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Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин,
Aleksandr Nikolajevič Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skriabin, Skryabin, or Scriabine
(6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871]–27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist who developed a highly lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language. Driven by a poetic, philosophical and
aesthetic vision that bordered on the mystical, he can be considered the primary figure of Symbolism in Russian music.
His music has been performed by musicians such as Sergei Rachmaninoff,
Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein,
Sviatoslav Richter, Claudio Arrau and
Vladimir Ashkenazy. He also influenced composers like Olivier Messiaen, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, although Scriabin was reported to have disliked Prokofiev's and Stravinsky's music.
Scriabin stands as one of the most innovative and most controversial of composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that, "No composer has had more scorn heaped
or greater love bestowed...". Leo Tolstoy once described Scriabin's music as "a
sincere expression of genius" [1]
Scriabin was highly regarded during his lifetime and his music has resurged in popularity in the last few decades after
suffering a period of some decline in the middle of the 20th century. He has consistently remained a favorite composer among
pianists.[2]
Biography
Childhood
Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family in Moscow on Christmas Day 1871, according to the Julian Calendar (this translates
to 6 January 1872 in the Gregorian 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.
Conservatory
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 Josef Lhevinne he seriously damaged his right hand
while practicing Liszt's Don Juan Fantasy
and Balakirev's Islamey.[3] 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". In 1892, he graduated with the Little Gold Medal in piano performance, but
did not complete a composition degree because of strong differences in personality and musical taste with Arensky and
unwillingness to compose pieces in forms that did not interest him.[4] Ironically, one requirement that he did complete, an E-minor fugue, became required learning for decades at the Conservatory.
Career
In 1894 Scriabin debuted as a pianist in St. Petersburg, performing his own works to positive reviews. This was followed by
period of extensive touring, in Russia and abroad, culminating in a highly successful 1898 concert in Paris, where he performed with his recent wife, Vera Ivanova Isakovich, also a pianist. The same year he accepted
the offer by Safonov to become a professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory. In this period he composed his cycle of
etudes op. 8, several sets of preludes, his first three piano
sonatas, and his only piano concerto, among other works, mostly
for piano.
Scriabin had several children, but eventually left his teaching position and divorced his wife, marrying Tatiana Fyodorovna
Schloezer (Tatiana de Schloezer), a younger pupil. As well as his two prominent amorous attachments, Scriabin may have had some
homosexual encounters.[4]
With the financial support of a wealthy sponsor, he left Russia in 1904 and spent several years traveling between
Switzerland, Italy, France,
Belgium and America, working on more orchestral pieces,
including several symphonies. He was also beginning to compose "poems" for the piano, a form with which he is particularly
associated.
In 1907 he settled in Paris with his family and was involved with a series of concerts organized by the impressario
Sergei Diaghilev, who was actively promoting Russian music in the West at the time.
Mysterium
In 1909 he returned to Russia permanently, where he continued to compose, working on increasingly grandiose projects. 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 [1]). Scriabin left only sketches for this piece, Mysterium,
although they were eventually made into a performable version by Alexander Nemtin.
The Mysterium was, psychologically speaking, a world Scriabin’s genius created to sustain its own evolution [2].
Death
Scriabin was a small and reportedly frail, and 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.
With Tatiana Fyodorovna, he had a son named Julian who was himself to prove a musical
prodigy who composed several sophisticated pieces before drowning in a boating accident at age 11 in 1919.
Philosophy and aesthetics
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 [3]
. 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."
Performers
Pianists who have performed Scriabin to critical acclaim include Vladimir
Sofronitsky, Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter. Horowitz performed for Scriabin, in his home as an 11 year old child, 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 could not sit still. Despite Horowitz' assessment, Scriabin held the rapt
attention of the musical world in Russia while he was alive.
Music
- See also: List of
compositions by Alexander Scriabin and Category:Compositions by Alexander
Scriabin
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 étude, the
prelude, the nocturne, and the mazurka. Scriabin's music gradually evolved over 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 and style can be followed in his ten piano sonatas: the earliest are composed in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom and show the influence of Chopin and Franz Liszt, but
the later ones move into new, original 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." [3]
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." [5] 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 more flexible
sonata-form.[3]
Influence of colour
Synesthetic colors, described by the composer
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 doubted that Alexander
Scriabin actually experienced this.[6][7] 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 colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on
associations of musical keys with colours; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did
not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat
major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favoured 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.
Miscellaneous
- A comparison of the creative trajectories of Rachmaninov and Scriabin has fueled psychoanalytic speculation on the
distinction between talent and genius.[8]
- The graphic above depicting a colored keyboard is not entirely correct: the colors shown do not relate to the particular
tones of the twelve-tone system, but to the tonalities starting with those keys. Also note that Scriabin did not, as far as this
theory is concerned, recognize a difference between a major and a minor tonality of the same name (for example: c-minor and
C-Major).
Media
In January 1910 Scriabin played in Moscow nine of his own compositions for Welte-Mignon
and his playing was transcribed on piano rolls. The results have been played back and
recorded. Examples:
See also
References
- ^ E.E. Garcia (2004): Rachmaninoff and Scriabin: Creativity and Suffering in Talent and Genius.
Psychoanalytic Review, 91: 423–42.
- ^ Scriabin Again and Again.
- ^ a b c d Scholes, Percy. Crotchets: A Few Short Musical Notes. Ayer, 141. ISBN 0836908554.
- ^ a b
Bowers, Faubion (1996), Scriabin, a Biography,
Courier Dover Publications, ISBN 0486288978
- ^ Copland, A. (1957). What to Listen for in Music, New York:
McGraw-Hill.
- ^ *Harrison, John (2001). Synaesthesia: The Strangest
Thing, ISBN 0-19-263245-0: "In fact, there is considerable doubt about the legitimacy of Scriabin's claim, or rather the
claims made on his behalf, as we shall discuss in Chapter 5." (p.31-2).
- ^ B. M. Galeyev and I. L. Vanechkina (August 2001). "Was Scriabin a Synesthete?", Leonardo, Vol. 34, Issue 4, pp. 357 - 362: "authors conclude that the nature of
Scriabin’s 'color-tonal' analogies was associative, i.e. psychological; accordingly, the existing belief that Scriabin was a
distinctive, unique 'synesthete' who really saw the sounds of music—that is, literally had an ability for 'co-sensations'— is
placed in doubt."
- ^ E.E. Garcia (2004): Rachmaninoff and Scriabin: Creativity and Suffering in Talent and Genius.
Psychoanalytic Review, 91: 423–42.
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
Skryabin, Scriabine, Skrjabin |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
pianist, composer |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
6 January 1872 [O.S. 26 December 1871] |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Moscow, Russia |
| DATE OF DEATH |
27 April, 1915 |
| PLACE OF DEATH |
Moscow, Russia |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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