How crazy was Alexander Scriabin? This documentary will give you a pretty good idea. Only, in providing a glimpse into what made him tick, paradoxically, it makes him seem almost sane.
Overheated, roiling, euphoric – Scriabin’s music sprang from an impassioned, highly idiosyncratic logic. He began as an ardent admirer of Chopin and developed into a harmonically complex thinker, pushing into atonality and serial composition. He was also influenced by synesthesia, associating specific colors with various notes and keys.
Pantheism, Nietzsche, and Madame Blavatsky all left their marks. Ultimately, he came to regard himself as a messiah, and he didn’t necessarily mean it metaphorically. He wrote music that he believed quite literally would usher in a new world– a “symphony of fragrances,” scored for, among other things, bells suspended by ribbons from clouds – the piece performed in the foothills of the Himalayas over a span of seven days and nights, at the end of which the human race as we know it would be replaced by nobler beings.
Death. Love. Peace. It was all the same to Scriabin.
The documentary includes commentary by Vladimir Horowitz, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mikhail Pletnev, Håkon Austbø, and Alexander Zemetin, who, for over a quarter century, worked at a realization of Scriabin’s “Prefatory Action” (itself three hours in length) to the apocalyptic “Mysterium.”
Don’t be confused by the “Old Style” grave marker. The Julian calendar fixes Scriabin’s birthday on December 25, 1871. With the adjustment to the Gregorian system, adopted by Russia in 1918, Scriabin was born on this date – January 6 – 150 years ago.
In his comparatively brief life, Scriabin aimed very high indeed. As if in punishment for his hubris, his wings were melted by a carbuncle on his upper lip. He died of blood poisoning in April of 1915, at the age of 42.
Brilliant. Highly-strung. Visionary. Ecstatic. Like the Titan of his orgiastic symphonic poem for piano, orchestra, and clavier à lumières, he was Promethean.
Happy birthday, Alexander Scriabin.
“Alexander Scriabin – Towards the Light/Calculation and Ecstasy” (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VmLkzzBMM
“The Poem of Ecstasy”
“Prometheus: The Poem of Fire”
Piano Sonata No. 9 “Black Mass”
Prefatory Action to “Mysterium”