Scriabin: Complete Symphonies for Piano 4-hands and 2 Pianos

Description

Alexsander Scriabin: tradition and modernity
The symphony collapsed, constantly caved in, like a city under artillery fire, and recomposed itself entirely, rising from its own fragments and ruins. It overflowed with a content that had been madly elaborated and was new, like the woods, fragrant with life and freshness, in the morning guise of their springtime buds, on that day of 1903. […] That symphony was bold, bordering on frenzy, on prankishness, spontaneous in its irreverence, as free as a fallen angel.

Thus Boris Pasternak, in a famous passage of his Autobiography (pages 24-25 of the Italian translation), extols Scriabin’s music, catching its mischievous variability, its impertinent youthfulness. The sound that was flowing over the woods of Obolenskoe in the summer of 1903 was that of Scriabin’s Symphony No. 3, Le divin Poème, played on the piano by him while he was composing it, and Pasternak, who at that time was a youngster, caught in it one of the components of Scriabin’s distinctive sound that reflects one of the facets of the composer’s many-sided personality. Boris de Schloezer, who was Scriabin’s brother-in-law and friend, and a perceptive expert of his music and thought, in his portrait of the musician, written in 1923 and by now regarded as a classic, dwelt on this playful, bold felicity of his, which seemed almost childish, but on the contrary had been conquered through spiritual practice and philosophic commitment, and showed up also in the composer’s physical appearance (pages 127-130). This is how he was seen also by the poet Konstantin Balmont, on 30 October 1913, when he played the piano during a concert; the poet caught the magic liveliness of his slender figure, like that of a “resounding elf” and a “spirit of the woods” (quoted in Taglialatela, page 118).
We can contrast this image with another literary and equally famous one, presented by Gabriele D’Annunzio in his Notturno (1921):

In my insomnia, Alessandro Scriàbine’s prelude passes again and again on my forehead, which seems to me as light and transparent as a glass visor on an iron helmet.
All my head feels heavy, sunken into the pillow.
I am wearing that armour of the head that infantrymen used to call brain cap. But its front is made of glass, full of cracks and bubbles, as hot as a goblet that has just been blown by a glassworker.
It is the only slightly luminous part of my sleepless body, above the bandage.
Scriàbine’s prelude is a dark, purplish colour, like a watered fabric that wriggles in the evening wind.
It reminds me of the funereal veil that fluttered in my lost eye and did not allow me to see anything in the mirror beyond the pale top of my bald forehead.
The hours go by. The music is like the dream of silence.
I do not sleep, yet inside me life ebbs slowly like the tide. My pulse is weak. My hand on my chest does not feel the heartbeat.
The music moves away, then returns, changing colour like a wave under a fluctuating twilight.

