Alexander Scriabin
 

(b. Moscow, January 6, 1872; d. Moscow, April 27, 1915)

Russian composer and pianist. Driven by an egomaniacal mysticism that eventually led to messianic delusions, he started out writing in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom and developed into a visionary modernist intent on pushing the envelope of tonality to its limits. His piano music was his most important achievement.















 

Scriabin’s father, a lawyer and foreign service officer, came from a family with a long tradition of military service. His mother was an exceptionally talented pianist; she died of complications from his birth, less than a year afterward. The only child was raised by his two grandmothers and his doting aunt, living a pampered existence that surely helped form his delicate, nervous, egocentric personality. His aunt, also a pianist, became his first teacher. Taken to concerts and operas, Scriabin developed an interest in literature and the arts. He entered the army cadet corps as a boy, and began his formal musical education when he was 11, studying piano with Nikolay Zverev and following the customary regimen: He lived in his teacher’s house (a fellow student was the young Rachmaninov), learned French and German and social etiquette, and practiced hard. He received help preparing for the Moscow Conservatory entrance examinations from Sergey Taneyev.

Though of diminutive stature and with hands that could barely span an octave, Scriabin attacked the most difficult repertoire during his years at the conservatory; in 1891 he severely strained his right hand with excessive practicing. Forbidden by a doctor to play, he focused on his left hand and developed a formidable technique. (His Prelude in C-sharp minor and Nocturne in D-flat, Op. 9, Nos. 1 and 2, written for the left hand only, date from 1894. Idiomatic and well wrought, they exhibit the young composer’s gift for yearning lyricism as well as a marked predilection for dark moods.)

Scriabin’s conservatory career came to a stormy end, with the 20-year-old in conflict with his fugue teacher Anton Arensky. Aiming to become a sort of latter-day Chopin, Scriabin promptly composed a clutch of preludes and his Piano Sonata No. 1—his first published works. He undertook travel outside of Russia and made his European debut in Paris in 1896; he also developed an unbridled lifestyle, including regular bouts of all-night drinking. In 1897 he married pianist Vera Isakovitch, who bore a child a year for four years. Scriabin’s publisher kept him afloat until he landed a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory in 1898. Over the next three years, he wrote his first two symphonies, which were received with incomprehension and open hostility.

The watershed year was 1903. Scriabin began a love affair with the 20-year-old Tatiana de Schloezer, a pianist (and fol-
lower of philosophical cults), who would encourage his megalomania. In the glow of this relationship, his works for piano became infused with an extreme sensuality. The scintillating brilliance and feverish emotional intensity of the Piano Sonata No. 4 mark it as a breakthrough; on its heels, in 1904, Scriabin finished the hedo-nistically opulent Third Symphony, titled Divine Poem. Having also seduced a 15-year-old student, Scriabin had to leave Russia and seek temporary sanctuary in Switzerland. Tatiana soon moved in. The Divine Poem was premiered in Paris in 1905, the same year the couple moved to Italy, essentially destitute, with Tatiana pregnant (she would bear Scriabin three children in all). The composer was invited to New York for concerts during the winter of 1906-07 followed by a recital tour of the Midwest, in which he acquitted himself ably. But after Tatiana joined him the couple were dis-invited from further musical appearances and effectively kicked out of the country, as friends and colleagues of Scriabin now in the U.S. sided with Vera in the scandalous saga of infidelity and abandonment.

Scriabin and Tatiana next lived in Paris and Lausanne. From this time came two major orchestral works: The Poem of Ecstasy, scored for an enormous orchestra and based aesthetically on Scriabin’s developing philosophy of art as a sexual act, and Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, for piano, large orchestra, wordless chorus, and color organ (an apparatus that bathed performers and audience in colored light, whose “tonalities” were closely coordinated with the music). In 1908 Scriabin met Serge Koussevitzky, who, fascinated by his theories associating colors with keys, became an enthusiastic champion as both conductor and publisher. They toured together in 1910 but afterward had a falling-out over money.

In 1909, when Scriabin returned to Russia, he was recognized as a prophet of modernism, his music finally embraced by the critics. His piano works of the next several years included five brilliant sonatas (Nos. 6 through 10) and Vers la flamme (1914), a poeme for the piano. Scriabin was visited during the summer of 1913 in Switzerland by Igor Stravinsky, who pronounced the late piano pieces “incomparable.” Scriabin now contemplated his “great work,” which he referred to as the Mysterium, a vast, purifying musical happening that would lift participants to a higher spiritual plane; it would take place in India, land of swamis and sages (in 1914 he bought property in Daijeeling), and he would be at the center of it, playing the piano. His visionary music was to be a wonderful glimpse into the future. But that future never came, and in an instant Scriabin too was gone: In the spring of 1915 he developed an infection from a pimple on his mustachioed upper lip and died of sepsis.
The vast majority of Scriabin’s compositional output involved the piano, which he played with exceptional finesse. The influence of Chopin and Liszt on his earlier piano works, scintillating pianistic miniatures, was to be expected. In later works the collagelike assembly of motifs into subjects, and the subsequent processes of recollection within a piece, also owed something to Liszt’s notion of thematic transformation. The lugubriousness of earlier works was superseded by the languor of later ones, which became increasingly turbulent and almost telegraphically compressed.

Scriabin’s other major musical endeavors were his manic, delirious, kaleidoscopic essays for orchestra. While his first two symphonies were nothing special—No. 1 is a sprawling six-movement hodgepodge, No. 2 a dark, slow-moving, minor-key meditation with the obligatory triumphant concluding movement in the major—with the Divine Poem, fulminant and compact, Scriabin hit his stride. Here, and even more so in the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, the harmony is saturated to the point where there is complete freedom to maneuver yet nowhere to go, because every chord sounds pretty much like the one that preceded it, making a palette of shimmering tonal ambiguities. The result is music that at once conveys a longing for the unattainable and, paradoxically, attains it, luxuriating in the contemplation of its own sound.