Scriabin

Scriabin’s Fantasie in B Minor: A Dramatic Tour de Force

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The story, recounted by the Russian musicologist, Leonid Sabaneyev, is so incredible that it may have been apocryphal. One day, while in Alexander Scriabin’s Moscow flat, Sabaneyev sat down at the piano and began to play a theme from Scriabin’s Fantasie in B minor, Op. 28. The composer called out from the next room, “Who wrote that? It sounds familiar.” “Your Fantasie,” was the response. “What Fantasie?” Composed in 1900 during Scriabin’s …

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Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5: Summoning Mysterious Forces

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Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5 arrived amid a six day burst of creative energy in December of 1907. In a letter, the composer’s wife, Tatyana Schloezer, reported, Sasha has already managed… to compose a fifth sonata!!! I don’t believe my ears, it is unbelievable! The sonata flowed from him in a kind of stream. […] What you have heard is nothing, the sonata is unrecognizable, it cannot be compared with anything. …

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Scriabin’s “The Poem of Ecstasy”: The Spirit Takes Flight

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For the Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), music formed a mystical passageway to a transcendent level of consciousness. In the final years of his short life, Scriabin, a virtuoso pianist, moved beyond the early influences of Chopin and Liszt to a series of boundary-pushing symphonic works which, in the words of the conductor Marin Alsop, “break down the traditional tonal structure and experiment with new methods of organizing sound.” For Scriabin, who experienced synesthesia, …

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The Ghosts of D-Sharp Minor: Bach’s Prelude and Fugue, BWV 877 and Scriabin’s Etude Op 8, No 12

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In an 1806 treatise, Christian Schubart described D-sharp minor as a key which expresses “feelings of the anxiety of the soul’s deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the most gloomy condition of the soul.” Schubart concluded with the chilling statement, “If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.” In the early twentieth century, expressive variations between keys became blurred following the adoption of equal temperament in tuning. …

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Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9 “Black Mass”: A Diabolical Landscape

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Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9, completed in 1913, inhabits a haunting, diabolical landscape. The single-movement work begins with distant, mournful descending chromatic lines which outline Scriabin’s iconic “mystic chord,” a hexachord built on fourths which the composer described as “smoky.” In its purest form, the “mystic chord” dissolves harmonic function, leaving us with blinding sound. The marking, Legendaire, over the first bar suggests that we are being lulled into an unsettling dream …

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Scriabin’s “Prometheus, The Poem of Fire”: Revelations of the “Mystic Chord”

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In Greek mythology, the Titan and “supreme trickster” Prometheus steals fire from the gods and brings it to humanity in defiance of Zeus. For the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), Prometheus’ fire symbolized searing creative energy and an ecstatic expansion of human consciousness. Influenced by mysticism, Theosophy, and the theories of Nietzsche, Scriabin believed that the highest calling of humanity was to escape the physical world and enter a vast “oneness” with the …

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Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 10: “The Sun’s Kisses”

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The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin once said, My Tenth Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun…they are the sun’s kisses…How unified world-understanding is when you look at things this way. In science all is dis-unified, not made into one. It is analysis, not synthesis. For the deeply mystical Scriabin, the circle of fifths became a vibrant color wheel in which musical keys were experienced through synesthesia. Influenced …

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