These words hint at the dark component of Scriabin’s music, and, in this case too, at his many-sided nature: they colour the piano’s notes in a dark, intense, gloomy hue, but outline them as something that is fragile and blown about by the wind: the listener/writer echoes the physical and psychic constraint of a difficult convalescence of his in that music, which resounds only in his imagination. In this case, too, the literary description hits the mark: “He liked to evoke dark visions,” Schloezer reported, “and indulged, on his own, in a dangerous game” (page 137). Satanism and black magic, in any case, were present in some titles of Scriabin’s compositions, such as Poème tragique, Poème satanique, Messe noire, not to mention the expressive directions that are clustered on the scores; and it is not difficult to catch their purely musical reflections. Unlike Pasternak, D’Annunzio never met the Russian musician, and was only acquainted with his music. Like Pasternak, he was fascinated by him. Among the Italian men of letters of that period, D’Annunzio was undoubtedly the closest to the cultural atmosphere of Symbolism, particularly of the Russian one, and shared the inclination to synaesthesia that was widespread in that context. In D’Annunzio’s poems and also in his prose, his interest in music, repeatedly declared and shown, took on the linguistic musicality that was the common denominator of the poetics of all the symbolist men of letters, both Russian and French.
So both Pasternak’s image and D’Annunzio’s are convincing and in accordance with the reality that has been authoritatively handed down to us. They are not antithetical poles, but extremes: the personality and musical production situated between them are impossible to classify and do not seem to have any direct forerunners or accepted heirs.
Aleksandr Scriabin was born in Moscow on 6 January 1872 (25 December 1871 according to the Julian calendar), and died in the same city on 27 April 1915, but during his comparatively short life he travelled repeatedly – to St. Petersburg, to many European countries, and to the United States – and lived for more or less long periods in Italy, Switzerland, France and Belgium. A characteristic of his was precisely his ambiguous relationship with Russian culture: he seemed already to wish to move away from it as a youngster, in his first compositions inspired by Chopin; and during his mature age as well he went on partly distancing himself from it; but he actually embodied it so much in its depth and complexity that Pasternak declared, at the end of the passage quoted above, that he was “the celebration and incarnate feast of Russian culture” (page 32). Schloezer too asserted that “Scriabin’s art is essentially foreign to the West” (page 283): his experiences abroad were all elaborated and rearranged by him from his own standpoint, somehow distorting them.
In 1904, at Bogliasco, in Italy, Scriabin met Georgij Plechànov, a theoretician of the revolution of 1905, and associated with him for a period, during which he managed somehow to bend the music he was composing to the demands of militant Marxism: at that time he was composing Le poème de l’extase, which aimed at “the realm of the sublime ideal”, as Plechànov himself (quoted by Taglialatela, page 28) defined it, imagining that its inscription might be the incitement to “ye workers” at the beginning of the Internationale anthem. The encounter with Plechànov was rather bewildering for Scriabin. It led him to read the main texts of Marxism, and incredibly had some effects on the mystical-philosophical system he was building, introducing in it a greater need for synthesis and logic, and a mitigation of his solipsistic omnipotence in favour of a personal pantheism of his.
In the same year he went to Switzerland to the Congrès International de Philosophie, in Geneva, where his presence during a talk by Henri Bergson is documented.
In France, where at an early age, during a tour – as reported by his publisher and patron Mitrofan Belaiev – he had had his first sexual experience and in 1900 had visited the Exposition Universelle and its glittering Palais de l’électricité, in 1906 he met Rodo, Auguste de Niederhäusern, the mystical sculptor who reinforced his interest in theosophy.
In 1908, in Belgium, he went to the Société de Théosophie, where he met Jean Delville, the painter who illustrated the cover of the score of Prométhée with a rich decoration of theosophic symbols, and Emile Sigogne, who impressed him deeply with his quest for a new universal language.
These were a few of the stimuli that contributed, during Scriabin’s stays abroad, to the mysteriosophic system he developed also with music and for music. On his return to Russia in 1909, he established a contact between this system and the Symbolism of Vjačeslav Ivanov, Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Andrej Belyj and others. His relationship with Ivanov, in particular, led to a friendship, to exchanges of ideas and experiences, to a deep mutual esteem; it originated and nourished many essential themes, the religious component, the Indian mysticism, the salvific role of art and music, the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus, the figure of Prometheus/Lucifer, the great German music (that Ivanov called Apollonian) and the music of Wagner (Dionysian). As during his early years, Scriabin was less interested in his relationships with the contemporary Russian composers, with the Five, and with the folklore roots that gave substance and definition to the national sense of belonging (in which Ivanov was not much interested either). Stravinskij, the greatest Russian composer with whom Scriabin had some contacts abroad, in Switzerland in 1913, may be regarded as his exact opposite, and Stravinskij’s initial interest in Scriabin soon turned into the lethal sarcasm of which he was a master. It has even been surmised that Stravinskij’s Apollonian neoclassicism was driven by the wish to oppose Scriabin’s Dionysian style (Cooper, page 339). It is reasonable to believe that Stravinskij’s clear-cut, geometric, ironic music was not in the least likely to arouse any interest in Scriabin, and that this was mutual. In any case, we know very little also about the Western composers and compositions, if any, with which Scriabin came advantageously in touch abroad. This is an aspect on which his biographers usually do not give us much information and about which we cannot obtain any evidence in his musical compositions, where the composers who influenced him during his youth – mainly Chopin, Liszt and Wagner – were all from the previous generations; moreover their influence appeared to decrease considerably during Scriabin’s mature age, when his musical style acquired evident personal characteristics.

