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Alexander Scriabin, born Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, was a Russian pianist, composer and poet. He was born into a noble family in Moscow on 6 January 1872. When he was still a child, his mother, a concert pianist, died while his father, a diplomat, was away on a mission in the Ottoman Empire. Young Alexander was mainly raised by his grandmother and aunt. His aunt was a pianist like his mother and introduced Alexander to the instrument.
At just 10 years old, Scriabin entered the Second Moscow Cadet Corps, following in the military footsteps of his father and uncle. Unlike his relatives however, an exception was made for Alexander to substitute hours of physical training for hours of piano lessons under the tutelage of pianists and teachers Georges Conus and Nikolaï Zverev. It was during this time that he wrote his first poems and modest compositions.
When Scriabin was 16, the director of the Moscow Conservatory recognized his talent and enrolled him, without audition, in piano classes with Vassili Safonov and in composition classes with Anton Arenski, whose lessons Scriabin did not complete due to disagreements about stylistic approach. During these classes, Scriabin discovered numerous composers including Chopin, whose works greatly inspired the young composer’s first compositions. His classes were also where he met both established and up-and-coming musicians such as the young Sergei Rachmaninov, a conservatory student himself. Rachmaninov, who graduated with the Great Gold Medal, had become both a friend and rival to Scriabin who was awarded the Little Gold Medal for piano performance in 1892. The conservatory was also where Scriabin met pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich whom he married five years after leaving the music school. They later had four children together: Rimma, Elena, Maria, and Lev. Elena Scriabin kept the musical family tradition alive in her marriage to Russian pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky.
After leaving the conservatory, Alexander’s goal to become a pianist was quickly curbed by an accident that temporarily paralyzed his right hand which always remained weaker than his left. This imbalance influenced the creation of his works, of which he published an initial collection with Jurgenson Editions in the same year. Also that year, he met Mitrofan Belyayev, as well as husband and wife Mikhail Morozov and Margarita Morozova, who became his patrons and enabled him to pursue a career in Europe and Russia respectively. It was during his travels in Western Europe, particularly in Paris, where he made acquaintances in more philosophical circles, notably with members of the Symbolist movement.
In 1898, Scriabin became a piano teacher at the Moscow Conservatory where he taught until 1902. It was during this period that he met and fell in love with his student Tatiana Schlözer for whom he left his wife, despite being unable to divorce her until later. The young couple were married in a civil ceremony in Italy and had three children: Ariane, Julian (1908), and Marina (1911). The eldest daughter, Ariadna Scriabina in Russian, became a poet and a figure of Jewish resistance in France. Julian, like his father, showed promising talent as a pianist but died at an early age. The family relocated several times, to Paris, Brussels, then back to Russia. These travels were a source of intellectual fulfilment for the composer. Soon after the death of his father, Scriabin died on 27 April 1915, reportedly due to an infection.
Alexander Scriabin, a philosopher in pursuit of innovation
As soon as he took up the keyboard, Scriabin also took up composition, writing works that would link to poems. From the outset, he noted down his own poems, philosophical musings, and musical ideas in journals. His interest in symbolism grew from his travels to Europe where he met poets Baudelaire and Konstantin Balmont, as well as composers such as Debussy, Liszt, Beethoven, and Wagner, all of whom were great sources of stylistic inspiration for Scriabin.
Driven by his interest in combining music and poetry, Scriabin composed his first orchestral works, taking inspiration from the symphonic poems of his colleague, Liszt. He composed three symphonies between 1900 and 1904, all three of which were negatively received. They were innovative in their five- to six-movement form and dense orchestral instrumentation for which he was inspired by Wagner and Beethoven's symphonic works featuring choirs and vocal soloists. The Russian maestro then began composing an opera depicting the story of Zarathustra. The opera remained unfinished.
In addition to his symphonies, deemed over-ambitious and unconventional by his contemporaries, the Russian composer devoted himself to the composition of two symphonic poems that demonstrate both his highly intellectual understanding of music and his musical style, particularly at the innovative harmonic level, as foreshadowed in his third symphony, The Divine Poem. Two years later saw the premiere of The Poem of Ecstasy, widely regarded as Scriabin's fourth symphony. Scriabin proposed the work as a path to the divine through voluptuous, even orgiastic sexuality. This affiliation with the Theosophical movement is made clear by the performance directions in the score evoking a lexicon of intoxication and physical longing.
Scriabin’s intellectual ambitions, imbued with mysticism, were poorly understood during his lifetime. His harmonic approach steadily moved away from academic tonal vocabulary towards a modal language, sometimes echoing works by Olivier Messiaen, who never referenced the stylistic approaches of his Russian colleague, but equally never used a language as broad as that of Arnold Schoenberg, of whom he was rather skeptical. For Scriabin, his intellectual insights were a vector of creation, arguably employed in their highest form in his second symphonic poem, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, a “concertante” work for piano, orchestra, organ and choir. The composer conceived the tone poem as a complete work of art in which music notes would be converted into colors that provoke ecstasy and synesthetic transcendence in the audience and musicians alike.
Alexander Scriabin, piano virtuoso
Scriabin began playing the piano at a young age after being introduced to the instrument by his aunt. At the age of eight, prolific pianist Anton Rubinstein (no relation to Arthur Rubinstein) recognized his musical abilities and encouraged him to train both musically and intellectually.
Scriabin composed a significant number of works for piano, including ten sonatas and a concerto. The Romantic style of his concerto resembles that of his friend Rachmaninov's concerto, but critics, particularly in America, criticized its academic orchestration and lack of originality. Nevertheless, the work was well received during the composer's lifetime, and he played it several times, notably in his home country. His other piano works include numerous etudes, mazurkas and preludes. His sonatas in particular bear witness to the evolution of Scriabin's style, inspired by Chopin, then Liszt and Wagner, and finally by his synesthetic understanding of music.