On the Brink of Madness 

‘I want to be the brightest light, the greatest (and only) sun. I want to illuminate the universe with my light. I want to swallow all and include (all) in my individuality. I want to give (to the world) pleasure.’ (Scriabin, Notebook, 1904)  

Scriabin (1872 - 1915) 

A supernova explosion to a galaxy is what Scriabin was to humanity: a rather brief (he only lived for 43 years) but extraordinarily luminescent existence. His aftermath will surely reverberate forever throughout the cosmos. Such a bright and powerful explosion would obliterate anything within its vicinity. So it is with Scriabin: anyone who comes in close contact with his music, will be changed forever. ‘Scriabin’s music is like a narcotic. It is so intoxicating that it can become dangerous’, as Arthur Rubinstein once said. 

Since my first Scriabin recording (almost 20 years ago), my fascination with him has only increased. I simply cannot think of any other composer who never fails to bring out such a primordially raw and physical reaction in me, and with time, his grip has only intensified on me. ‘He was crazy, you know’, Horowitz said. I am sure it takes one to know one (as I should know). He first lures you in with his more approachable, tame style from his earlier romantic period and before you know it, and once all the sharps and flats have gone from his scores in his later compositions, so have your proverbial marbles. Maybe Rachmaninoff knew this when he said: ‘Scriabin was a genius, and a visionary. His music is like a bridge to another world’. Do you really want to know what’s on the other side, even if that way madness lies? 

A composer not without controversy, the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia says of him, ‘No composer has had more scorn heaped or greater love bestowed’, but few composers were worshipped more than Scriabin in their lifetime and even fewer were more ignored after death. Showing all the signs of the Messiah complex, he was only five foot tall which didn’t stop him from platforming himself to preach to the peasants on the shores of Lake Geneva. Although his music experiences a Second Coming from time to time, I do feel this cannot happen often enough. Without possessing any nationalistic traits at all, even in his early works, it was always amusing when the Soviets tried to find such self-serving elements (which they did with every artist or scientist who achieved any degree of greatness), for example when they blasted, quite inappropriately, his erotic Poem of Ecstasy into space along with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Like our most primordial instincts or the laws of physics, the music feels woven so deeply into us and the fabric of the universe already, with its light shining so bright, that it could care less about geography. 

An example of how a light can shine so bright that it will inevitably burn you is Vers la Flamme ‘Poème’ Op. 72. It is one of Scriabin’s last works, composed in 1914, a year before he died and premiered a month before his death in 1915. It was going to be his 11th sonata but he had to publish it early because of financial difficulties. Horowitz (who met the composer around that time as a 10-year old) intimated that the piece symbolises a gradual but constant accumulation of heat and energy that would ultimately lead this ‘ocean of fire’ annihilating the world. Aside from unknowingly issuing the world’s first global warming warning, it seems Scriabin was determined to ‘go out with a bang’ (and the ending, like a Gamma Ray explosion at the extreme ends of the keyboard, can have this effect). 

For me, the piece has so many other symbolisms connected with the universe; from before its birth where time seems suspended or doesn’t exist yet, as the chords in the beginning are being interspersed with chromatically oscillating and rhythmically uncertain fragments. Very gradually, from the section avec une émotion naissante (with gestating emotion), the 5-against-9 rhythm begins to growl and some hints of arson may start to become apparent at this point. Scriabin’s comment to the musicologist, composer and, of course scientist Sabaneyev was: ‘Look here, how everything blossoms little by little … from clouds to blinding light!’ Indeed before you know it, the tongues of the flame begin to take hold at avec une joie voilée (with veiled joy) becoming more and more turbulent (de plus en plus tumultueuse) until they envelope everything. It burns at full force in éclatant, lumineux (radiant, luminous) with its unforgiving  double-tremolos and by then you realise there is no more escape from the flames, especially when the trumpets begin to descend from heavens (comme une fanfare). In Scriabin’s music, the trumpets often announce themselves shortly before total destruction (the ‘singularity’ in scientific terms or in more spiritual terms, the ascent to the heavens). But it’s more than that: here, the 9th, 11th and 13th chords (built around Scriabin’s infamous ‘mystic chord’, and spaced out in fourths, for maximum resonance or ‘luminosity’) begin to impatiently vandalise the gates of heaven. The force is unstoppable. Interestingly, the ‘mystic’ or ‘Prometheus chord’ (he also called it ‘synthetic chord’, for maximum confusion) while built around the perfect fourths and a tritone, lacks a perfect 5th. It is structured around the Lydian dominant scale, later often used in jazz. 

The rhythm also becomes increasingly diminutive, starting uncertainly at first as a quaver moving up chromatically like a slithering snake, and later turning into an abrasive semi-quaver (and inversion of the beginning) giving the piece at some point an almost war-like, combative character. Prometheus stealing from Gods and giving ‘fire’ to humanity which unintentionally results in the complete destruction of our civilisation, is another one of Scriabin’s prophecies one would ideally want to avoid, especially given the current violent events around the world. 