The catalogue of Scriabin’s compositions is formed of 74 opus numbers, but numbers 50 and 55 are not used, and we must add to the numbered works other 25 early compositions, or posthumous, incomplete or reconstructed ones. At first sight the catalogue does not exhibit innovative qualities. On the contrary, it contains almost exclusively genres that were rather common, if not conventional – impromptus, mazurkas, preludes, studies, but also fragments, and so on – or else decidedly traditional ones, such as concertos, sonatas and symphonies. But even on taking a cursory glance at Scriabin’s catalogue, we can see clearly that something happened in 1907. After his Sonate No. 5, the indication of the key disappears, showing a radical melodic and harmonic change. Another feature that disappears, as in the contemporary Poème de l’Extase, is the traditional division into movements: this is a mark of a new, free outlook on form that applies the dialectics of themes developing it throughout the composition.
The Sonate n. 5 is actually regarded as a watershed in Scriabin’s production by all the main scholars who have analysed his music, no matter what their position is with regard to his development as a composer. This work is pointed out as the outcome of the attainment of musical and philosophic maturity.
Schloezer reported that Scriabin, with reference to the composition of the Sonate No. 5, strangely described himself as “nothing but a translator”:

When he played this sonata for me in Lausanne, in the winter of 1908, he pointed out that music existed outside him in images that could not be described verbally. He had not created this music from scratch – he declared – but had merely raised a veil that hid it, and had thus made it become visible. (Pages 85 and 86)

This idea, of Platonic origin, is not consistent with Scriabin’s philosophic journey, which we will take up again further on. It is possible to play down his self-attributed role of “translator” or even “clairvoyant”, by understanding it simply as a feeling of having attained an ability to compose easily, almost spontaneously, that coincides precisely with his universally recognised attainments in the sphere of composition.
Scriabin’s catalogue has another evident feature that persisted throughout his life and did not interfere with the degree of maturity or linguistic originality acquired by him: his almost absolute preference for the piano, an instrument on which he was an extraordinary performer and which clearly was, for him, the necessary medium for the transformation of a mental image into a concrete sound. Pasternak’s passage quoted at the beginning of this text, in addition to the description of the lofty sounds of Le divin Poème, supplies a further piece of information: we can imagine the composer engaged in his craft, materially seeking on the keyboard the solutions that will occur to him as components of an idea to which he must give audibility. His work is not an abstract one: it is precisely a craft.
Like Chopin, his real master, Scriabin devoted to the piano most of his energy as a composer. As Martin Cooper wrote, “Up to the end of his life, Scriabin remained above all a composer for the piano” (page 348). Only in a few cases do other instruments appear in his catalogue: in a Romance from 1890, in which the piano accompanies the horn or, as an alternative, the cello; and in the second variation, only 22 bars long, included in Variations on a Russian Theme for string quartet, a collective work composed in 1899 in honour of Mitrofan Belaiev, together with Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, Vītols, Blumenfeld, Ewald, Winkler and Sokolov. Solo and choral voices are present in Romance for voice and piano, from 1883, in a Duet in D minor from 1886, in Symphony No. 1 and in Symphony No. 5.
But in actual fact Scriabin was not exclusively a composer of piano music. His orchestra pieces, though their number is limited, are an essential core of his production. His symphonies are five, and the last three have an additional title: Le divin poème, Le poème de l’extase and Prométhée. Le poéme du feu. We only have to add Allegro de concert and Piano concerto, both from 1896, Rêverie, composed two years later, and two or three early works. It is evident that Scriabin used the orchestra and tried out the orchestral technique with deep interest. This is demonstrated, obviously, above all by the resulting sound, with its dazzling timbral solutions, and by the way the individual instruments stand out with their melodic and physical qualities; but it is also confirmed, in the catalogue, by the limited number of symphonic works and their distribution in time. This is true also of the ten sonatas. Like a composer of the romantic age, like Beethoven himself, Scriabin put a particular care in the great classic genres, sonatas and symphonies: each of these pieces has very specific features, and they are distributed over his lifetime with a certain regularity. However, the numerous “minor” piano compositions, whose genres and free forms are of romantic origin, offer many surprises to the listener with their melodic creativeness, their harmonically obtained colours, the vigour of their expression and the originality of their language.
The catalogue gives us another piece of information about Scriabin’s relationship with the musical theatre. The Opera on whose “libretto” he worked with great care between 1900 and 1903, and which is regarded as an important moment in his philosophic journey, does not appear in the catalogue, because no musical traces of it were left. The complexity of Scriabin’s relationship with the very concept of staging is revealed by the fact that his works for the theatre were not completed. Thus only an outline was left of his work on the poem in five cantos by Michail Lipkin, Kejstut i Biruta, and above all of his utopian works, Mysterium and Acte Préalable, of which only the text and a great number of musical fragments remain. These works, which were studied and reorganised for many years by Alexander Nemtin, appear, under the title Mysterium, in the recently drawn up catalogues.

