There are other reasons that might lead one to presume that these recent works represent a slump. For Ornstein has been devoting too much of his energy to concertizing. He has been traveling madly over the United States and Canada for the last few years, living in Pullman sleepers and playing to audiences of all sorts. During the first years that he was in America after the outbreak of war in Europe, he at least played the music that he loved. But no one was ready for programs beginning with Korngold and Cyril Scott and ending with Ravel and Scriabine and Ornstein himself. So little by little Ornstein began adulterating his programs, adding a popular piece here, another there. Recently, he has been playing music into which he cannot put his heart at all, Liszt and Rubinstein as well as Beethoven and Schumann. He has been performing it none too brilliantly. Such an existence cannot but dull the man's edge. 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. It makes us sure that he will finally come to terms with his managers and audiences, and that the harm already done him by his way of life will grow no greater. It convinces us that his present mood is but the result of a necessary process of transition from one basis to another; that the man is really summoning himself for the works that will express him in his manhood. And we are positive that there will shortly come from him weighty musical forms with colors as burning and deep as those of his first pieces, and of like intensity and boldness; and that Leo Ornstein is sure of reaching the high heaven of art for which he seemed and still seems bound. Bloch