Leo Ornstein
Leo Ornstein (originally Russian Lew Ornstein / Лев Орнштейн , scientific transliteration Lev Ornštejn ; born December 11, 1892 in Kremenchug ; † February 24, 2002 in Green Bay , Wisconsin ) was an American pianist and composer of Russian origin.
Ornstein's year of birth is controversial, there is also talk of the years 1893 to 1895. When he died he was (probably) 109 years old, making him the longest-lived composer in music history.
Life
Ornstein studied piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Alexander Glasunow , but was forced to flee the pogroms with his family in 1906 and went to New York , where he continued his studies at the forerunner of the Juilliard School . During the hasty escape, Ornstein's parents forgot to take all their personal papers with them, which is why the composer himself never found out the truth about his date of birth.
In 1911 he began a very distinguished career as a pianist. He also composed avant-garde piano music that quickly made him the enfant terrible of the music scene of the time. In 1918 he married the pianist Pauline Mallet-Prevost, a former fellow student at the Juilliard School. After the First World War , Ornstein withdrew from the concert stage and opened the Ornstein School of Music in the early 1930s , which he directed until 1953. After that he worked, increasingly withdrawn from the public, as a freelance composer.
Compositional style
His compositional work primarily includes piano works , among which the five sonatas that have survived particularly stand out, as well as chamber music , some orchestral works, incidental music and a ballet .
From the mid- 1920s a change in style became noticeable in Ornstein's compositional work. While his early works were still strongly characterized by garish dissonances, in later compositions he also resorts to means of tonality or polytonality , which he combines with these. Overall, his music can be classified as Expressionism . Although the lyrical element is not foreign to his tonal language, Ornstein's music is primarily determined by motor energy.
Ornstein had a strange way of composing. Usually he improvised a piece on the piano and then worked it out in his head. He left the notation to his wife Pauline, to whom he dictated the works in pen. Ornstein could keep a composition in his head for a very long time like in an archive. Sometimes he waited decades to write it down. Too long in the case of his first three piano sonatas: when he tried to dictate them to Pauline more than 50 years after the “composition”, he had forgotten them.
The composer was active well into old age. He wrote his last work, the eighth piano sonata, in his late 90s.
Catalog of works (selection)
- Eight piano sonatas
- Piano concerto
- Three string quartets
- Piano quintet
- Two violin sonatas
literature
- Alfred Baumgartner: Propylaea World of Music - The Composers - A lexicon in five volumes . tape 4 . Propylaen Verlag, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-549-07830-7 , pp. 208 .
Web links
- Website created with numerous notes and recordings from son and grandson
- Sheet music and audio files by Leo Ornstein in the International Music Score Library Project
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ornstein, Leo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Орнштейн, Лев (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian pianist and composer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 11, 1892 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kremenchug |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 24, 2002 |
| Place of death | Green Bay , Wisconsin |