{ program notes
A fellow pupil of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s
at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1880s
and ’90s, Scriabin had to be content to
come second to him at graduation because
his composition teacher Anton Arensky
disliked his already unorthodox creations.
Physically diminutive, effete in manner,
and a dandy in his dress, he usually wore
gloves to ward off germs and avoid the contamination of directly handling money. For
him, music was always something much
more than notes: “The purpose of music is
revelation,” he said.
Mysticism, whether religious or occult
in nature, was sweeping Russia in the years
immediately before the Revolution, but
Scriabin was exceptional in the degree to
which his mystical beliefs dominated his
life and creative work. In time, he began to
see himself as a messianic figure who would
bring in a new age for humankind through
his music. Hinduism, Nietzsche and
Theosophy all contributed to his
personal philosophy.
Many thought Scriabin mad, but most
were willing to admit that as a musician
he possessed genius. Scriabin was a radical
who eventually left traditional tonality
behind in his late works. He saw musical
tones as colors—a phenomenon known as
synesthesia—and he dreamed of uniting
all the senses in his works — hearing, sight,
taste and smell—though the unperformed
color score for his late orchestral tone
poem Prometheus was as far as he realized
these ideas.
Although Scriabin was predominantly
a composer of piano works — he wrote
about 200 of them — his creation of
a Piano Concerto in 1896 unleashed a
fascination with the orchestra. Having
already written three symphonies, in late
1904 he began to conceive of a fourth, but
after three years of work, it would turn into
something quite different: a massive onemovement tone poem, The Poem of Ecstasy
(Le Poème de l’extase).
Before he began putting notes on paper,
Scriabin, however, began his creative work
by writing a lengthy poem in Russian initially called “Orgiastic Poem.” Not intended as a script for his musical composition, it
was rather a parallel expression in another
medium of his conception of ecstasy, which
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mingles equally spiritual and sensual fulfillment. It opens: “Spirit,/ Winged with thirst
for life,/ Is drawn into flight/ On the summits of negation./ There, under the rays of
its dream,/ Emerges a magical world/ Of
heavenly forms and feelings …” The poem
is an effusion of mystical late-Romantic
language, and though Scriabin loved it, it
is hard going for the modern reader. But it
worked to prime Scriabin’s creative pump,
and the sumptuous musical work that followed is much more universally appealing.
[Scriabin] saw musical tones
as colors—a phenomenon
known as synesthesia—and
he dreamed of uniting all the
senses in his works.
However, the first audience that heard
it — on December 10, 1908 in New York
City played by the visiting Russian Symphony Orchestra — didn’t know what to
make of it, and the critics were cruel. Much
more successful we