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.
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