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Alexander Scriabin's music forms a seamless web that leads from one musical era to another, to the present and into the future. His early works, written mostly in the 1890's, while distinctive, show the influence of Chopin, Liszt and Schumann, the middle works contain glints of Debussy and even Gershwin, while the late pieces are written in his own musical language and shot through with his own brand of mysticism. He wrote mostly for piano, producing 10 sonatas, which trace the path of his creative development, scores of preludes, etudes, poems and other shorter pieces, many only a page long. There are also five symphonies and a piano concerto.

The earlier pieces bring Romanticism into the 20th century. The later ones deal with themes that were virtually unheard of until decades after his death: space flight (the narrator of a poem accompanying the 4th Sonata (read the poem) soars toward a star he had been gazing at longingly in the introduction, then merges with it in the climax, radiating its light himself), apocalyptic conflagration (the bomb bursts in the Opus 74, No. 5, prelude, marked "savage, bellicose," and in the swirling clangor of "Dark Flames"), the explosion of stars into cosmic dust (the arppegiated chords and trills in the 7th Sonata that seem to stretch into an infinity of silence).

Toward the Flame

Ecstasy is a theme that runs through all stages of his career (the climax of the 5th sonata is a muscial depiction of sexual orgasm). Luminosity, too, whether in the early piano pieces glowing with sunshine or shimmering with moonlight, or in the blinding sunlight of the 10th Sonata.

His notation, in French, includes terms like ravishing, dreaming, pure. His titles include "Fragility," "Danced Caress," "Desire," "Poem of Ecstasy," "Poem of Fire," "Winged Poem," "Toward the Flame." Others gave the names "White Mass" and "Black Mass" to the 7th and 9th Sonatas, respectively. Scriabin never discouraged the nicknames. He acutally considered parts of the 7th to be holy, perhaps, as Faubion Bowers says in his biography of Scriabin, to banish the dark mists lingering from the 6th, which the composer refused to play, saying it was too terrifying.

Scriabin wrote instructions for a light machine to bathe the orchestra and audience in color during his 5th Symphony, "Prometheus: The Poem of Fire," predating rock light shows.

In spite of such seeming excesses, the music is never excessive. No notes are out of place. He was fastidious, even in penmanship, and imposed strict forms that conformed to the inner logic of each piece. Some compositions, like the 5th Sonata, were conceived in one creative flash, then written out in several days. He agonized over others, like the 2nd Sonata, which sat almost completed for several years, until Scriabin found the right notes for a gap of only a few measures that he deemed essential.

Complexity Through Simplicity

The composer often told friends, probably baffling them, that he was striving for the ultimate complexity through the greatest simplicty. The complexity is apparent, but what was simple about his composition techniques, especially the later pieces?

In the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas, Scriabin dropped key signitures and adopted an alternating whole-tone, half-tone scale of nine tones. There are three such scales available, and he used each of them through both sonatas.

The easiest one to visualize is one beginning on C followed by a half step. Continuing the sequence it results in a simple pattern on the black and white keys of the piano, C and E with C-sharp and E-flat on the inside, and G and A, flanked by F-sharp and B-flat, all, of course, spelled in varied ways when written. Another easy way to arrive at the scales is by pairing any two of the the three dominant seventh chords into the three possible combinations. Still another way of viewing the structure of the scale is the combination of two major chords with sixths added, the roots being a tritone apart. The above example would include C major with A and F-sharp major with D-sharp. However derived, this scale with just a single additional tone gives the composer a huge arsenal of colors that mark his late music.

Translating this broader palette to the traditional bass and treble staffs results in a heavy spray of sharps, flats and naturals. But when the notes are placed in the alternating whole-tone, half-tone scales, the two sonatas can actually run pages without an accidental. When an accidental occurs it acts as a leading tone, signaling a shift to a new scale, new colors, new themes.

The use of accidentals changes in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Sonatas, becoming more frequent and creating more complex patterns. Tones foreign to the whole-tone, half-tone scales are incorporated into the melodic and harmonic schemes of the last three sonatas.

Music From Space

Unitil his death at 43 in 1915, Scriabin enjoyed immense popularity in Russia, both as a composer and as a pianist, though his trip to the United States was a failure. The outcry over his living with his mistress, who happened to be the muse for most of his later years, forced him to cut short his visit to New York, where the critics had been devastating anyway. His work also fared poorly under Communism, which for years considered his music decadant. But he gradually returned to favor, and his music was played on government radio when Yuri Gagarin was the first to orbit the earth.

There are signs that the world is catching up to Scriabin's music. His "Prefatory Action," a three-or-four-hour prelude to the world-transforming "Mysterium,"which was to be performed in the Himalayas with bells suspended from clouds, huge choruses and corps of dancers and clouds of perfume, has been created from Scriabin's notes by the late Alexander Nimtin and performed.

Space flight is now routine, atomic bombs have been used, and hardly anyone objects to expressions of ecstasy anymore. But no one has been able to pick up the compositional thread that Scriabin worked with, though many have tried. He was unique.

Listen to Scriabin:

Sonata No. 4 in F Sharp Major, Op.30

For More About Scriabin, Visit:

The Scriabin Society of America