Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was born in Moscow on January 6, 1872, into a family of minor aristocracy with a strong military tradition ^[1]. His mother, Lyubov Petrovna Shchetinina, was a concert pianist who had studied with Theodor Leschetizky, but she died of tuberculosis before her son was eighteen months old. His father, Nikolai Scriabin, entered the diplomatic service and spent most of his career abroad in Turkey, leaving the boy to be raised in Moscow by his grandmother, his great-aunt, and above all his aunt Lyubov, who doted on him and later left detailed memoirs of his childhood ^[2].

The household treated the small, delicate child as something precious. He gravitated to the piano early, improvising before he could read music and building toy pianos as gifts for relatives. Family expectation nonetheless pointed toward the army, and at ten he entered the Moscow Cadet Corps, where his slight build kept him out of most physical training but where his piano playing made him a minor celebrity among the cadets ^[1].

Serious musical instruction ran alongside his military schooling. He took piano lessons with Nikolai Zverev, the demanding Moscow teacher whose small circle of live-in and visiting pupils included the young Sergei Rachmaninoff, and he studied theory privately with Sergei Taneyev ^[2]. In 1888 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying piano with Vasily Safonov and composition with Taneyev and Anton Arensky. Any Alexander Scriabin biography has to reckon with an injury from these years: while practicing pieces of extreme difficulty, including Liszt and Balakirev's Islamey, he damaged his right hand, and doctors warned the injury might be permanent ^[3]. The crisis marked him deeply. He composed his First Piano Sonata partly in response to it, and the works he wrote for left hand alone, the Prelude and Nocturne, Op. 9, date from this period. He graduated in 1892 with the Little Gold Medal in piano, though a quarrel with Arensky meant he never completed the composition degree ^[1].

Scriabin's professional break came through the publisher and timber magnate Mitrofan Belyayev, who took him on in 1894, printed his early works, and financed a European concert tour ^[2]. The publisher's support gave the young composer something rare: freedom to write mostly piano music in his own manner while performing it himself in Russia and abroad. Those early preludes, etudes, mazurkas, and impromptus show an obvious debt to Chopin, whose music Scriabin reportedly kept under his pillow as a boy, yet the harmonic restlessness that would define his mature style is already audible in pieces like the Etude in D-sharp minor, Op. 8 No. 12 ^[3].

In 1898 Safonov brought him back to the Moscow Conservatory as a professor of piano, a post he held until 1903 ^[1]. Teaching gave him income but drained his energy, and colleagues remembered him as an inconsistent instructor who cared far more about his own composing. During these years he completed his first three symphonies. The Symphony No. 1 (1900) ends with a choral finale in praise of art itself, and the Symphony No. 3, titled The Divine Poem and premiered in Paris in 1905 under Arthur Nikisch, announced a composer with philosophical ambitions well beyond conventional program music ^[4].

Those ambitions had specific sources. Around the turn of the century Scriabin immersed himself in the philosophy of Nietzsche and then in the Theosophical writings of Helena Blavatsky, and he attended meetings of the Moscow Philosophical Society ^[2]. He began keeping notebooks in which he cast the creative artist as a godlike figure whose ecstasy could transform the world. Whatever one makes of these ideas, they drove concrete changes in his music: longer unresolved dissonances, harmony built increasingly from chords stacked in fourths rather than thirds, and titles like Poème and Désir replacing conventional genre names ^[3].

The list of Alexander Scriabin achievements centers on a harmonic evolution that few composers of any era have matched for sheer speed. Between roughly 1903 and 1915 he moved from a late-Romantic idiom to music that abandons functional tonality almost entirely, and he did it across a compact body of work: ten piano sonatas, five symphonic works, and dozens of preludes and poems for piano ^[3]. The Fourth and Fifth Sonatas, the Poème de l'extase for orchestra (completed 1908), and the late piano works trace the whole journey.

At the core of the mature style sits the sonority analysts call the mystic chord, a six-note collection built largely in fourths (in one common spelling: C, F-sharp, B-flat, E, A, D) that functions in the late works as both harmony and melodic source ^[5]. Scriabin treated such chords not as dissonances demanding resolution but as stable, luminous objects, which is one reason his last sonatas, none of which carries a key signature, sound suspended rather than restless.

His most famous single conception is Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, Op. 60, first performed in Moscow in 1911 under Serge Koussevitzky with the composer at the piano ^[4]. The score includes a part for a clavier à lumières, a color organ meant to flood the hall with changing light keyed to the harmony, reflecting Scriabin's association of tonalities with specific colors. The color part went unrealized at the premiere for technical reasons, but a performance in New York in 1915 attempted the lighting, and the work has invited multimedia realizations ever since ^[5]. Among widely cited Alexander Scriabin facts is his synesthetic color-key system; scholars still debate whether he experienced true clinical synesthesia or constructed the correspondences intellectually, since his color assignments follow the circle of fifths with suspicious neatness ^[5].

