Alexander Scriabin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Alexander Scriabin died on the 14th of April 1915 from a pimple. That sentence sounds absurd, but it is true. A small sore on his upper lip, first noticed as early as 1914 while he was in London, returned after his last triumphant concert in Petrograd. Within days it had turned septic. His temperature reached 41 degrees Celsius. Doctors made incisions, but the poison had already entered his blood. Scriabin died in his Moscow apartment at age 43, at what contemporaries agreed was the height of his powers.

  The death is shocking partly because of what it interrupted. Scriabin had been planning a multimedia work called Mysterium, a seven-day performance involving music, scent, dance, and light, to be staged in the foothills of the Himalayas, and intended to bring about the literal transformation of humanity. He had left only sketches. Across his career he had moved from intimate Chopin-like piano miniatures to orchestral scores requiring a specially built colour-organ that projected light onto a concert hall screen instead of producing sound. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of him that no composer had attracted more scorn or greater love. Leo Tolstoy called his music a sincere expression of genius.

  How did a shy, small boy from a modest noble Moscow family become the most controversial composer-pianist of the early twentieth century? And what drove him toward an artistic vision so vast it could never be finished?

• 2. A Childhood of Pianos

  ›

  Scriabin was born in Moscow on Christmas Day, 1871, according to the Julian calendar. His mother, Lyubov Petrovna, had studied under the celebrated pedagogue Theodor Leschetizky and came from an ancient family that traced its line back to Rurik. She died of tuberculosis when Alexander was barely a year old. His father, then a student at Moscow State University, eventually left for Turkey to pursue a military and diplomatic career, and Alexander was raised by his grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt.

  His aunt Lyubov, his father's unmarried sister and an amateur pianist, documented the boy's early years. She described a child who was shy and unsociable with peers but eager for adult company. Young Sasha, as he was known, became so captivated by piano mechanisms that he began building his own instruments and occasionally presented them as gifts to houseguests. One anecdote records him trying to conduct an orchestra assembled from neighbourhood children; the attempt ended in tears. He also staged operas and plays using puppets.

  At school, after enrolling in the Second Moscow Cadet Corps in 1882, Scriabin was the smallest and weakest boy in the year, and his future friend, the actor Leonid Limontov, admitted in his memoirs that he had been reluctant to befriend him. A single piano performance at a school concert erased that hesitation. Scriabin ranked first academically and was excused from drilling to practise the piano each day.

  His piano teacher Nikolai Zverev, who also taught Sergei Rachmaninoff, was a strict disciplinarian. Scriabin, unlike Rachmaninoff, never boarded with Zverev. He later studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Safonov, and he became a noted pianist despite hands that could barely stretch to a ninth.

• 3. The Hand and the First Masterpiece

  ›

  Feeling challenged by his fellow student Josef Lhévinne, Scriabin practised Franz Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan and Mily Balakirev's Islamey so intensively that he damaged his right hand. His doctor told him he would never recover its full use.

  Scriabin's response was to compose. He wrote his Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 6, describing it as a cry against God, against fate. It was actually the third sonata he completed, but the first to which he assigned an opus number. His second sonata was condensed and published separately as the Allegro Appassionato, Op. 4. He eventually regained the use of the damaged hand.

  In 1892, Scriabin graduated from the Conservatory with the Small Gold Medal in piano performance. He did not receive a composition degree. His personality and musical thinking had clashed sharply with Arensky, whose faculty signature is the only one absent from Scriabin's graduation certificate. Scriabin had refused to write in forms that did not interest him.

  Two years later, in 1894, he made his debut as a pianist in Saint Petersburg, performing his own music to positive reviews. That same year the publisher Mitrofan Belyayev, whose roster included Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov, agreed to pay Scriabin to compose for his company. In August 1897 Scriabin married the pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, toured Russia and abroad, and in 1898 gave a successful concert in Paris. That same year he began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory.

• 4. Leaving Russia, Finding a New Sound

  ›

  By the 13th of March 1904, Scriabin and his wife had settled in Geneva. The marriage soon collapsed. His first wife refused to grant a divorce, and Scriabin began a common-law partnership with Tatiana Fyodorovna Schlözer, a former pupil, the niece of the pianist and composer Paul de Schlözer, and the sister of the music critic Boris de Schlözer. They had children together out of wedlock.

  With the financial support of a wealthy sponsor, Scriabin travelled through Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, and the United States, composing orchestral works and a new form of intimate piano piece he called the poem. In New York City in 1907 he met the Canadian composer Alfred La Liberté, who became a personal friend and disciple. That same year Scriabin settled in Lausanne and became involved with a series of concerts organised by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was then promoting Russian music in Western Europe. The family subsequently moved to Brussels, to an address at rue de la Réforme 45.

  Musically, these years mark Scriabin's second period. Beginning with his Sonata No. 4, Op. 30, his harmonies grew more chromatic and dissonant, yet still operated within functional tonality. He raised the number of chord tones in his dominant chords to create what he described as a radiant, shining feeling. Complex harmonic structures such as the mystic chord began to appear, though their roots in an older Chopin-derived language were still audible.

  By the end of this period, around his Sonata No. 5, Op. 53 and The Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54, dissonances within chords had stopped resolving in the traditional way. As one analyst described it, the dissonances froze into a colour-like effect within the chord itself, becoming structural rather than decorative.

