Again and again there passes through it the haggard, shrouded
figure of the Russian Jew. The "Poems of 1917" are full of the wailings
and rockings of little old Ghetto mothers. Again and again Ornstein
speaks in accents that resemble nothing quite so much as the savage and
woeful language of the Old Testament.
But the music of Ornstein is much besides. It is a thing germane to all
beings born into the age of steel. It is the expression of all the men
who have tried to embrace and love the towering piles, the strange,
black, desolate pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one
discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16,
is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not
youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the
expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels,
itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its
sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The
spring comes up hot and cruel in them. There is all the loneliness of
youth in this music, all the mysterious dreams of a world scarce
understood, all the hesitancies and blind gropings of powers untried.
Always, one senses the pavements stretching between steel buildings, the
black, hurrying tides of human beings; and through them all, the
oppressed figure of one searching out the meaning of all this convulsive
activity into which he has been born.
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