Alexander Scriabin
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Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин; sometimes transliterated as Skryabin) (6 January 1872 – 27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist.
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[edit] Biography
Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family in Moscow on Christmas Day 1871 according to the Julian Calendar. When he was only a year old, his mother, a concert pianist, died of tuberculosis. Scriabin's father left for Turkey, leaving the young infant with his doting grandmother and great aunt. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with famed teacher Nikolay Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninov and a number of other prodigies at the same time. His home was a place where famous musicians of the day, such as Tchaikovsky, would be the audience for his pupils' performances, usually of their own compositions. Zverev was demanding and strict; he even threw Rachmaninov out when he asked for his own room in order to compose without disturbance from noise.
Scriabin later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Ilyich Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands with a span of barely over an octave. Feeling challenged by Rachmaninov, who had exceptionally large hands, he seriously damaged his right hand while practicing Liszt's Don Juan. His doctor said he would never recover, and he wrote his first large-scale masterpiece, the f minor sonata, as a "cry against God, against fate". Unmoved by the requirement to write several pieces in forms that didn't interest him, Scriabin failed his composition class and didn't graduate. Ironically, the one requirement he did complete, an e minor fugue, became required learning for decades at the Conservatory. He was awarded the Little Gold Medal, and Rachmaninov was awarded the Great Gold Medal for his one-act opera, Aleko. A comparison of the creative trajectories of Rachmaninov and Scriabin has fueled psychoanalytic speculation on the distinction between talent and genius(Garcia 2004).
Scriabin married a pianist, Vera Ivanova Isakovich, after graduation and had several children, but he eventually left his wife and teaching position for a young pupil, Tatiana Fyodorovna Schloeze, with whom he had a son named Julian. That son was also a prodigy, who composed several sophisticated pieces before drowning in a boating accident at age 11. He also painted and wrote poetry.
Scriabin, previously interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's übermensch theory, also became interested in theosophy, and both would influence his music and musical thought. In 1909-10 he lived in Brussels, becoming interested in Delville's Theosophist movement and continuing his reading of Hélène Blavatsky (Samson 1977). Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician," (Rudhyar 1926b, 899) and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group." (Ibid., 900-901).
Scriabin was a hypochondriac his entire life. He died in Moscow from septicemia, contracted as a result of a shaving cut or a boil on his lip. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalayas, that would bring about the armageddon, "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world" (AMG [1]). This piece, Mysterium, was never realized.
He was possibly the uncle of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian politician and eponym of the Molotov cocktail. Molotov's original surname was Scriabin. Simon Montefiore in his biography of Stalin, states that despite the shared family name, Molotov was not in any way related to the composer. Scriabin wrote poetry, which was generally tied to his compositions, and it is not taken seriously by itself.
Pianists who have performed Scriabin to critical acclaim include Vladimir Sofronitsky, Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter. Horowitz performed for Scriabin, in his home as a youth, and Scriabin had an enthusiastic reaction, but cautioned that he needed further training. Horowitz remarked, as an elderly man, that Scriabin was obviously crazy, because he had tics and couldn't sit still. Despite Horowitz' assessment, Scriabin held the rapt attention of the musical world in Russia while he was alive.
For anyone interested in Scriabin's personality, music and Russian culture, Faubion Bowers' biography on the composer is an indispensable resource: "Scriabin: A Biography (2nd Revised Edition)" ISBN 0-486-28897-8 .
[edit] Music
- See also: List of compositions by Alexander Scriabin and :Category:Compositions by Alexander Scriabin
[edit] Style and influences
Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano. The earliest pieces resemble Frédéric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the etude, the prelude and the mazurka. Scriabin's music gradually evolved during the course of his life, although the evolution was very rapid and especially long when compared to most composers. Aside from his earliest pieces, his works are strikingly original, the mid and late-period pieces employing very unusual harmonies and textures. The development of Scriabin's voice or style can be followed in his ten piano sonatas: the earliest are in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom and show the influence of Chopin and Franz Liszt, but the later ones move into new territory, the last five being written with no key signature. Many passages in them can be said to be atonal, though from 1903 through 1908, "tonal unity was almost imperceptibly replaced by harmonic unity." (Samson 1977) See: synthetic chord.
Aaron Copland praised Scriabin's thematic material as "truly individual, truly inspired", but criticized Scriabin for putting "this really new body of feeling into the strait-jacket of the old classical sonata-form, recapitulation and all" calling this "one of the most extraordinary mistakes in all music." According to Samson the sonata-form of Sonata No. 5 has some meaning to the work's tonal structure, but in Sonata No. 6 and Sonata No. 7 formal tensions are created by the absence of harmonic contrast and "between the cumulative momentum of the music, usually achieved by textural rather than harmonic means, and the formal constraints of the tripartite mould." He also argues that the Poem of Ecstasy and Vers la flamme "find a much happier co-operation of 'form' and 'content'" and that later Sonatas such as Sonata No. 9 employ a much more flexible sonata-form. (Samson 1977)
[edit] Influence of color
Though these works are often considered to be influenced by Scriabin's synesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another, it is doubted that Alexander Scriabin actually experienced this [1] [2]. His color system, unlike most synesthetic experience, lines up with the circle of fifths: it was a thought-out system based on Sir Isaac Newton's Optics. Indeed, influenced also by his theosophical beliefs, he developed it towards what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that was to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss.
In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of color and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colors involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff's opera The Miserly Knight supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny."
While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are frequently performed. They include three symphonies, a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier à lumières", also known as the Luxe, - which was a color organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected colored light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has erroneously been claimed that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction personally supervised and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.
Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the Arbat in Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works.
[edit] References
- ^ *Harrison, John (2001). Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, ISBN 0-19-263245-0: "In fact, there is considerable doubt about the legitimacy of Scriabin's claim, or rather the claims made on his behalf, as we shall discuss in Chapter 5." (p.31-2).
- ^ B. M. Galeyev and I. L. Vanechkina (August 2001). "Was Scriabin a Synesthete?", Leonardo, Vol. 34, Issue 4, pp. 357 - 362: "authors conclude that the nature of Scriabin’s 'color-tonal' analogies was associative, i.e. psychological; accordingly, the existing belief that Scriabin was a distinctive, unique 'synesthete' who really saw the sounds of music—that is, literally had an ability for 'co-sensations'— is placed in doubt."
- Samson, Jim (1977). Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900-1920. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-02193-9.
- Harry Plummer, "Color Music-A New Art Created with the Aid of Science, The Color Organ Used in Scriabin's Symphony Prometheus". [Scientific American, April 10, 1915]
- E.E. Garcia (2004): Rachmaninoff and Scriabin: Creativity and Suffering in Talent and Genius. Psychoanalytic Review, 91:423-442.
- Sergei Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff's Recollections Told to Oskar von Rieseman, translated by Dorothy Rutherford; New York, MacMillan, 1934.
- Bowers, F. (1996): "Scriabin, a Biography: Second, Revised Edition". Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-28897-8
[edit] External links
- Scriabin Society of America
- The mythical time in Scriabin by Lia Tomás
- Was Scriabin a Synaesthete? by B. Galeyev & I. Vanechkina
- Scriabin in Aspen No.2 on UBUWEB (A short biography by Faubion Bowers; four preludes and the tenth sonata available for download)
- ChopinMusic - Scriabin (Scriabin - Biography, Links, Discussion, Recordings, etc.)
- Scriabin's Sheet Music by Mutopia Project
- Alexander Scriabin at MusicBrainz
- Free Public Domain Sheet Music by Scriabin at IMSLP
- Kunst der Fuge: Aleksandr Scriabin - MIDI files
