Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich ScriabinAlexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин, Aleksandr Nikolaevič Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skryabin or Scriabine (6 January 1872 – 27 April 1915) was a Russian modernist composer and pianist.

Biography
Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family in Moscow on Christmas Day 1871 according to 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 Nikolay Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninoff and a number of other prodigies at the same time.

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 Fantasy. 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.

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 Schloezer (Tatiana de Schloezer), with whom he had a son 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 (Samson 1977). 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," (Rudhyar 1926b, 899) and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group." (Ibid., 900-901).

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" (AMG). 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. As an elderly man, Horowitz remarked that Scriabin was obviously crazy, because he had tics and couldn't sit still. Despite Horowitz' assessment, Scriabin held the rapt attention of the musical world in Russia while he was alive.

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." (Samson 1977) 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."[citation needed] 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. (Samson 1977)

Influence of color

Synesthetic colors, described by the composerThough 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 doubted that Alexander Scriabin actually experienced 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.

In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of color and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colors involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny."

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 (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), 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 (including the premiere) 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.

List of compositions by Alexander Scriabin

Piano Sonatas
Scriabin wrote twelve sonatas for piano, ten of which he published. The first five are in the Romantic style. Initially the music is reminiscent of Chopin, but Scriabin's unique voice, present from the beginning, becomes fully present even in these early pieces. With the brief fourth sonata, Scriabin explored more complex, chromatic harmonies. Each of the following sonatas are often highly dissonant and have a new form of tonality that some decribe as atonal and others describe as simply different from conventional tonality. Vers la flamme was intended to be the eleventh sonata, but he was forced to publish it early due to financial concerns. Beginning with the fifth, Scriabin's published sonatas consist of only a single movement.

Sonata-Fantasy in G sharp minor
Sonata in E flat minor
Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 6
Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor, Op. 19 (also known as Sonata-Fantasy)
Sonata No. 3 in F sharp minor, Op. 23
Sonata No. 4 in F sharp major, Op. 30
Sonata No. 5 in F sharp major, Op. 53
Sonata No. 6, Op. 62
Sonata No. 7 "White Mass Sonata", Op. 64
Sonata No. 8, Op. 66
Sonata No. 9 "Black Mass Sonata", Op. 68
Sonata No. 10, Op. 70

Other works for piano
Some of Scriabin's other major works for piano include:

Fantasy in B minor, Op.28
Vers la flamme, Op.72
Scriabin wrote a large number of short pieces, including preludes, etudes, and poems. Particularly popular short pieces include:

Etude in D sharp minor, Op. 8, No. 12
Etude in C sharp minor, Op. 2, No. 1

Orchestral works
Piano Concerto in F sharp minor, Op. 20
Reverie, Op. 24
Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 26
Symphony No. 2 in C minor, Op. 29
Symphony No. 3 "The Divine Poem" in C minor, Op. 43
Symphony No. 4 "Poem of Ecstasy", Op. 54
Prometheus: Poem of Fire, Op. 60
Mysterium (unfinished)

Catalog of works
Nearly all of Scriabin's works have opus numbers. His work can be divided into three (somewhat arbitrary) periods, based on increasing atonality: early, Opus 1-29; middle, Opus 30-53; and late, Opus 54-74.

Works without opus
Canon in D minor (1883)
Nocturne in Ab major (1884)
Mazurka (1884)
Mazurka (1886)
Valse in Db Major (1886)
Valse in G# minor (1886)
Sonata-Fantasy (1886)
Egorova (Egoroff) variations (1887)
Fantasy for two pianos in A minor (1889)
Mazurka in F major (1889)
Mazurka in B minor (1889)
Feuillet d'Album in Ab major (1889)
Sonata in Eb minor (1889)
Romance for horn (1890)
Romance for voice (1894)
Symphonic Poem in D minor (1896)
Feuillet d'Album in F# major (1905)

