de Juares” “Juan de Juarez”
Page 84: “_Fantasy_ of Farrega” “_Fantasy_ of Tárrega”
Page 136: “oder Der misverstandene” “oder Der missverstandene”
Page 178: “is a _pointe de depart_” “is a _point de départ_”