Scriabin was a mystic, a philosopher and a theosophist. He developed his thoughts and convictions by reading, debating and also writing: some disorganised notes, a rich collection of letters, and some texts that were related in various ways to music. None of the latter can be read as an explanation or illustration of the composition to which each refers. Some were meant to be sung: for instance the final chorus of Symphony No. 1 and the libretto of Opera, though the latter remained only a project. Others, the outline of Poème orgiastique (first title of Poème de l’Extase), and Poème de l’Extase in verse may be regarded as a programme that was useful for the artist rather than for the public: this is confirmed by the fact that he did not choose to publish them in the score. Acte Préalable, lastly, was conceived as a component of a real liturgy and as an introduction to another even more complex and engrossing liturgy that was to close the human cycle, the final salvific act, Mysterium. Scriabin worked on the text of Acte Préalable for a long time, in the hope of acquiring a good poetic technique and aiming at a high quality, but perhaps unconsciously also putting off the musical composition, which was quite exacting and decisive for his mystic goal, just as Acte Préalable had been useful for putting off the realisation of the unrealisable Mysterium.
In these texts, however, we can follow the composer’s journey in moving away from a near-psychotic messianic egotism (“I have come to disclose to you/the mystery of life,/the mystery of death,/the mystery of heaven and earth”, Appunti e riflessioni, page 15) towards an utopian promise of purification, communion, fusion – with a strong erotic connotation – of all living beings through art:

Into this last instant of convergence
We will pour the eternity of our instants/
In this last sound of lyre
We will dissolve into an airy whirlwind

We are born in the vortex!
Let us wake up in the sky!
Let us mix our feelings in a single wave!
And in the sumptuous splendour
Of the last flowering
Appearing to one another
In the naked beauty
Of our burning souls
We will disappear…
We will dissolve…

