Alexander Scriabin

born January 6, 1872

How can words possibly convey the sound of music? Any attempt to describe extraordinary harmonies and new approaches to melody and sound is doomed to failure. Perhaps it makes sense to turn to another art form for help in transmitting the experience of music. This seems to be what the poet Konstantin Balmont (1867-1942) was doing when he endeavored to capture the amazing beauty of Scriabin’s music in his verse.

Сперва играли лунным светом феи.
Мужской диез и женское - бемоль -
Изображали поцелуй и боль.
Журчали справа малые затеи.

Прорвались слева звуки-чародеи.
Запела Воля вскликом слитных воль.
И светлый Эльф, созвучностей король,
Ваял из звуков тонкие камеи.

Завихрил лики в токе звуковом.
Они светились золотом и сталью,
Сменяли радость крайнею печалью.

И шли толпы. И был певучим гром.
И человеку Бог был двойником.
Так Скрябина я видел за роялью.

First fairies toyed about with wisps of moonlight.
Female flats along with sharps most male,
Act out a kiss, but also pain’s travail.
As trifling fancies gurgle to the right.

And from the left burst forth the sounds of magic.
And Will sang out a cry of merging wills.
The shining Elf, who rules harmonic thrills,
Formed cameos engraved from sound and music.

These faces whirled within the soundful current.
They shined and sparked, reflections gold and steel,
Joy gone, they now a piercing sorrow feel.

And crowds passed by. And thunder boomed its song.
And God resembled man as if his double.
So did I see Scriabin at his piano.

The poem is carefully crafted to represent all aspects of Scriabin’s musical vision. The title, “Elf,” expresses the magical principle at work in the composer’s creation as he attempted to probe the essence of things and represent the majesty of the elements that rule the world. The poem’s merging of the male and female principle relates to Scriabin’s musical depiction of an erotic coming together of matter and spirit in the universe that will lead to the birth of a new world. The appearance of the cameo in the poem, a carved image representing the plastic arts, which, one would think, were entirely separate from music, speaks to the unity of all art forms, a central theme for Scriabin and an important aspect of his Mysterium. Finally, the faces (liki, a word with multiple meanings, including faces – used frequently for the faces of saints on icons or of the face of the moon – and assemblies of angels) are illuminated expressions of sound. Scriabin was the first composer to try to unite sound and light.

Scriabin’s experimentation was very much in the spirit of the times at the dawn of the twentieth century, when a frequent theme across all the arts was foretelling the birth of a new world, a new culture, a new humanity, and artists, composers, and poets were trying to find a new artistic language to express their sense of the world in a way that would reveal these new horizons. Scriabin was one of those people of culture found in all the arts who imbibed the classical heritage, filtered it through his own sensibilities, and moved boldly forward.

In 1892, upon graduating from Moscow Conservatory, he received the gold medal for piano (an honor traditionally given to the best graduate from each class in Russia). Anyone would have expected him to go on to become an outstanding pianist and perform the works of his musical forefathers or perhaps write his own, developing the musical traditions of the nineteenth century. Scriabin’s early compositions were strikingly melodious and could even be called impressionistic.

But then came the twentieth century. On the surface, it started out peacefully and uneventfully enough. In the West, it was a time of prosperous calm and contentment, but like a finely tuned seismometer, the artist could already sense the distant rumble of war, revolution, and social change. Whatever early twentieth-century art may have been, it was certainly not an expression of calm and contentment.

The more Scriabin developed as an artist, the stranger and more tormented his melodies became and the odder the sounds orchestras generated in performing his works. The composer Sergey Taneyev, who had been one of Scriabin’s teachers, was present at a performance of Prometheus, the first work for which Scriabin prepared not only a musical score, but a light score as well. When the performance was over, Taneyev was prompted by some mixture of naiveté and spite to exclaim, “Now the music will start!” It was also Taneyev who reacted to one of Scriabin’s piano miniatures with the statement, “I feel as if I’ve been beaten with sticks.” Another of Scriabin’s teachers, the composer Anton Arensky, said of one of Scriabin’s works that it was not a symphony but a cacophony. All these barbs were targeted at works that today are considered the epitome of melodiousness and beauty.

And, if we are to believe Valentin Katayev, here is what another great writer – Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin – had to say about Scriabin’s masterpiece, The Poem of Ecstasy:

“Scriabin?...Hm...You would like me to tell you about Scriabin, about just what kind of music he composes, for example his Poem of Ecstasy? I can tell you. Imagine the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The radiance of chandeliers. Oval portraits of great composers, a huge organ, and before it a symphony orchestra – violins, music stands, the immaculate shirtfronts and white ties of the musicians, all of whom are preeminent in their own right. The audience is the height of refinement: Moscow’s great experts and connoisseurs of music, young women from the university, professors, artists, the wealthy, the top beauties, military officers – the cream of the Moscow intelligentsia. A slight chill of expectation. The hall is electrified. Restrained impatience reaches its apex, and then the conductor, with a sweep of his coat tails, begins to wave his baton in the air, and the famous symphony begins – the latest, most revolutionary word in contemporary modern decadent music. Well...how can I describe this symphony in simple terms? I will try. And so, they “put bow to string,” sawing away at cross purposes.* But things were still more or less befitting the renowned Moscow conservatory. And suddenly, out of the blue, a violin screeches utter desperation, like a piglet on the butcher’s block: ‘Eeeeek! Eeeeek!’” Bunin made an angry face and without the slightest embarrassment, started to fill the entire apartment with his squealing. “And then a trumpet let out a blood-curdling, heart-rending cry...”

Ivan, you have gone totally mad!” Vera Nikolayevna [Bunin’s wife] cried out in horror, running into the room with her fingers in her ears.

I’m just explaining Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy in simple terms,” Bunin replied dryly, shooting a penetrating look my way. “You, of course, are crazy about the ‘new music,’ as any modern young poet and devotee of Dostoevsky and Leonid Andreyev should be.”

Others, however, reacted quite differently to Scriabin. At concerts in London the crowds went wild. As one contemporary wrote, “Music lovers who have been attending London concerts for 30 years cannot recall ovations like the outpouring for Scriabin. The hall was filled with some sort of howl, people waved scarves or whatever they had at hand. The orchestra, infected with the general mood, stood and bowed to the new luminary.”

Scriabin, like many in his day, dreamed of the total transformation of both art and the world. As he saw it, music had to become an art that united everything else in a sort of mystical oneness, like in the Middle Ages or in ancient Greece. His final, unfinished work, Mysterium, was supposed to bring together sound, color, and even smell. Alas, in 1915, with Mysterium still not completed, the 43-year-old composer died of a blood infection caused by a minor cut. The First World War was already underway, but all the tragedies of the twentieth century that his music had foretold were yet to come.

* Итак, «ударили в смычки». Кто в лес, кто по дрова. Bunin quotes famous lines from two of Krylov’s fables, “The Musicians” and “The String Quartet.”