In 1897 Scriabin married the pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, a fellow Moscow Conservatory graduate who became a dedicated performer of his music. The couple had four children, but the marriage collapsed ^[2]. In 1905 Scriabin left Vera for Tatiana Fyodorovna Schloezer, the niece of the music critic Boris de Schloezer and an ardent believer in his artistic mission. Vera refused a divorce, so Scriabin and Tatiana lived together unmarried, a situation that scandalized parts of Russian society and complicated the legal status of their three children, among them Julian Scriabin, a composing prodigy who drowned in 1919 at age eleven ^[1].

The years with Tatiana were itinerant. Between 1904 and 1909 the couple lived abroad, in Switzerland, Italy, Brussels, and Paris, supported unevenly by patrons after the Belyayev firm reduced his stipend ^[2]. An American concert tour in 1906 and 1907, arranged with the conductor Modest Altschuler, ended early when word of his irregular domestic arrangements reached the press. More reliable help arrived in 1909 from Koussevitzky, whose new Russian Music Publishing House signed Scriabin and whose orchestra featured him as soloist, including a celebrated 1910 concert tour down the Volga River by steamboat ^[4].

Contemporaries described a small, fastidious, hypochondriac man, obsessively careful about germs, who wore gloves and worried over minor ailments, yet who spoke of his own cosmic significance with total sincerity ^[2]. He and Rachmaninoff, fellow Zverev pupils, remained lifelong acquaintances despite temperamental and musical differences; after Scriabin's death Rachmaninoff toured Russia playing all-Scriabin programs to raise money for the family ^[1].

Scriabin returned to Moscow in 1910 and entered his most radical period. The final five piano sonatas, Nos. 6 through 10, all composed between 1911 and 1913, dispense with key signatures and unfold from single chord complexes, ranging from the menacing Sixth, which the composer refused to perform publicly because he found it frightening, to the Tenth with its trilling textures he associated with insects and sunlight ^[3]. Short late pieces such as Vers la flamme (1914) compress the same language into a few incandescent minutes.

Increasingly his composing served a single project: the Mysterium, an enormous week-long ceremony of music, dance, light, and scent to be enacted in a temple in India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, by all of humanity rather than for an audience. Scriabin believed the event would bring about a transfiguration of the world ^[5]. Recognizing that the full conception was beyond immediate reach, he began drafting a preparatory work he called the Acte préalable (Prefatory Action), leaving musical sketches and a poetic text at his death. Decades later the Russian composer Alexander Nemtin spent roughly a quarter century elaborating those sketches into a three-part performing version ^[5].

The end came abruptly. In early 1915 he gave concerts in Petrograd to strong acclaim. That April a pustule on his upper lip, apparently present in some form for years, became infected; the infection spread, septicemia set in, and after several days of illness he died in Moscow on April 27, 1915, at the age of forty-three ^[1]. In an era before antibiotics nothing could be done. His funeral drew such crowds that tickets were issued, and Rachmaninoff and Koussevitzky were among those who honored him in the following months with memorial concerts ^[4].

Few reputations have swung as widely as Scriabin's. In the decade after his death he was revered in Russia, and early Soviet artists briefly claimed his ecstatic visions for the revolution; later, official Soviet culture cooled toward his mysticism even as pianists kept the sonatas alive ^[4]. In the West his stock fell sharply between the wars, when his philosophy struck many critics as embarrassing, before a durable revival took hold in the second half of the twentieth century led by pianists including Vladimir Horowitz and Vladimir Sofronitsky, the latter married for a time to Scriabin's daughter Elena ^[1].

His technical influence proved concrete. Scriabin's fourth-based harmony and his treatment of a single complex chord as the source of an entire work anticipated devices later associated with atonality, and composers as different as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Szymanowski, and Messiaen absorbed elements of his sound ^[3]. The Prometheus lighting experiment made him a founding reference point for multimedia art, cited by later creators working across music, color, and light ^[5].

The Moscow apartment on Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane where he spent his last three years opened as the Scriabin Memorial Museum in 1922 and preserves his piano, library, and a reconstruction of his color-light apparatus ^[6]. A century on, the essential Alexander Scriabin facts still startle: a composer who died before the premiere of most modernist landmarks yet wrote music without key centers, who planned a work meant to end history, and whose ten sonatas remain a summit of the piano repertoire, programmed and recorded by each new generation ^[3].