This is the conclusion of the first version of Acte Préalable (translated from Taglialatela’s translation, page 202). We can easily understand that the disparaging opinion expressed by Scriabin in a letter to Sabaneev about musicians who produce “only music” (quoted by Bowers, II, page 70), that is compositions that consist only of their sound and do not have an extra-musical meaning, is consistent with his conception of art, which is deeply rooted in the philosophy and aesthetics of the romantic age. Schopenhauer, together with Fichte and Nietzsche, was actually the philosopher who influenced the thought and musical choices of Scriabin most of all. Scriabin reported that he had read Schopenhauer rather late in life, when he was about 20 (in Schloezer’s citation, pages 69-70); it is true that this statement was rather cursory, but Scriabin hardly ever mentioned the books he read in a detailed manner. Like Schopenhauer, he felt that music, in its own way, could spread the world-view, the “true philosophy” (Schopenhauer, II, 355). In The World as Will and Representation he also found the idea of will as the motor of the universe that he first depicted in his ego; then he described it in its fable-like reflections (the protagonist of Opera), and represented it with mythical symbols (Prométhéé). This idea had been marked by personal experiences of Scriabin’s, such as the recovery, in contrast with his physician’s predictions, from a tendonitis that had ravaged him. It also contained one of the basic themes that formed the substance of his history as a composer: the tension towards the reabsorption of individuality, and death as a completion. Although Acte Préalable and Mysterium remained a utopian intention, they were the projection of the idea of a final completion with which Scriabin combined Schopenhauer with Helena Blavatskij (creator and theoretician of theosophy), and mystic contemplation with sexual fulfilment. The final completion referred also to his existential and creative journey: from this point of view, we should consider the burning images in the text written by him for Romance for voice and piano (1883), dedicated to Natalia Sekerina, which have been translated into French, in the rhythmic adaptation of the work, with the word “extase”. And we should keep in mind that ecstasy takes on the value of a collective experience in the text of Opera and is musically depicted by the perfect chord that concludes Prométhée, the only tonal triad in this composition, that, at the end, reabsorbs, pacifies and effaces all dissonances and tensions.
Scriabin’s poetic diligence in writing the lines of Acte Préalable leads us to an important goal of his artistic activity: the merging of the arts. He aimed at “an intimate interpenetration of the artistic media” (Schloezer, page 84), and for this reason he meant to create a poetic work that might be equal – both in its technique and in its expression – to the musical one, in order to blend them in a single unit that might be more complete and profound than the traditional relationship between music and text. In Prométhéé, we know, he had introduced colours and lights alongside sounds; for Mysterium he also had in mind fragrances, gestures and dances, but with a basic difference. While Prométhéé preserved the status of a work that could be enjoyed in a concert hall by a traditional public, Mysterium was not meant for a public, but for participants, was designed to be performed not in a theatre but in a temple, and was not supposed to be a show but a collective liturgical action in which the contemporary presence of different sensations aimed at stimulating all the senses at the same time, in order to achieve the Dionysian exhilaration in which every living being was to lose itself and find itself again.
For Scriabin the union of the arts was one of the modes of innovation and linguistic experimentation. If music was true philosophy, if his own music transmitted his thought, it was necessary for him to develop an original, innovative musical language, to seek new forms and new relationships between the sounds, and, beyond sounds, new forms and relationships between all perceptible languages. These were the assumptions that were shared by the cultural and artistic movements of that period, the historical avant-gardes that were active in Central Europe from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the First World War: not only Symbolism, but also Impressionism with its psychological and perceptive significance and its masterly use of timbres, and above all Expressionism with its extreme romanticism. In symbolistic literature, theatre, music and painting, all the objects and people on the scene lost their physical qualities and their position in space and time. Nothing was regarded as valid because of its concrete characteristics: what mattered was something else that was not expressed and was evanescent; everything tended to be vague, hazy, indefinite. Expressionist art, on the contrary, though it also tended to overstep concreteness and realism, developed geometric features, measurements, shapes, boundary lines that acted as an instrument to check the existential, ancestral anguish, the Urschrei, the scream that otherwise would be the sole, undifferentiated word of human suffering. In Symbolism and Expressionism, artists often adopted a dramatic-theatrical construction based on correspondences of senses (chiefly sounds and coloured lights, but others as well). We refer not only to Prométhéé and its luminous keyboard, but also, in the expressionistic sphere, to the scenic compositions of Kandinskij (1908-1914) and above all to his contemporary theoretic texts; to Die glücklische Hand (The lucky hand), by Schönberg (1908-1913), in which the composer intended to “make music using the means of the stage” (page 87). We refer – in a position halfway between Symbolism and Expressionism – to Kékszakállú herceg vára (Bluebeard’s castle) by Béla Bartók (1911-12; 1918), with its coloured lights that had a symbolic meaning and, as in Schönberg, were a part of the structure of the work. Other Modernist circles followed this route: consider some of the sound-noise-colour effects pursued, in the context of their irreverent provocations, by the Russian Futurists and the Italian ones: for instance Sogni, a pantomime intermezzo of lights, colours and sounds in Aviatore Dro, by Francesco Balilla Pratella (1912-1914). The idea pursued during those years overstepped Baudelaire’s synaesthetic “correspondences” – Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent, 1857 – and was closer, if anything, to Rimbaud’s image, A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, 1883: not only references, similarities or connections – correspondences, precisely – between perceptions of the senses, but also the elucidation or revelation of a form of things that comes to our minds as a single one – colour-sound-meaning – and that we translate physiologically into separate qualities: “the unity of things is pre-aesthesic”, as Dufrenne wrote in 1987 (page 130). Symbolism and Expressionism met on this aspect of synaesthesia. And here, perhaps, we can better understand what Scriabin meant when he referred to the latent image he was translating into sounds: not a Platonic idea, but a phenomenological description of perception.
The real, profound content of a work of art is, as Kandinskij put it, its “inner vibration”, the sound of things in our inner psychic life that artistic languages cause to emerge (pages 83-84). Ivanov wrote that “the true soul of art is musical”: soundless music is the ineffable quality that the artist infuses into his work and that also achieves its religious goal. And D’Annunzio, in the previously quoted Notturno, remarked: “The word I write in the dark, well, now it loses its literal meaning and significance. It is music.” Schönberg too, in his article for Der Blaue Reiter on the relationship between music and text, confessed that he had set to music some lines by George because he was “enraptured by the initial sound of the first words”(page 62), and had found that their true, profound content consisted in their sound. It is no coincidence that in the expressionistic almanac designed and published by Kandinskij and Franz Marc, there is an article by Sabaneev, Scriabin’s first biographer, about his Prométhée. Kandinskij was acquainted with Scriabin’s music and had caught its spiritual tension and the novel aspects of its composition; because of these qualities, in his manifesto he chose to include it, albeit as the subject of an essay, and to place Scriabin’s rift with the tonal system, his disruption of the old classic-romantic language, alongside Schönberg’s, although it was less explicit and less visible. The spiritual tension in Scriabin’s works and the novel aspects of their composition were the qualities that led Vjačeslav Ivanov to leave us another apt literary image of Scriabin’s music: “an arrow shot into the future, beyond the horizons of his contemporaries” (quoted by Mueller, page 198).
Amalia Collisani © 2021