What you should know about Alexander Scriabin

Born: 6 January 1872, Moscow, Russia
Died: 14 April 1915, Moscow, Russia

Poet, philosopher, musician, mystic, visionary and egotist – Alexander Scriabin was the romantic to end Romanticism, a man whose creative imagination knew no bounds and who believed himself capable of re-booting global civilisation.

That project started in Moscow, where Scriabin was born into nobility. The young Scriabin’s talent showed characteristically tangential tendencies, as he entertained house guests on self-built pianos. It was via ten sonatas for the instrument, the first sounding rather like one of Chopin’s, that Scriabin steadily developed a new harmonic method that would render traditional tonality redundant. What Scriabin had done for harmony, he believed he could do for humanity.

Scriabin produced enraptured music of undeniable originality, colossal power and dizzying energy – many as sensual as they are spellbinding. He advanced both Wagner’s harmonic fluidity and Debussy’s atmospheric Impressionism, creating orchestral music that can overwhelm even without the supplementary media Scriabin prescribed for them (mostly outlandish light shows).

Scriabin’s Messiah-complex, tethered to an everyday stubbornness, could alienate even those friends and colleagues who respected his work. He spent time living in Geneva and Paris, before returning to Russia for the last six years of his life. There he conceived a series of grandiose works, including a multimedia piece to be performed in the Himalayan mountains that he believed would bring about an Armageddon and induce a new civilisation. It didn’t happen. Scriabin was just as nonplussed when, in April 1915, his human mortality was confirmed after a pimple on his lip poisoned his blood.

Symphony No 4, ‘Poem of Ecstasy’ (1907) – Scriabin’s signature work. It’s a 20-minute exhortation to humans to tear our spirit away from relativity, thus liberating its active energy and achieving ecstasy (to paraphrase the composer). The music yearns incessantly towards a delayed gratification. The score includes such instructions as ‘ever-increasing drunkenness’ and ‘almost deliriously’.

Hear Poem of Ecstasy in concert: 3 December 2023

The Divine Poem (1905) and Poem of Fire (also known as Prometheus, 1910) are two pieces that form a trilogy with Poem of Ecstasy. Prometheus is effectively a piano concerto, a label far too prosaic for Scriabin. It picks up where Poem of Ecstasy left off, reminding humanity of fire’s representation of creative energy and, therefore, urging us to expand our consciousness. Back in the real world, the piece introduces Scriabin’s ‘mystic chord’ – a group of six resonating notes stacked on top of one another that forms a tonal foundation from which Scriabin can refract all manner of distinctive but unified sounds. The chord initiates audiences into Scriabin’s sound world by dissolving the harmonic relationships we’re used to, preparing us for the dizzying musical swirls to come.

It’s easy to view Scriabin as an eccentric. But his music stands up. It is highly original, utterly distinctive and has proved its ability to seduce generations.

Unsurprisingly, Scriabin was big in the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s, a time when many were seeking the very same planes of ecstasy with the help of actual hallucinogenic drugs. The American novelist Henry Miller referred to the composer’s music as ‘like a bath of ice; cocaine and rainbows’.

In Soviet Russia, one conductor reported being mobbed by workers demanding he play Poem of Ecstasy. Fellow composer Dmitri Shostakovich was on hand to calm them, announcing, perhaps by coercion, that Scriabin’s music represented a dangerous ‘flight from the realities of life’.

Musically, Scriabin’s dissolution of harmony may have helped pave the way for composers like Arnold Schoenberg to wipe the slate clean in the 20th century and abandon tonal harmony altogether.

Scriabin subscribed to a brand of ‘theosophy’ – the belief that mystical insight would allow humans to liberate themselves from the trappings of everyday life and become at one with the cosmos.

Music, believed Scriabin, was a good lubricant to that process – a portal through which humanity might access this new plane of consciousness. For his piece Prometheus, he advocated use of a light show that would unite certain keys with certain colours (it would end bathed in the deep blue of F-sharp major).

The ultimate expression of this would be the score intended to follow Prometheus, which remained far from finished on Scriabin’s death. Mysterium would unite all the arts and the senses, its preliminary bells summoning the whole of humanity to the foothills of the Himalayas before uniting them in an act of cataclysmic and cosmic transcendence courtesy of a Master of Ceremonies seated at a piano (yes, Scriabin himself).

Had Scriabin lived long enough to see it through, that would have proved quite the logistical challenge. At least, in his music, he allows us to glimpse momentarily and vicariously how such an event might have felt. Artistically, perhaps that’s good enough.