Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... I. THE MAN OME account of the life of a creative artist would seem a logical prelude to a consideration of his ideas and their creative development. And particularly so in the case of Leo Ornstein, the circumstances of whose life and the influence of whose surroundings are so vividly reflected in the music he has written. Ornstein has put so much of his own emotional and impressional life and the life of his time into his creative work, that the story of his twenty-two years of existence--he was born in Kremenchug, a town of southwest Russia, December 11, 1895--explains and in some degree motives his artistic activities, opens up vistas of understanding and appreciation for them, and establishes the connection between his life itself and his life-work up to the present time--for the composer cannot, as yet, be said to have reached the full plenitude of his powers. Ornstein's recollections of his childhood are vivid. Kremenchug, an important commercial town of nearly sixty thousand inhabitants, is situated on the Dnieper river in a flat, dreary countryside, and before the war was the centre of the tallow trade with Warsaw. The government of Poltava, in which it lies, was included within the pale of settlement first established in 1791, by which a great Jewish population was held down in a congestion which worked terrible destitution and misery, and reduced them to a condition of abject poverty and despair. Though no doubt subconsciously influenced by his environment, the boy led the ordinarily happy life of all children. He speaks with affection of the old wooden house in which he grew up, built round a court with a well in the centre, and of the daily joy of bathing with the companions of his own age in the Dnieper during the hot days of...