It is such solitude that speaks in
the first "Impression of Notre-Dame" with its gray mounting masses, its
cloisteral reverberation of bells, its savage calls of the city to one
standing alone with the monument of a dead age. Violent, uncontrolled
passions cry out in the "Three Moods," with their youthful surrender to
the moment. The energy of adolescence, unleashed, rejoicing in pure
muscular activity, disports itself in the "Shadow Dances," and in the
"Wild Man's Dance," with its sheer, naked, beating rhythm. The
bitterness of adolescence mocks in the "Three Burlesques," in the "Dance
of the Gnomes," with its parodying of clumsy movements. What revolt in
the first "Piano Sonata"! And other emotions, timid and uncertain of
themselves, uneasy with the swelling sap of springtide, speak their
poetry and their pain, tell their tales and are silent, make us remember
what once we felt.
The city, the birth into the new world, youth, exist in the music of
Ornstein with all the sharpness of shock because of an imagination of a
wonderful forcefulness. There is no indirectness in Ornstein, no
vagueness. His tension is always of the fullest, the stiffest. What he
feels, what he hears, he sets down, irrespective of all the canons and
rules and procedures.
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