As was often the case with Scriabin’s later pieces, he often assigned a text as a kind of epigraph, as he did here: 

In the dark and dark depths of matter

Time In heavy chains languished.

Pyramid MountainIn a slow dream turned.

Magic signs

The power was dozing in the underground mysterious crypts.

But anxiety arose in the mysterious abysses,

Hidden joy radiance woke her

Sleeping matter clumps.

Consciousness and will

Born again and burning aspirations flows

From the depths rushed to the radiant light

What flared above the groundInspiredlyIn the dance circled the disembodied children of the universe.

Fire thoughts avalanche and sharp flashes

Lightning will pierce the planet through and through.

Stormy joy embraced the last Race -

God became an immortal earthly man!

In the bright light shone triumphantly

Disappearances and the origin of chords.

And embraces the universe clean flame

Transfiguration of the sacred - the new world

The image of the mysterious in eternity gently shines ... 

While Scriabin was not the first to be fascinated with mysticism, transfiguration and spiritual enlightenment in his works, (we already had Strauss’s with ‘Death and Transfiguration’, Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’, ‘Neptune, the Mystic’, from Holst’s ‘The Planets’, Mahler’s 8th Symphony etc), the way Scriabin seems to be going about it is in a different league: it feels more like a ritualistic exercise, (or downright exorcism, like in his 9th piano sonata ‘Black Mass’) directly invoking such experiences, whether though the act of performing the music or from listening to it. He was influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Übermensch’ which was all about transcending ordinary human experiences and achieving a higher state of being. It was all fun and games until of course such ideas were later hijacked and taken in a different direction later in Germany. My disclaimer when it comes to his music is the same as with any intoxicating substances: enjoy responsibly at your own peril. 

The driving force of light and enlightenment continues in his Sonata No. 4, Op. 30 but now fully enveloped in eroticism. Composed in 1903 and being one of his shortest sonatas (short but powerfully intense), this subject matter is so explicit here that even ChatGPT will abruptly stop itself in mid-sentence. By introducing sex into music, Scriabin went beyond the romanticism of Brahms and the magical gardens of temptations in Wagner. Scriabin searched for many creative ways to express this subject, composing pieces such as ‘Désir,’ ‘Caresse dansée’ and ‘Le Poème de l'extase’. He was impatient to tell his mistress Tatiana Schloezer about the new words he has found for ‘love’ and ‘caresses’: ‘I will play them for you. I have never made such love before!’ 

Here are some of the words pertaining to the sonata: 

In a light mist, transparent vapour


Lost afar and yet distinct


A star gleams softly.



How beautiful!

The bluish mystery


Of her glow
Beckons me, cradles me.

 

O bring me to thee, far distant star!


Bathe me in trembling rays
Sweet light!

 

Sharp desire, voluptuous and crazed yet sweet


Endlessly with no other goal than longing
I would desire….

Approaching thee by my desire for thee


I lave myself in thy changing waves


O joyous god.



I swallow thee


Sea of light.



My self-of-light


I engulf thee! 

In his day, it was less controversial to talk about ‘gender polarities’ which is how Scriabin conceptualised his compositions. Unlike Chopin’s music, where masculine and feminine characters are often alternating in a dance-like manner (particularly in his mazurkas), Scriabin goes further, portraying this polarity through an idealised and combined erotic experience, after the dancing stops and the adults go to bed, so to speak. He believed that achieving higher artistic and spiritual expression was only possible if the two elements - the feminine and the masculine - were blended together into an ecstatic union, as they do so vividly in this sonata. He regarded the feminine character as ‘passive’ and the masculine as ‘active’ (or aggressive), ‘the will and resistance’, and it becomes abundantly clear where he places himself on the spectrum from his notebook: ‘I want to be the brightest light, the greatest (and only) sun. I want to illuminate the universe with my light. I want to swallow all and include (all) in my individuality. I want to give (to the world) pleasure. I want to seize the world as (one would seize) a woman’.  While some of this may come across as a snippet from a diary of a serial offender, when expressed through music however, rather than words, it sounds more organic (and less criminal). 

Scriabin also regarded the cosmos itself as ‘feminine’, while stars and galaxies contained within it, must have represented  masculine qualities to him. Harmony is the cosmos while melodies, like swirling galaxies, are its contents, both inextricably linked together leading a symbiotic existence. The opening bars of the first movement embody this idea: the descending chromatic left hand symbolises the essence of female seduction (similar to Carmen in Bizet’s opera playfully lingering on her descending notes) while the poetic right hand (masculine ego) moves in the opposite direction, blossoming outwards and undoubtedly wanting to be seduced. This theme later appears in the climactic closing section of the last movement, in a much more emphatic and powerful manner with the repeated fourths once again symbolising trumpets and masculinity, perhaps bearing some resemblance to Wagner’s operatic hero ‘Siegfried.’ The assertion of the masculine ‘active’ ego rises to the surface towards a point of unbearable tension within a phrase, all within a ‘passive’ (feminine), harmonic universe (in Scriabin’s words, although I am not sure I would regard the universe as ‘passive’ since it contains everything within it, including this pestering male ‘active’ ego), only then to retract again (for example at the end of the opening phrase, where the tension is somewhat released in bar 7, on the dominant 7th). Each of these retractions only increases Scriabin’s desire to then reach an even more intense climax. 

