17 Facts About Leo Ornstein

Leo Ornstein completed his eighth and final piano sonata in September 1990 at the age of ninety-four, making him the oldest published composer in history at the time.

Leo Ornstein was born in Kremenchug, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire.

Leo Ornstein was recognized early on as a prodigy on the piano; in 1902, when the celebrated Polish pianist Josef Hofmann visited Kremenchuk, he heard the six-year-old Leo Ornstein perform.

In 1904, the nine-year-old Leo Ornstein auditioned for and was accepted by the St Petersburg school.

Leo Ornstein began composing works containing dissonant and startling sounds.

Between 1915 and the early 1920s, when he virtually ceased performing in public, Leo Ornstein was one of the best known figures in American classical music.

Leo Ornstein constantly performed before packed halls, often more than two thousand, in many places the 'largest audience of the season.

Leo Ornstein traveled to New Orleans in 1916, where he discovered jazz.

Cowell, who had encountered Leo Ornstein while studying in New York, would pursue a similarly radical style as part of a grand intellectual and cultural mission, which involved ambitious writings on music theory and publishing and promotional efforts in support of the avant-garde.

Leo Ornstein, burned out, effectively gave up his celebrated performance career in the early 1920s.

Too early and too independent, Leo Ornstein had little desire to participate in the modernist movement by the time it caught hold in the United States.

Leo Ornstein made over two dozen rolls for Ampico, mostly of a nonmodernist repertoire; the composers he performed most often were Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt.

Leo Ornstein never recorded, in any format, even a single example of his futurist pieces which had brought him fame.

Leo Ornstein had continued to compose music; equipped with a powerful memory, he was not diligent about writing it all down and had not sought to publicize it for decades.

In 1988, the ninety-two-year-old Leo Ornstein wrote his Seventh Piano Sonata.

On September 23,1990, at the age of ninety-four, Leo Ornstein completed his final work, the Eighth Piano Sonata.

On February 24,2002, Leo Ornstein died of natural causes in Green Bay, Wisconsin.