AlexanderScriabin

At the Moscow première of Prometheus in 1911, Scriabin sat at the piano and Serge Koussevitzky conducted. The audience heard the large orchestra, the solo piano and the sustained harmonies that precede the first horn melody. One part of the score was not performed: the keyboard intended to project coloured light. Alexander Mozer had built a small apparatus for Scriabin, but because of technical difficulties Scriabin withdrew it from the concert, and the première went ahead without the lights.

1872–⁠92Moscow Conservatory and the Op. 11 Preludes

He was born in Moscow in 1872. His mother, Lyubov, was a trained pianist; she died when he was a baby. His father was pursuing a diplomatic career abroad, and his aunt, also Lyubov, helped bring him up. He entered the cadet corps in 1882, took lessons from Nikolai Zverev, and joined Vasily Safonov’s piano class at the Moscow Conservatory in 1888. Rachmaninoff studied there too. Scriabin graduated as a pianist in 1892, a year after Rachmaninoff, but left without completing the composition course with Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky.

He had small hands and practised hard. While he was still a student, an injury to his right hand threatened his career. The First Sonata ends with a funeral march, which he later connected with the despair of that time. The Prelude and Nocturne for the left hand, Op. 9, were a practical response to the injury. In them the left hand plays the bass, the accompaniment and the melody.

1894–⁠1903Belyayev and the Moscow Conservatory

The wealthy publisher Mitrofan Belyayev took him up in the 1890s, paying for new compositions and helping arrange concerts. Scriabin married the pianist Vera Isakovich in 1897. The following year he began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory. He needed the income, though lessons and touring took hours he wanted for composing. His Piano Concerto, written in 1896–⁠97, has as its central movement a set of variations on a quiet theme for muted strings, which the piano decorates.

His ambitions were growing. The First Symphony ends with soloists and chorus praising art. The Third, The Divine Poem, has three connected movements that pass through struggle, pleasure and release. Among the piano works, the Fourth Sonata of 1903 sets a slow Andante beside a movement marked Prestissimo volando (flying, as fast as possible). Scriabin imagined a star drawing closer until it could be possessed. Near the end the opening music returns at full strength across the whole keyboard.

1904–⁠08The Fifth Sonata and The Poem of Ecstasy

In 1904 he moved to Switzerland. His relationship with Tatiana Schloezer broke up his household with Vera, who refused a divorce. He and Tatiana lived together abroad, and for a time settled in Brussels. Philosophy and Theosophy entered his conversation and notebooks. “I am, and there is nothing outside me,” he wrote in 1904, and a few lines later, “I am god”.

The Fifth Sonata of 1907 is in a single movement. A sudden rush out of the bass breaks off into quiet, widely spaced notes, and slow, suspended phrases and fast dance passages interrupt one another. Its epigraph comes from the poem Scriabin wrote alongside The Poem of Ecstasy. That orchestral work was first heard in New York in 1908, conducted by Modest Altschuler. A solo trumpet plays repeatedly above the orchestra. Eight horns, five trumpets, bells and organ play in the final C major chord.

1909–⁠13Prometheus and the light part

The light part has two lines. One follows the changing harmony; the other moves slowly through the larger spans of the piece. C is red, D yellow, F♯ blue-violet. In 1913 Scriabin added instructions for flames, lightning and sparks to a copy of the score. Explaining his plan to the British psychologist Charles Myers in 1914, he said: “The colour underlines the tonality”; it “makes the tonality more evident”.

The Belgian painter Jean Delville designed the cover of the published score. Both Delville and Scriabin took occult ideas seriously. Scriabin’s projected Mysterium was to be a collective rite in India, combining music, poetry, dance, light and perfume, in which everyone present would participate and which was intended to transform the world. He worked on an introduction, the Prefatory Action, and left words and musical sketches for it.

1911–⁠15Late sonatas and Vers la flamme

Vers la flamme, written in 1914, opens with widely spaced chords. Repeated notes and tremolos gradually fill the texture, and the piece builds in intensity over a few minutes. Scriabin was still making plans when an infection on his lip developed into septicaemia. He died in Moscow on 27 April 1915, aged forty-three. Mysterium had never been rehearsed.