Psychedelic Scriabin

He was a giant: measuring 5'1" he could still have looked down on the even shorter Wagner - had they been able to meet. He was also a Christmas baby according to the Julian calendar which in the last century was 12 days behind our Gregorian; it is now 13 days behind. Because of that discrepancy, by Western reckoning Scriabin's birthday falls on January 6, Epiphany or the 12th day of Christmas, in 1872 rather than 1871 as recorded on his birth certificate.

On the non-political front, Scriabin was almost responsible for losing Boris Pasternak to literature: the families had neighboring country homes outside Moscow and the lad, Pasternak son of a famous portrait painter and the future 1958 Nobel Prize winner, idolized Scriabin to the point of wanting to become a composer.  Presumably, Uncle Kolya a character in Dr. Zhivago, has been modeled on Scriabin.

Orphaned as a one year old toddler, Scriabin was left in the care of a doting spinster aunt and other female relatives. His father, who as a tsarist foreign service officer signed Igor Stravinsky's first passport, remarried and mostly lived abroad. As a youngster, Scriabin suffered from severe migraine headaches, which could be relieved after a 'talk treatment', as analysis was then called, with the noted neuropathologist Dr. Erb, in Germany. Later on, Scriabin was able to control the physical effects of his neuroses through inner self-discipline and the power of mind over matter, as well as turning increasingly to the study and practice of yoga and theosophy.

He was training for a performing career as a concert pianist, but strained his right hand through over-practice and was afraid that he would not be able to perform again. The gloomy First Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 6 (1892), with its "Funeral March" was one reaction to the mishap. Another, and more practical, resulted in two left-hand piano pieces, Op. 9, with the first, Prelude in C-sharp minor, on the current MHS 3768A release. The com­panion piece, Nocturne, appears on the MHS 1613T all-Scriabin disc which contain all the 12 Etudes, Op. 8 and other scattered pieces; both left hand pieces are on the MHS 1971H collection of Piano Music for Left Hand Alone.

After graduating from the Moscow Conservatory, Scriabin continued concertizing but restricted himself exclusively to the performance of his own works. According to some, he was a supreme poet at the keyboard, mesmerizing the audiences with the poetry and hypnotic power of his playing. Others were appalled by his technical unevenness or inconsistencies, rhythmic inaccuracies and the many liberties he took, which included complete departures from the text of his own scores.

He had similarly mixed notices during a four year teaching stint, 1898-1902, at the Moscow Conservatory, his alma mater. He was detested by his colleagues, possibly for his youth or out of jealousy, but adored by his students. An emissary from the Vienna Conservatory considered him one of the best piano teachers and invited him to come and teach in Vienna. Scriabin, resigned his Moscow professorship, and instead went to live abroad for five years and resumed the full time career as composer and concert pianist, including a four month tour of the United States in 1906-07.

In his Russian homeland, Scriabin is a household word. Predictably, in the heyday of the Socialist realism, the dark ages of Zhdanov's and Stalin's brand of 'cultural revolution', his music was banished as unhealthy, decadent and degenerate formalism -- Hitler would have called it cultural Bolshevism! Scriabin's music, however, was casting its spell on the tsarist elite and post-revolutionary proletarian masses alike and his Poem of Ecstasy (4th Symphony: 1908) was beamed over the Soviet radio when Yuri Gagarin was shot into space in 1961 and greeted him again during welcoming ceremonies at Moscow's Red Square upon his return.

There could not have been a better choice, nor is there a more cosmic composer than Scriabin: he had already started his private lift into a space of sorts with his previous work, while still using the later abandoned impersonal numerical designation of the Third Symphony, but subtitled Divine Poem (1903) and written with a 'philosophical program' in mind. His last completed orchestral composition, chronologically the 5th symphony, Prometheus: Poem of Fire (1910) has a prominent solo part, but the first line in the score is for a 'colored lights keyboard' that had to be especially built for the early performances of the work: Scriabin had the faculty of hearing music in colors.

His ultimate 'Gesamtkunstwerk': a synthesis of all the arts, and engaging all senses, was to be a Mysterium, performed in India with the Himalayas in the back­ground, the bells suspended from clouds, and involving tastes: a symphony of flavors, with the complete blurring of distinction between the performers and the audience. More than just a "happening" with audience participation, it was to be a sacred ritual - with Scriabin as celebrant, anticipating perchance Bernstein's Mass festival lasting a full week and culminating in the total destruction of the world as the composition's shattering climax: cataclysm, doomsday and Armageddon all together! Quoting his brother-in-law Boris Schloezer, "in his dream of the end of the universe, Scriabin saw some kind of a grandiose sexual act'': a musical marquis de Sade orgy?

Koussevitzky, the double bass virtuoso who was just breaking into conducting and established the Russian Music Edition in 1908 with the money of his second wife, signed up Scriabin with substantial yearly advances toward the completion of Mysterium. The association was mutually profitable but not satisfying for they broke off within four years. While the friendship lasted, however, Scriabin was Koussevitzky's piano soloist on the epoch making Koussevitzky orchestra tour on a barge down the Volga river that took music to the people in the provinces. At the same time, Koussevitzky' s early conductorial career was helped considerably by his reputation as a Scriabin champion and specialist.

