Leo Ornstein, 109; Piano Prodigy, Avant-Garde Composer

Composer Leo Ornstein, regarded in the 1920s as a prophet of new music on the order of a Stravinsky or Schoenberg before he withdrew from public view, died Feb. 24 in Green Bay, Wis. He was 109.

Born in Kremenchug, Russia, in 1892, the piano prodigy was accepted at St. Petersburg Conservatory when he was 10.

Because of rising anti-Semitism, however, his family immigrated to the United States in 1907.

The young pianist continued his studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and the Institute of Musical Art (which evolved into the Juilliard School) in New York.

Ornstein made his New York recital debut in 1911. European tours followed in 1913 and 1914.

He excelled at standard repertoire--Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt--but also programmed works by contemporaries such as Ravel, Scriabin and Schoenberg. He gave many of the first U.S. performances of works by Debussy.

Ornstein soon began performing programs entirely of new music, including his own compositions, which made use of polytonality, polyrhythms and other modernist techniques.

Reactions--pro and con--were extreme.

“Ornstein represents an evil musical genius wandering without the utmost pale of tonal orthodoxy, in a weird No-Man’s Land, haunted with tortuous sound, with wails of futuristic despair, with cubistic shrieks and post-impressionist cries and crashes,” a reviewer wrote in the Globe-London in 1914. Influential American critic James Huneker, however, described Ornstein in 1918 as “the only true-blue, genuine, Futurist composer alive.”

In 1933, at the height of his popularity and fame after nearly 20 years of public performances, Ornstein gave his last New York concert and effectively disappeared.

“One beautiful day I decided I could not stand the incessant practicing and the incessant traveling,” he told the New York Times in 1976. “So that’s the story of why I gave up concerts.”

Ornstein met his wife, debutant Pauline C. Mallet-Prevost, while they were students at the Institute of Musical Art. They were married in 1918.

After he retired from the concert stage, the couple founded the Ornstein School of Music in Philadelphia in 1935 and ran it successfully until selling it in 1958.

They lived in New Hampshire, Arizona and Florida before settling in Texas. Pauline Ornstein died in 1985.

Despite his withdrawal from public concerts, Ornstein never stopped composing.

His 40-minute “Biography in Sonata Form” received its world premiere in 1977 in Texas by Los Angeles pianist Michael Sellers.

Ornstein’s apparent final composition, the Eighth Piano Sonata, was written in 1990.

He is survived by a son, Severo, of Woodside, Calif.; a daughter, Edith Valentine of De Pere, Wis.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.