Early (Opus 1-29)
Opus 1: Waltz in F minor (1886)
Opus 2: Tres Morceaux (1889)
Etude in C sharp minor
Prelude in B major
Impromptu à la Mazur (C major)
Opus 3: Ten Mazurkas (1889)
Mazurka in B minor
Mazurka in F sharp minor
Mazurka in G minor
Mazurka in E major
Mazurka in D sharp minor
Mazurka in C sharp minor
Mazurka in E minor
Mazurka in B flat minor
Mazurka in G sharp minor
Mazurka in E flat minor
Opus 4: Allegro Appasionato (E flat minor) (1892)
Opus 5: Two Nocturnes (1890)
Nocturne in F sharp minor
Nocturne in A major
Opus 6: Sonata No. 1 in F minor (1892)
Opus 7: Two Impromptus à la Mazur (1892)
G sharp minor
F sharp minor
Opus 8: Twelve Etudes (1894)
Etude in C sharp minor
Etude in F sharp minor
Etude in B minor
Etude in B major
Etude in E major
Etude in A major
Etude in B flat minor
Etude in A flat major
Etude in G sharp minor
Etude in D flat major
Etude in B flat minor
Etude in D sharp minor
Opus 9: Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand (1894)
Prelude in C sharp minor
Nocturne in D flat major
Opus 10: Two Impromptus (1894)
Impromptu in F sharp minor
Impromptu in A major
Opus 11: 24 Preludes (1896)
Prelude in C major
Prelude in A minor
Prelude in G major
Prelude in E minor
Prelude in D major
Prelude in B minor
Prelude in A major
Prelude in F sharp minor
Prelude in E major
Prelude in C sharp minor
Prelude in B major
Prelude in G sharp minor
Prelude in G flat major
Prelude in E flat minor
Prelude in D flat major
Prelude in B flat minor
Prelude in A flat major
Prelude in F minor
Prelude in E flat major
Prelude in C minor
Prelude in A flat major
Prelude in G minor
Prelude in F major
Prelude in D minor
Opus 12: Two Impromptus (1895)
Impromptu in F sharp major
Impromptu in B flat minor
Opus 13: Six Preludes (1895)
Prelude in C major
Prelude in A minor
Prelude in G major
Prelude in E minor
Prelude in D major
Prelude in B minor
Opus 14: Two Impromptus (1895)
Impromptu in B major
Impromptu in F sharp minor
Opus 15: Five Preludes (1896)
Prelude in A major
Prelude in F sharp minor
Prelude in E major
Prelude in E sharp minor
Prelude in C sharp minor
Opus 16: Five Preludes (1895)
Prelude in B major
Prelude in G sharp minor
Prelude in G flat major
Prelude in E flat minor
Prelude in F sharp major
Opus 17: Seven Preludes (1896)
Prelude in D minor
Prelude in E flat major
Prelude in D flat major
Prelude in B flat minor
Prelude in F minor
Prelude in B flat major
Prelude in G minor
Opus 18: Allegro de concert (Concert Allegro) in B flat minor (1896)
Opus 19: Sonata No. 2 in G sharp minor (also known as Sonata-Fantasy) (1897)
Opus 20: Piano Concerto in F sharp minor (1896)
Opus 21: Polonaise in B flat minor (1897)
Opus 22: Four Preludes (1897)
Prelude in G sharp minor
Prelude in C sharp minor
Prelude in B major
Prelude in B minor
Opus 23: Sonata No. 3 in F sharp minor (1898)
Opus 24: Reverie for orchestra (1898)
Opus 25: Nine Mazurkas (1899)
Mazurka in F minor
Mazurka in C major
Mazurka in E minor
Mazurka in E major
Mazurka in C sharp minor
Mazurka in F sharp major
Mazurka in F sharp minor
Mazurka in B major
Mazurka in E flat minor
Opus 26: Symphony No. 1 in E Major (1900)
Opus 27: Two Preludes (1901)
Patetico in G minor
Andante in B major
Opus 28: Fantaisie in B minor (1900)
Opus 29: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor (1902)

Middle (Opus 30-58)
Opus 30: Sonata No. 4 in F sharp major (1903)
Opus 31: Four Preludes
Prelude in D flat major/C major
Prelude in F sharp minor
Prelude in E flat major
Prelude in A flat major
Opus 32: Two Poemes
Poeme in F sharp major
Poeme in D major
Opus 33: Four Preludes
Prelude in E major
Prelude in F sharp major
Prelude in C major
Prelude in Ab major
Opus 34: Poeme Tragique
Opus 35: Three Preludes
Prelude in D flat major
Prelude in B flat major
Prelude in C major
Opus 36: Poeme Satanique
Opus 37: Four Preludes
Prelude in B flat minor
Prelude in F sharp major
Prelude in B major
Prelude in G minor
Opus 38: Waltz in A flat major
Opus 39: Four Preludes
Prelude in F sharp major
Prelude in D major
Prelude in G major
Prelude in A flat major
Opus 40: Two Mazurkas
Mazurka in D flat major
Mazurka in F sharp major
Opus 41: Poeme
Opus 42: Eight Etudes
Etude in D flat major
Etude in F sharp minor
Etude in F sharp major
Etude in F sharp major
Etude in C sharp minor
Etude in D flat major
Etude in F minor
Etude in E flat major
Opus 43: Symphony No. 3 "Le Divin Poeme" (The Divine Poem)
Opus 44: Two Poemes
Poeme in C major
Poeme in C major
Opus 45: Tres Morceaux
Album Leaf in E flat major
Poème fantastique in C major
Prelude in E flat major
Opus 46: Scherzo
Opus 47: Quasi Waltz in F major
Opus 48: Four Preludes
Prelude in F sharp major
Prelude in C major
Prelude in D flat major
Prelude in C major
Opus 49: Trois Morceaux
Etude in E flat major
Prelude in F major
Rêverie in C major
Opus 50 was not used by Scriabin

Opus 51: Quatre Morceaux (1906)
Fragilité
Prelude
Poème Aile
Danse Languide
Opus 52: Trois Morceaux
Poem in C major
Enigma (no definite tonality)
Poème languide in B major
Opus 53: Sonata No. 5
Opus 54 Le Poeme de l'extase (The Poem of Ecstasy)
Opus 55 was not used by Scriabin

Opus 56 Quatre Morceaux
Prelude in E major
Ironies in C major
Nuances
Etude
Opus 57 Deux Morceaux
Désir
Caresse dansée
Opus 58 Album Leaf

Late (Opus 59-74)
Opus 59 Deux Morceaux
Poème
Prelude
Opus 60 Prometheus: Le Poeme de feu (The Poem of Fire)
Opus 61 Poème-Nocturne
Opus 62 Sonata No. 6
Opus 63 Two Poèmes
Masque
Etrangete
Opus 64 Sonata No. 7
Opus 65 Three Etudes
Opus 66 Sonata No. 8
Opus 67 Two Preludes
Andante
Presto
Opus 68 Sonata No. 9
Opus 69 Two Poèmes
Allegretto
Allegretto
Opus 70 Sonata No. 10
Opus 71 Two Poèmes
Opus 72 Vers la flamme (Towards the flame) (Poem)
Opus 73 Deux Danses
Guirlandes
Flammes sombres
Opus 74 Five Preludes
Douloureux, déchirant
Très lent, contemplatif
Allegro drammatico
Lent, vague, indécis
Fier, belliqueux