Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: ÐÐ»ÐµÐºÑÐ°ÌÐ½Ð´Ñ€ ÐÐ¸ÐºÐ¾Ð»Ð°ÌÐµÐ²Ð¸Ñ‡ Ð¡ÐºÑ€ÑÌÐ±Ð¸Ð½, Aleksandr NikolaeviÄ Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skryabin) (6 January 1872 – 27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin

Biography

Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family in Moscow. When he was only a year old, his mother, a concert pianist, died from tuberculosis. Scriabin's father left for Turkey, leaving the young infant with his grandmother and great aunt. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolay Zverev who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninov at the same time. He 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 (at one point he actually damaged his hand from practicing pieces which required greater hand spans). Scriabin, previously interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's Ã¼bermensch 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 HÃ©lÃ¨ne 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).

He was a hypochondriac his entire life. He died in Moscow from septicemia, contracted as a result of a shaving cut. 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]). 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.

Pianists who have performed Scriabin to critical acclaim include Vladimir Sofronitsky, Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter.

Music

Style and influences

Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano; the earliest pieces resemble FrÃ©dÃ©ric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the etude, the prelude and the mazurka. Later works, however, are strikingly original, 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." 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

Synaesthetic colors, described by the composer

Though these works are often considered to be influenced by Scriabin's synaesthesia, 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 *Harrison, John (2001). Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, ISBN 0192632450: "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 'synaesthete' who really saw the sounds of musicâ€"that is, literally had an ability for 'co-sensations'â€" is placed in doubt.". His color system, unlike most synaesthetic 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 3 symphonies, a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier Ã lumiÃ¨res", 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.

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]

Alexander Scriabin: Encyclopedia BETA

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