llman sleepers and
playing to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was in
America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the
music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with
Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and
Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his
programs, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he has
been playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt and
Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing it
none too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's edge.
No one can play the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody or the transcription of
the Mendelssohn Wedding March or the Rigoletto Fantasy continually
without being punished. No one who does not love them can play the
Sonata Appassionata or the _Etudes symphoniques_ or the waltzes of
Chopin long without becoming dulled and spoiled. So with composition
become an interval between two trains, and expression an attempt to
please audiences and to establish oneself with the public as a popular
pianist, it is not the most preposterous of thoughts that Leo Ornstein
has lost something he once possessed in beautiful and superabundant
form.

Still, it is fairly incredible. It is impossible that great and
permanent harm should have been done him already. He was too vital and
sane a being to be so easily corrupted. For those who knew him in the
first years of his return from Paris, he was nothing if not the genius.
If he was less accomplished, less resourceful and magistral an artist
than Strawinsky, for instance, whom he resembles in a certain general
way, he was at least a more human, a more passionate being. It is this
great vitality, this rich temperament, that makes one sure that we are
not going to have in Leo Ornstein another Richard Strauss, another
Strauss who has never had the many fertile years vouchsafed the other.
It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers
and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life
will grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but the
result of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another;
that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will express
him in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly come
from him weighty musical forms with colors as burning and deep as