For Ornstein is youth. He is the one striving to adjust himself to all
this thunder and welter and glare. He is the spring as it comes up
through the pavements, the aching green sap. In part, no doubt, he is
the resurrection of the most entombed of spirits, that of the outlaw
European Jew. He is the breaking down of the walls with which the Jew
had blotted out the hateful world. He is Lazarus emerging in his grave
clothes into the new world; the Jewish spirit come up into the day from
out the basement and cellar rooms of the synagogue where it had been
seated for a thousand years drugging itself with rabbinical lore,
refining almost maniacally upon the intention of some obscure phrase or
parable, negating the lure of the world and of experience with a mass of
rites and observances and ceremonials, losing itself in the gray desert
stretches of theory, or wasting itself in the impossible dream of Zion
restored in modern Palestine and Solomon's temple rebuilt in a
provincial capital of the Turkish Empire. And Ornstein's music is the
music of a birth that is the tearing away of grave clothes grown to the
body, the clawing away, stone by stone, of the wall erected against the
call of experience which was sure to be death-dealing. The old
prohibitions are still active in it in the terror with which life is
viewed, in the menace and cruelty of things, the sharpness of edges
encountered, the weight of the masses that threaten to fall and
overwhelm, the fury and blackness and horror of nature once again
regarded.
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