Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Before 1903, Scriabin was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and composed in a relatively tonal, late-Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his influential contemporary Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a much more dissonant musical language that had transcended usual tonality but was not atonal, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin found significant appeal in the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk as well as synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also inspired by theosophy. He is often considered the main Russian symbolist composer and a major representative of the Russian Silver Age.
Scriabin was an innovator and one of the most controversial composer-pianists of the early 20th century. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of him, "no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed." Leo Tolstoy described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius." Scriabin's oeuvre exerted a salient influence on the music world over time, and inspired many composers, such as Nikolai Roslavets and Karol Szymanowski. But Scriabin's importance in the Russian musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined after his death. According to his biographer Faubion Bowers, "No one was more famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death." Nevertheless, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated since the 1970s, and his ten published sonatas for piano and other works have been increasingly championed, garnering significant acclaim in recent years.
Biography
Childhood and education (1871–1893)
Scriabin was born in Moscow into a Russian noble family on Christmas Day, 1871, according to the Julian calendar. His father, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Scriabin, then a student at the Moscow State University, belonged to a modest noble family founded by Scriabin's great-grandfather Ivan Alekseevich Scriabin, a soldier from Tula who had a brilliant military career and was granted hereditary nobility in 1819. Alexander's paternal grandmother, Elizaveta Ivanovna Podchertkova, daughter of a captain lieutenant, came from a wealthy noble house of the Novgorod Governorate. His mother, Lyubov Petrovna Scriabina, was a concert pianist and a former student of Theodor Leschetizky. She belonged to an ancient dynasty that traced its history back to Rurik; its founder, Semyon Feodorovich Yaroslavskiy, nicknamed Schetina, was the great-grandson of Vasili, Prince of Yaroslavl. She died of tuberculosis when Alexander was only a year old.After her death, Nikolai Scriabin completed tuition in the Turkish language in Saint Petersburg's Institute of Oriental Languages and left for Turkey. Like all his relatives, he followed a military path and served as a military attaché in the status of Active State Councillor; he was appointed an honorary consul in Lausanne during his later years. Alexander's father left the infant Sasha with his grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt. Scriabin's father later remarried, giving Scriabin a number of half-brothers and sisters. His aunt Lyubov was an amateur pianist who documented Sasha's early life until he met his first wife. As a child, Scriabin was frequently exposed to piano playing; anecdotal references describe him demanding that his aunt play for him.
Apparently precocious, Scriabin began building pianos after becoming fascinated with piano mechanisms. He sometimes gave houseguests pianos he had built. Lyubov portrays Scriabin as very shy and unsociable with his peers, but appreciative of adult attention. According to one anecdote, Scriabin tried to conduct an orchestra composed of local children, an attempt that ended in frustration and tears. He performed his own plays and operas with puppets to willing audiences. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolai Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was also the teacher of Sergei Rachmaninoff and other piano prodigies, though Scriabin never lodged with Zverev as Rachmaninoff did.
In 1882, Scriabin enlisted in the Second Moscow Cadet Corps. As a student, he became friends with the actor Leonid Limontov, who in his memoirs recalls his reluctance to become friends with Scriabin, who was the smallest and weakest among all the boys and sometimes teased due to his stature. But Scriabin won his peers' approval at a concert where he performed on the piano. He ranked generally first in his class academically, but was exempt from drilling due to his physique and given time each day to practice piano.
Scriabin later studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands, which could barely stretch to a ninth. Feeling challenged by Josef Lhévinne, he damaged his right hand while practicing Franz Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan and Mily Balakirev's Islamey. His doctor said he would never recover, and he wrote his first large-scale masterpiece, his Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 6, as a "cry against God, against fate." It was the third sonata he wrote, but the first to which he gave an opus number. He eventually regained the use of his hand.
In 1892 he graduated with the Small Gold Medal in piano performance, but did not complete a composition degree because of strong personality and musical differences with Arensky and an unwillingness to compose pieces in forms that did not interest him.
