Alexander Skrjabin

Russian composer and pianist. The focal point of his oeuvre is his extremely unique piano music; in
addition, he wrote important orchestral works.

Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively
tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg,
Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was
not atonal,[3] which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in
the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic
tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy.

1872 Born in Moscow on January 6, the son of a pianist (his mother); she died in 1872.

1888–92 Piano studies at the Moscow Conservatory

1888–96 Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 11, containing all the hallmarks of Scriabin’s early period:
broad, ornamental cantilenas underpinned by figurations and arpeggios in the style
of Chopin, complex rhythmic structure from polyrhythms and syncopations.

1892–1913 Composition of ten piano sonatas.

1896 Travels to Paris, Vienna, Rome.

1897 Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op. 20, in the style of Chopin.
1897–1909/10 He primarily composes orchestral pieces, including the major works “Le Poème de
l’extase” (“The Poem of Ecstasy”) for large orchestra (1905–07), Op. 54, and
“Prométhée ou Le Poème du feu” (“Prometheus or The Poem of Fire,” 1908–10);
orientation toward Liszt and Wagner; programmatic music with occasional
annotations in the musical score, incorporation of philosophical notions into his
compositions, which are defined by various philosophical movements from around
the turn of the century. Unusual intervals, harmonically at the edge of tonality.
1899–1904 Composition of his three symphonies, Opp. 26, 29, and 43.

1904 He resides in Switzerland.

1906 Invitation to the United States.
1910 Return to Russia.

1908–10 “Prométhée ou Le Poème du feu” for piano, orchestra, organ, choir, and clavier à
lumière, Op. 60: enrichment of musical performance through plays of light. 1911–14,
piano compositions, Opp. 61–74, with avant-garde harmonies.

1913 Beginning of the multisensory “Acte préalable” (“Prefatory Action”), which is never
completed.
1915 Death in Moscow on April 27.
Sonata in F-sharp major, op. 30
A fairly radical break had taken place with the moral code inculcated by the adoring maiden aunt who had
pampered Scriabin’s youth (his mother was dead and his father abroad on diplomatic missions). Mitrofan
Belaiev, outstanding patron of Russian composers, Scriabin’s publisher since 1894 and his stern, fatherly
mentor in worldly matters, had died in December 1903. Corresponding to this upheaval in personal life is a
transformation in musical language, shown clearly in the Sonata No. 4, Op 30 (1903). For this work Scriabin
wrote a programme: a poem describing flight to a distant star:
Thinly veiled in transparent cloud
A star shines softly, far and lonely.
How beautiful! The azure secret
Of its radiance beckons, lulls me …
Vehement desire, sensual, insane, sweet …
Now! Joyfully I fly upward toward you,
Freely I take wing.
Mad dance, godlike play …
I draw near in my longing …
Drink you in, sea of light, you light of my own self …

Reflecting the startling new philosophies he was imbibing, these excerpts give a flavor of Scriabin’s literary
effusion, which hardly does justice to his music. It does, however, contain a number of motifs which recur in
his mental world: light, color, erotic desire, flight, dance, and the equation of the cosmos with the ego. The
last-mentioned is close to the tat tvam asi—‘That art thou’—of Sanskrit teaching, the universal oneness of
mystic experience in many cultures; with a personality as self-absorbed as Scriabin, however, it is possible
to feel rather that he believes ‘All is myself!’—a rather different proposition.

The motives in the poem are those of a dream. These notes are not the place for psycho-analysis of the
dead—a notoriously open field—but if the symbols in the poem illuminate the music, so much the better.
Longing and desire are certainly to be heard in the first movement, with its close relation to the ‘Tristan’
prelude, but also something of that self-contained bliss found in the slow movement of the Third Sonata.
Harmony here is suspended, unresolved and floating and texture spare and luminous: a new manner which
must have startled the listeners of 1903. The return of the first theme, in Scriabin’s favorite ‘Thalberg’
scoring, reminds us of his remark about the Third Sonata, ‘Here the stars are singing!’, and suggests a
consistency to his musical symbolism stretching back to the ‘moonlight’ of the Second Sonata.

The second movement, a sonata Allegro which follows without a break, brings more new sounds: a light,
dancing and skipping, hovering style in breathless, irregular groups of chords. The motif of flight recurs
throughout Scriabin’s work, from the early D flat étude, Op 8 No 10, onwards, but here it becomes explicit.
Sabaneiev recalled Scriabin demanding of this movement: ‘I want it even faster, as fast as possible, on the
verge of the possible … it must be a flight at the speed of light, straight towards the sun, into the sun!’ In the
summer of 1903 the artist Leonid Pasternak, returning home after a short walk, told his family of an
encounter with a gentleman who seemed to be quite sober but was perhaps a little touched in the head; he
was bounding downhill with great springing strides and waving his arms like an eagle trying to take off. The
eccentric gentleman was Scriabin, who became a friend of the family and the idol and mentor of the young
Boris Pasternak.

The finale, with dominant harmonies succeeded by further dominants in an ever-widening perspective and
the final jubilant return of the first movement theme above vibrant repeated chords, is unmistakably an
explosion of overwhelming joy. Comparing it with the sombre finales of the first three sonatas, one is
forcibly reminded of a sentence Scriabin wrote down a few years earlier: ‘To become an optimist in the true
sense of the word, one must have been prey to despair and surmounted it.’

from notes by Simon Nicholls © 1996