Alexander Skrjabin: Late Piano Sonatas

Description

Alexander Skrjabin was a great piano virtuoso, a thrilling performer whose uncanny ability allowed him to bring forward both piano technique and compositional strategies in an entirely innovative manner. Skrjabin lived at a time when both society as a whole, with its values and principles, and music as part of it, were experiencing intense and dramatic changes. The great Empires were soon to be shattered by the Great War, but the seeds of this dissolution were already at work since some time. At the end of the nineteenth century, German philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had violently hammered against the values of Christianity and the worldview it promoted. Their harsh provocations, which could have encouraged a more mature experience of faith and religion (and in fact this was frequently the case) were often read as a destructive claim, which purportedly undermined one of the pillars on which society relied.
Other, rivalling, truth-claims were offered by new “sciences” such as psychoanalysis, which affirmed that free will was a utopia, and that the desires and behaviours of human beings were largely beyond their sphere of control. This all opened up a world of the unconscious, seen as dark, unknown forces driving the mind and senses of men and women. One of the paradoxes of that era (as, perhaps, of those following it) was that a science (or pseudo-science) seemed to postulate a “demonic” force – whereby “demonic” should be interpreted in the Greek sense, as a spirit holding the reins of human feeling and behaviour. Against such a daimon, the Greeks had postulated the use of music and tragedy, of dance and singing, as a catharsis, as a form of purification by representation.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to observe the fascination felt by many people between nineteenth and twentieth century for phenomena like spiritism, occultism, and the likes. This is not to be seen only as an attraction for the dark or unknown, but rather – at least in my opinion – as an attempt to control such forces. In other words, at a time when the Great Empires were beginning to crumble, the values they represented were seen as passé, and religion was scorned by many intellectuals, looking at the darkest side of the human soul was probably a symptom signalling a deep desire for an antidote.
Speaking, writing, composing about the daimon which seemed to take possession of politics, history, and humanity in general was not (or not only) a wish to embrace it, to throw oneself in the daimon’s embrace, but rather to challenge, to defy, to meet it on its own ground in order to emerge victoriously (and perhaps superhumanly) from it.
This background should be always kept in mind when considering Skrjabin’s late Sonatas, which form – as has been frequently argued and is mostly accepted – a cycle of its own. The composer wrote these Sonatas within a tight and narrow temporal frame, bearing witness to the unity of their inspiration and the cohesion of their concept. And while they explore – as will be discussed shortly – all kinds of forces, both natural and supernatural, which are at play in the world, their pattern and their sequence clearly proclaim the composer’s standpoint.
Musically speaking, we see the dialectics between known and unknown, “safe” and “dangerous” constantly embodied. On the one hand, Skrjabin himself was undermining one of the pillars of Western musicality, i.e. tonality. He was replacing, more and more, the basic principle of traditional harmony (i.e. the use of chords made by superimposition of thirds) with another of his own devising, i.e. the use of a harmony of fourths. Fourths are much more instable than fifths, although they represent the inversion of the fifths; and they are much emptier and more enigmatic than the thirds – much “less human”, one could even say. It is possible not by chance that Skrjabin was employing this particular concept for “destroying” a system of organization of sounds and for replacing it with a new one: from the seventeenth century onwards, the triad (the basic chord made of two superimposed thirds) had been seen as a symbol for the Trinity. Similar to Nietzsche, who was postulating the “death of God” in order to let the Superman (or rather the “beyond-man”) emerge, Skrjabin was musically enacting something similar, in order to replace that “ancien régime” with something new.
He was seeing his role as a musician and as a composer in terms of a Messianic, prophetic mission; not by chance, once more, he had just composed a Promethean work in which music (and its composer) gave voice to the desire to replace the “order of the gods” with a new one, initiated by a superhuman figure. Prometheus, the hero of ancient Greece, had stolen the secret of fire from the dwellings of the Olympian gods, and brought it as a gift to humankind – at the price of enormous suffering and agony. Similar to him, the Promethean composer was “stealing” the secret of new music – or rather of art in general – from the recesses of the supernatural, and bringing it as a gift to the lesser mortals.