Early career (1894–1903)
In 1894, Scriabin made his debut as a pianist in Saint Petersburg, performing his own works to positive reviews. The same year, Mitrofan Belyayev agreed to pay Scriabin to compose for his publishing company. In August 1897, Scriabin married the pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, and then toured in Russia and abroad, culminating in a successful 1898 concert in Paris. That year he became a teacher at the Moscow Conservatory and began to establish his reputation as a composer. During this period he composed his cycle of études, Op. 8, several sets of preludes, his first three piano sonatas, and his only piano concerto, among other works, mostly for piano.For five years, Scriabin was based in Moscow, during which time his old teacher Safonov conducted the first two of Scriabin's symphonies.
According to later reports, between 1901 and 1903, Scriabin envisioned writing an opera. He expounded its ideas in the course of normal conversation. The work would center around a nameless hero, a philosopher-musician-poet. Among other things, he would declare: I am the apotheosis of world creation. I am the aim of aims, the end of ends. The Poem Op. 32 No. 2 and the Poème tragique Op. 34 were originally conceived as arias in the opera.
Leaving Russia (1903–09)
By 13 March 1904, Scriabin and his wife had relocated to Geneva, Switzerland. While living there, Scriabin separated legally from his wife, with whom he had had four children. He also began working on his Symphony No. 3 there. The work was performed in Paris during 1905, where Scriabin was accompanied by Tatiana Fyodorovna Schlözer—a former pupil and the niece of the pianist and composer Paul de Schlözer and sister of the music critic Boris de Schlözer. Tatiana would become Scriabin's second wife, with whom Scriabin had other children.With a wealthy sponsor's financial assistance, Scriabin spent several years travelling in Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and the United States, working on more orchestral pieces, including several symphonies. He also began to compose "poems" for the piano, a form with which he is particularly associated. While in New York City, in 1907, he became acquainted with the Canadian composer Alfred La Liberté, who became a personal friend and disciple.
In 1907, Scriabin settled in Lausanne with his family and was involved with a series of concerts organized by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was actively promoting Russian music in the West at the time. He subsequently relocated to Brussels with his family.
Return to Russia (1909–15)
In 1909, Scriabin permanently returned to Russia, where he continued to compose, working on increasingly grandiose projects. For some time before his death he had planned a multimedia work to be performed in a temple in India. Scriabin left only sketches for this piece, Mysterium, although a preliminary part, L'acte préalable, was eventually made into a performable version by. Part of that unfinished piece was performed with the title Prefatory Action by Vladimir Ashkenazy in Berlin with Alexei Lubimov at the piano. Nemtin eventually completed a second portion and a third, and Ashkenazy recorded his entire two-and-a-half-hour completion with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for Decca. Several late pieces published during Scriabin's lifetime are believed to have been intended for Mysterium, such as the Two Dances, Op. 73.Death
Scriabin gave his last concert on 2 April 1915 in Saint Petersburg, performing a large programme of his own works. He received rave reviews from music critics, who called his playing "most inspiring and affecting", and wrote, "his eyes flashed fire and his face radiated happiness". Scriabin himself wrote that during his performance of his Sonata No. 3, Op. 23, "I completely forgot I was playing in a hall with people around me. This happens very rarely to me on the platform." He elaborated that he normally "had to watch himself very carefully, look at himself as if from afar, to keep himself in control."Scriabin returned triumphantly to his Moscow apartment on 4 April. He noticed a resurgence of a little pimple on his right upper lip. He had mentioned the pimple as early as 1914 while in London. His temperature rose, and he took to bed and cancelled his Moscow concert for 11 April. The pimple became a pustule, then a carbuncle and a furuncle. Scriabin's doctor remarked that the sore looked "like purple fire". His temperature shot up to, and Scriabin was now bedridden. Incisions were made on 12 April, but the sore had already begun to poison his blood, and Scriabin became delirious. Bowers writes: "Intractably and inexplicably, a simple spot had grown into a terminal ailment." On 14 April, at age 43 and at the height of his career, Scriabin died in his Moscow apartment of sepsis.