Encyclopedia
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a
Russian composer and
pianist.
Biography
Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family in
Moscow on Christmas day in the
Julian Calendar. When he was only a year old, his mother, a concert pianist, died of
tuberculosis. Scriabin's father left for
Turkey, leaving the young infant with his doting grandmother and great aunt. He studied the
piano from an early age, taking lessons with famed teacher Nikolay Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was teaching
Sergei Rachmaninov and a number of other prodigies at the same time. His home was a place where famous musicians of the day, such as Tchaikovsky, would be the audience for his pupils' performances, usually of their own compositions. Zverev was demanding and strict; he even threw Rachmaninov out when he asked for his own room in order to compose without disturbance from noise.
Scriabin later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky,
Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Ilyich Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands with a span of barely over an octave. Feeling challenged by Rachmaninov, who had exceptionally large hands, he seriously damaged his right hand while practicing
Liszt's Don Juan. His doctor said he would never recover, and he wrote his first large-scale masterpiece, the f minor sonata, as a "cry against God, against fate". Unmoved by the requirement to write several pieces in forms that didn't interest him, Scriabin failed his composition class and didn't graduate. Ironically, the one requirement he did complete, an e minor fugue, became required learning for decades at the Conservatory. He was awarded the Little Gold Medal, and Rachmaninov was awarded the Great Gold Medal for his one-act
opera,
Aleko.
A comparison of the creative trajectories of Rachmaninov and Scriabin has fueled psychoanalytic speculation on the distinction between .
Scriabin married a pianist, Vera Ivanova Isakovich, after graduation and had several children, but he eventually left his wife and teaching position for a young pupil, Tatiana Fyodorovna Schloeze, who he had a son with named Julian. That son was also a prodigy, who composed several sophisticated pieces before drowning in a boating accident at age 11. He also painted and wrote poetry.
Scriabin, previously interested in
Friedrich Nietzsche's
übermensch theory, also became interested in
theosophy, and both would influence his music and musical thought. In 1909-10 he lived in
Brussels, becoming interested in
Delville's Theosophist movement and continuing his reading of
Hélène Blavatsky . Theosophist and composer
Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician," and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle,
Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "
Schoenberg's group." .
Scriabin was a hypochondriac his entire life. He died in Moscow from septicemia, contracted as a result of a shaving cut or a boil on his lip. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalayas, that would bring about the armageddon, "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world" . This piece,
Mysterium, was never realized.
He was possibly the uncle of
Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian politician and eponym of the
Molotov cocktail. Molotov's original surname was Scriabin. Simon Montefiore in his biography of Stalin, states that despite the shared family name, Molotov was not in any way related to the composer. Scriabin wrote poetry, which was generally tied to his compositions, and it is not taken seriously by itself.
Pianists who have performed Scriabin to critical acclaim include Vladimir Sofronitsky,
Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter. Horowitz performed for Scriabin, in his home as a youth, and Scriabin had an enthusiastic reaction, but cautioned that he needed further training. Horowitz remarked, as an elderly man, that Scriabin was obviously crazy, because he had ticks and couldn't sit still. Despite Horowitz' assessment, Scriabin held the rapt attention of the musical world in Russia while he was alive.
Music
Style and influences
Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano. The earliest pieces resemble
Frédéric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the etude, the prelude and the mazurka. Scriabin's music gradually evolved during the course of his life, although the evolution was very rapid and especially long when compared to most composers. Aside from his earliest pieces, his works are strikingly original, the mid and late-period pieces employing very unusual harmonies and textures. The development of Scriabin's voice or style can be followed in his ten piano sonatas: the earliest are in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom and show the influence of Chopin and
Franz Liszt, but the later ones move into new territory, the last five being written with no
key signature. Many passages in them can be said to be atonal, though from 1903 through 1908, "tonal unity was almost imperceptibly replaced by harmonic unity." See:
synthetic chord.
Aaron Copland praised Scriabin's thematic material as "truly individual, truly inspired", but criticized Scriabin for putting "this really new body of feeling into the strait-jacket of the old classical sonata-form, recapitulation and all" calling this "one of the most extraordinary mistakes in all music." According to Samson the sonata-form of Sonata No. 5 has some meaning to the work's tonal structure, but in Sonata No. 6 and Sonata No. 7 formal tensions are created by the absence of harmonic contrast and "between the cumulative momentum of the music, usually achieved by textural rather than harmonic means, and the formal constraints of the tripartite mould." He also argues that the
Poem of Ecstasy and
Vers la flamme "find a much happier co-operation of 'form' and 'content'" and that later Sonatas such as Sonata No. 9 employ a much more flexible sonata-form.
Influence of color
Though these works are often considered to be influenced by Scriabin's
synesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another, it is most likely Alexander Scriabin did not actually experience this
. His color system, unlike most synesthetic experience, lines up with the
circle of fifths: it was a thought-out system based on Sir
Isaac Newton's
Optics. Indeed, influenced also by his theosophical beliefs, he developed it towards what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus
Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the
Himalayas that was to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss.
While Scriabin wrote only a small number of
orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are frequently performed. They include three symphonies, a piano concerto ,
The Poem of Ecstasy and , which includes a part for a "
clavier à lumières", also known as the
Luxe, - which was a color organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected colored
light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece have not included this light element, although a performance in
New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has erroneously been claimed that this performance used the
colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction personally supervised and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.
Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the
Arbat in Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works.
External links
- by Lia Tomás
- by B. Galeyev & I. Vanechkina
- by Mutopia Project
References
- Harry Plummer, "Color Music-A New Art Created with the Aid of Science, The Color Organ Used in Scriabin's Symphony Prometheus". [Scientific American, April 10, 1915]
- Garcia, E.E.: . Psychoanalytic Review, 91:423-442.