• 5. Colour, Light, and the Mystic Chord

  ›

  Scriabin developed a colour-coded circle of fifths, inspired partly by theosophy, that assigned specific colours to harmonic tones. Whether he genuinely experienced synesthesia, the involuntary condition in which one sense triggers another, is doubted by scholars; his system was constructed rather than involuntary. His colour associations did not distinguish between a major and a minor key sharing the same tonic, treating C major and C minor as the same colour.

  In his autobiographical Recollections, Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation among himself, Scriabin, and Rimsky-Korsakov about colour and musical keys. Both Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov agreed that D major was golden-brown, but they diverged on E-flat major: Scriabin assigned it red-purple while Rimsky-Korsakov preferred blue. Rimsky-Korsakov pointed to a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight, a scene in which an old baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels gleaming in torchlight, and noted it was written in D major. Scriabin told the sceptical Rachmaninoff that his intuition had unconsciously followed laws whose very existence he had tried to deny.

  For his orchestral tone poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, completed in 1910, Scriabin wrote a part for an instrument called a clavier à lumières, also known as a Luce, a colour organ that projected coloured light onto a concert hall screen rather than producing sound. It was played like a piano. Most performances, including the premiere, omitted the light element. A 1915 performance in New York City did project colours, using a novel construction built in New York specifically for that occasion and supervised by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society. It was not the colour organ of the English painter A. Wallace Rimington, despite later claims.

  On the 22nd of November 1969, John Mauceri and the Yale Symphony Orchestra gave what may have been the first full realisation of the colour score, using newly developed laser technology borrowed from Yale's Physics Department. Designer Richard N. Gould projected the colours into the auditorium, reflected by Mylar vests worn by the audience. The Yale Symphony reprised the presentation in 1971 and brought it to Paris that year, possibly the work's Paris premiere, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

• 6. Mysterium and the Cosmic Mission

  ›

  Scriabin's philosophical notebooks, published after his death, contain the declaration "I am God." Scholars who know the traditions he drew on point out that this phrase carries a specific meaning within both Eastern and Western mysticism: the individual ego is not inflated but dissolved, leaving only the divine. The terms fana in one tradition and samadhi in another point to the same state of consciousness.

  Scriabin was influenced by German thinkers including Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, and by Russian spiritual figures such as Solovyov and Berdyayev, both of whom he knew personally. Recent scholarship has placed him within the tradition of Russian cosmism, a current of thought originating with Nikolai Fyodorov and Solovyov that aimed to unite humanity in a cosmic evolution combining spirituality and technology. What distinguished Scriabin's version was the centrality he assigned to music as the vehicle of transformation.

  The projected culmination of this thinking was Mysterium. Scriabin believed he had a mission to regenerate humanity through art. Mysterium was conceived as a seven-day performance involving all possible means of expression, including music, scent, dance, and light, staged in a temple in India. His plan called for the work to somehow transform the world. He left only sketches.

  A preliminary portion, which Scriabin called L'acte préalable, was eventually made into a performable version. Vladimir Ashkenazy performed a section titled Prefatory Action in Berlin, with Alexei Lubimov at the piano. The arranger Nemtin eventually completed a second portion called Mankind and a third called Transfiguration. Ashkenazy recorded the full two-and-a-half-hour completion with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for Decca. Several late piano pieces published during Scriabin's lifetime, including the Two Dances, Op. 73, are believed to have been intended for Mysterium.

• 7. Aftermath and Descendants

  ›

  Scriabin's funeral on the 16th of April 1915 drew such crowds that tickets had to be issued for admission. Rachmaninoff served as a pallbearer and then embarked on a tour of Russia performing only Scriabin's music to raise money for the family. It was the only time Rachmaninoff publicly performed piano music other than his own.

  The immediate legacy was mixed. Prokofiev admired Scriabin, and his Visions fugitives shows clear similarities of tone and style. The English composer Kaikhosru Sorabji championed Scriabin's music during the years when his reputation had declined most sharply. Aaron Copland praised the thematic material as truly individual and truly inspired, but criticised Scriabin for fitting that material into the old classical sonata form, calling it one of the most extraordinary mistakes in all music. In the UK, Sir Adrian Boult refused in the 1930s to programme Scriabin selections chosen by the BBC's Edward Clark, calling it evil music. In 1935, Gerald Abraham described Scriabin as a sad pathological case. The same decade, the pianist Edward Mitchell, who had compiled a catalogue of Scriabin's piano music in 1927, was calling him the greatest composer since Beethoven.

  Scriabin himself had recorded 19 of his own works on 20 piano rolls: six for the Welte-Mignon, recorded in February 1910 in Moscow, and 14 for Ludwig Hupfeld of Leipzig, including the Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3. Those Welte rolls have since been replayed and published on CD. They reveal a free style marked by improvised variations in tempo, rhythm, articulation, dynamics, and occasionally even the notes themselves.

  Scriabin's descendants carried his legacy in unexpected directions. His daughter Ariadna became a hero of the French Resistance and co-founded the Zionist resistance movement Armée Juive. She was killed in an ambush by the French Militia after running weapons to partisan forces. Her daughter Betty, known as Betty Knut, personally received the Silver Star from General George S. Patton. His son Julian, a child prodigy in composition and piano, drowned at age 11 in the Dnieper River in 1919. Scriabin's nephew was Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh, who led the Russian Orthodox diocese in Great Britain between 1957 and 2003.

  In 2009, Roger Scruton called Scriabin one of the greatest of modern composers. Scriabin's original colour keyboard and its turntable of coloured lamps are preserved in his Moscow apartment near the Arbat, now a museum.