As the work on the composition of the Mysterium progressed, Scriabin started having doubts about his - or the work's - power to bring about the end of the world and renamed it into a mere Prefatory Action to that ultimate end, which was left incomplete on Scriabin's death. Stripped of its metaphysical folklore, Scriabin was really 'into' multi-media happenings eons before Fillmore East, strobe lights, laser beams, electronic sounds - or hovering flight machines that could make even his cloud-suspended chimes become a reality. (By the way, we still have not found a way to have Wagner's Valkyries ride their steeds through the clouds as the stage directions indicate.)

Even on the more spiritual plane, the mystic visionary Scriabin was more prophetic than insane, if not taken literally. He lived, after all, to see the outbreak of the first World War that turned out to be nothing but 'prefatory action' for the second with its holocaust and atomic age, rocketry and space travel that followed.

Other than the half dozen or so orchestral works, including an early Piano Concerto, and two songs - one of which has been lost - Scriabin composed exclusively for his own instrument, the piano. Basically a miniaturist, with collections of short pieces: preludes, etudes, occasional stylized dances, or impromptus and poems, he was sometimes dubbed a "Russian Chopin". The currently issued MHS 3768A joins two earlier all-Scriabin discs in the Society's catalog: 1613T and 1670M, the latter with the complete 24 Preludes, Op. 11. The present release represents a good cross-section of etudes and preludes on its first side, from the early Op. 2 to his last published composition, the complete set of Preludes, Op. 74. The Satanic Poem, Op. 36, sandwiched on the other side between two Sonatas, is one of Scriabin's 'demonic' compositions along with the 6th and 9th piano sonatas, the latter dubbed Black Mass, contrasted by the light-filled, 'saintly' sonatas Nos. 7 (subtitled White Mass) and 8.

Just as the piano works form the core of Scriabin's compositions, so too are his ten piano sonatas central to his development as a composer and a person, covering the period between 1892, when he was 20, and 1913, two years before his death. Currently released on MHS 3768A Nos. 4, Op. 30 (1903) and 5, Op. 53 (1908), both in F-sharp Major, represent the watershed of his approach to the sonata form. The uneven-numbered first two have the conventional four movements, the even­-numbered second and fourth are in two movements: slow - fast. Anybody curious comparing two different performances of the Fourth Sonata, the last of the old order in Scriabin's canon, may also want to look in - or listen to - MHS 1147Y collection of Russian piano music.

From the Fifth Sonata on, Scriabin uses single movement form. Whether in several or single movements, the sonatas were often cyclical in character -- as were his symphonies -- using the favorite Lisztian device of motivic or theme transformation within the same work. That organic unity within the work is brought one step further in sonatas Nos. 5 (current release), 9 ('Black Mass') and 10, which all end with the same music that was used at the beginning as an introduction, and again in the middle, separating what would traditionally be the exposition and development section of the sonata form.  

Scriabin was an intuitive composer who made an emphatic distinction between mechanically devising his works and inventing them creatively. Yet, he would often outline the structural framework by counting off empty measures with short­hand indications of tonality and harmony before filling in the actual sounds: his music forms have grown organically from harmonic changes that established Scriabin as a true pioneer and innovator that is still baffling the analysts.

The basis of his system is in linking two dominant seventh chords, e.g. C-B-D-F, that are a tritone (three whole stops) apart, which Mussorgsky used with such effect for the jubilant orchestral chiming in the "Coronation Scene" of his Boris Godunov. Often the fifth of the chord would be chromatically altered (in the above example: D to D-flat), or the chord expanded by adding the ninth and eleventh stops on top of the existing seventh. Those chromatic alterations resulted in chords that could belong and resolve to more than one key, a point referred to as 'dual modality'. When spread out horizontally, the chord sounds would produce the whole tone scale - a favorite with Russian composers from Glinka and Dargomizhsky to Rimsky-Korsakov for supernatural or mysterious effects -- or a synthetic scale of alternating whole and half steps.

Scriabin was equally fond of shunning the usual and conventional 'voicing' of his chords - distribution of the component sounds over the tonal gamut. Instead of the standard thirds, he would often build his chords by adding up fourths above each other: quartal instead of tertian harmony. The famous 'mystic chord' in his Prometheus, spelled as G - D sharp - A - C sharp - F sharp – B in Scriabin's score, however, can be considered but an inversion or redistribution of the eleventh chord: G - B - D sharp - F sharp - A - C sharp.

The result of all this was first a blurring, then a dissolution or disappearance of tonality: the feeling of the gravity pull towards a key center in music. With this, Scriabin reached the same point and at about the same time as Schoenberg, but by different means, imparting a distinct 'flavor' to his music. There is a purely sensuous fascination in Scriabin's music, and his method allowed for infinite diversity and self-renewal without tiresome repetitiveness, leaving the impression of being less cerebral than the 12-tone atonalism of the Schonebergian cast.