Alexandre Scriabine

Alexander Scriabin was born in Moscow on 6 January 1872 (25 December 1871 by the Russian calendar of the time). His mother, Lyubov, a talented pianist, died of tuberculosis a year after his birth. His father, a diplomat, went to work in Turkey and left him with his grandmother and aunt, who raised him with great tenderness and gave him his first piano lessons. A frail, dreamy child, he was fascinated by the piano and even built small instruments.

Following family tradition, in 1882 he entered the Moscow Cadet School, but he was excused from military exercises because of his poor health and continued his musical studies. He took lessons with Nikolai Zverev, a renowned teacher, then in 1888 entered the Moscow Conservatory. There he studied piano with Vasily Safonov and composition with Anton Arensky. His fellow student was Sergei Rachmaninoff, with whom he had a friendly rivalry.

A brilliant pianist, Scriabin practised so intensely — especially Liszt’s Reminiscences of Don Juan and Balakirev’s Islamey — that he seriously injured his right hand in 1891. For a time doctors thought he would never play again. He then composed, for the left hand alone, a Prelude and Nocturne (1894). This ordeal plunged him into a deep crisis. He graduated in piano but left the composition class without a diploma after a quarrel with Arensky.

In 1894 the wealthy publisher Mitrofan Belyayev took him under his wing: he published his works and organised his European tours. Scriabin’s early compositions — preludes, études, mazurkas and nocturnes — are influenced by Chopin, whom he admired. The passionate, tormented Étude Op. 8 No. 12 became one of his most played pieces. In 1897 he composed his Piano Concerto and married the pianist Vera Isakovich. From 1898 to 1903 he taught piano at the Moscow Conservatory.

Gradually his style changed radically. Scriabin became interested in philosophy and theosophy, a mystical doctrine. He believed art could transform the world and lead humanity to a kind of spiritual ecstasy. In 1904 he left his wife and children to live with Tatiana Schloezer and settled for some years in Switzerland, Italy and Belgium. He composed The Divine Poem (Symphony No. 3, 1905), then The Poem of Ecstasy (1908), for a huge orchestra, which culminates in an explosion of joy.

He invented a new harmonic language based on a strange, mysterious chord, the “mystic chord”, which took him away from traditional tonality. Scriabin also had a form of synaesthesia, or at least believed he associated each key with a colour: for him F sharp major was violet-blue and D major yellow. In Prometheus, the Poem of Fire (1910), he added to the orchestra a “keyboard of light” (luce), meant to project colours into the hall following the music. His last piano sonatas, such as the Ninth, nicknamed the “Black Mass”, and the Tenth (1913), are extremely daring.

Back in Russia in 1910, he dreamed of a gigantic work, the Mysterium, to be performed over seven days in a temple in India, uniting music, dance, poetry, colours and perfumes to transform humanity. He wrote only sketches, the Prefatory Action. In April 1915 a small sore on his lip became infected and caused blood poisoning. He died in Moscow on 27 April 1915, aged forty-three. His visionary work influenced many twentieth-century Russian composers.