Skrjabin had planned the creation of an opus magnum, of a major work which was to embody his philosophical and “religious” views, his spirituality and his beliefs.
He wanted to create something akin to Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total artwork”, in which all kinds of artistic expression should have flown – from visual art to music, from poetry to dramatic art, from dance to pantomime, but including even architecture and the art of scents, which actually has no name.
This cyclopic, “definitive” work was to be called Mysterium, and Skrjabin conceived the cycle of his last Piano Sonatas as constituting almost a preparatory sketch for it. Mysterium never came to light, due to the premature death of the composer, who passed away in his early forties due to blood poisoning; these last Sonatas, therefore, are practically the remains of that project, and what is closest to it. Through them, we can imagine and suppose what Skrjabin could have written, had his life been longer. Together, they bring out a clear pattern in terms of both ideology and music, and suggest their composer’s complex worldview.
Their very form and name perfectly embody the latent contradiction inherent in the perspective we have just outlined. The Sonata form is one of the most codified and typical for Western music. It is a typical product of musical Classicism, i.e. of one of the periods in music history where Enlightenment rationalism had put musical inspiration (somewhat) under control. Of course, geniuses such as Mozart or Haydn, or the young Beethoven, could not passively submit to strict and abstract rules; and while they created some of the most beautiful keyboard Sonatas in music history, their breaking of the Sonata form rules is almost as systematic as their observance of them. Still, lesser composers had found in the Sonata form the perfect recipe for framing the daimons of music within a perfectly ordered, and comfortably foreseeable, pattern.
Romanticism had struggled with this approach. All of the great Romantic composers tackled the Sonata form, both in terms of Sonatas proper (for the piano and/or other instruments) and of other works in the Sonata form (such as Trios or Symphonies). And all of them had a hard time trying to find a balance between tradition and innovation.
By Skrjabin’s time, not many great composers were still writing Piano Sonatas, and their number was to decrease further in the twentieth century. And Skrjabin himself, in these last Piano Sonatas, adopted just one of the elements of a traditional Sonata – i.e. the opening “Allegro”. Which is, however, precisely the movement commonly written in the Sonata form. The composer of poems, of seemingly “formless” works, adopted the Classical Sonata form for building his architecture of sounds.
These Sonatas were all written within a short time, as said before, in the early 1910s. The form he employed was carefully studied by the composer with a system of sophisticated calculations, which bear witness to his desire to control form, and to exert that control through the means of numbers – implying both mathematics, i.e. the most precise of all sciences, and the symbolism of numbers, i.e. the vaguest and least univocal form in which numbers can be treated.
The first of these Sonatas to be completed was the seventh, but in the order of publication it comes after the Sixth, a dark and obscure work described as “nightmarish… fuliginous… murky… dark and hidden… unclean… mischievous”. The composer never dared play it in public, and he openly felt the worrying perspectives it was opening up.
Almost as a counterpoison, the Seventh Sonata was called White Mass, and it conjures up a full palette of religious symbolism, especially in the form of a pealing of bells. Many other elements from the aural world of the Church are found here, and the piece’s first tempo indication was, significantly, Prophétique.
The Eighth Sonata is the longest of the series, and perhaps the most enigmatic of all. It is construed in a highly original fashion, by juxtaposition of short elements, many of which are repeated; critic E. P. Meskhishvili spoke of “mosaic construction” with respect to it. Here, the process of deconstruction/reconstruction of the Sonata form reaches possibly its apex.
Sonata no. 9 explores the darkest recesses of the soul, and faces the unknown represented by the daimon with unusual sharpness. It is as if Skrjabin wished to delve into the depths of the unknown and of the (dark) supernatural before finding a way out.
And this way out is given to the listener in the form of the Tenth Sonata: not the last to be written, but the one bearing this definitive, complete numbering. The new creation imagined by the composer is presented here in its fullness, with an abundance of evocations of natural sounds, including the buzzing of many insects, representing – in Skrjabin’s own words – the “kisses of the Sun”. Bright sunrays penetrate the thick veil of obscurity of the preceding pieces, and, in spite of a musical language which is by now far from tonal, a sense of homecoming is clearly evident.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024