Another one of his gems: ‘As a person in the moment of a sexual act, in the moment of ecstasy loses consciousness and all of his organism in all its points experience bliss, thus God-man, experiencing ecstasy, will be filled with universal bliss and burn up in fire.’ At this point, the more scientifically minded tend to whip out Wilhelm Reich's ‘The Function of the Orgasm’ diagram to illustrate this point. Suffice to say (and staying with the music), the longer one can sustain the tension of the phrase, the more intense the emotional discharge will be at the end of it, and somehow in Scriabin’s music this particular aphorism holds especially true. Moreover, in this period of Scriabin’s oeuvre (and why I like it so much), it never feels as if a phrase fully resolves since it often ends on the dominant, already accumulating tension for the next climax. This pattern repeats over and over, particularly in the second movement (Prestissimo volando). It is relentless but at the same time infinitely virile all the way through. 

Just as in his 5th sonata, the concept of flight (‘vzlyot’ in Russian) or upsurge is immensely present in the second movement of the fourth sonata, particularly when it comes to the ascending chords, tremolo patterns, broken rhythms and soaring motifs being manically thrown around the upper register, and all the while the Left hand's frequent pedal points act as centres of gravity. Scriabin talked about it a lot (also in his poems) as it was another tool to achieve sexual ecstasy, through which he plotted to liberate and transform the human soul (anyone familiar with the feeling of ‘butterflies’ in the stomach when ‘surging up’ on a swing, falling in love or experiencing special dreams, or all of the above simultaneously, might be able to relate). 

Whether in dreams or reality, it appears that Scriabin genuinely believed that he could achieve flight. During walks, he would hop, race, skip and jump: ‘It is we who make the world, with our creative spirit, with our will; there are no obstacles to the manifestation of the will, the laws of gravity do not exist for it, I can throw myself off this bridge and not fall on my head on the stones but hang in mid-air thanks to this power of will’ (quoted by Rozaliya Plekhanova). His exasperated friends would dare him on occasion but he always declined a demonstration. He would carry out ‘flying experiments’ on his wife, as one does, perhaps when he wasn’t otherwise serenading her with perfect words of love. Despite the quirks, he put art (and sometimes himself) above else: ‘Tsars must kneel to art, Art can change the face of the whole world, The artist is higher than the Tsar, so Kings must bow before him.’ Perhaps it is a miracle he wasn’t forced to take flights himself off a building at the time, for such insights. 

Preludes 

While travelling to Western Europe, Scriabin made a bet with his patron and publisher Belyayev that by April 1896 he would compose 48 preludes, twice traversing the major and minor keys. Curiously, he abandoned the project after composing about 47 of them.  Only the first 24 Preludes from Op. 11 ended up being based on a circle of fifths, like Chopin’s preludes. But this is where the similarities end in my view. Scriabin’s ardent admiration for the Polish composer began to wane by then (he used to sleep with the score of Chopin’s nocturnes under his pillow) and even in these early works, his own voice is starting to come through strongly and some of the darker elements begin to emerge, such as the nostalgic yearnings in Prelude Op. 11 No. 2 in A minor, the kind only accessible to Scriabin. Prelude No. 11 in B major on the other hand radiates glowing love despite its fiendishly difficult and stretched left hand, utilising four distinct voices as a balancing act. 

He composed them over a period of 8 years, with no chronological order (nos 2 and 11 were in fact both composed in 1986 while the Five Preludes Op. 16 were written in 1894-95, all in Moscow). While the latter set are perhaps technically less demanding than the rest, they showcase Scriabin’s evolving style, moving towards more complex harmonic worlds and expressive depths. 

I love the end of Scriabin’s middle period (approximately spanning between 1896 and 1906) where the rich late-romantic idiom is just beginning to cross into darker, more complex realms but before becoming somewhat chained by the more schematic writing which despite being infused by more and more outlandish ideas paradoxically appears to me more logical and almost formulaic (basing the chords and whole passages around specific intervals or particular scales, as with Vers la Flamme or his 10th Sonata). In his Fantasie Op. 28 in B minor, the sky is the limit. It is unpredictable as you never know where it might take you, harmonically or emotionally. The writing is often dense, at times very contrapuntal, with its dark, brooding B minor beginning, struggling to erupt to the surface (and sometimes succeeding). This is then contrasted by some of the most glorious and tender melodies ever written in the second subject in D major, with multiple voices echoing on top of the left-hand accompaniment which later appears in a totally different guise in the climax section. There is a constant sense of wonder, even in the darker sections. The Fantasie (composed at the turn of the century) bridges the gap between his third and fourth sonatas and even though it became one of his most beloved works, the composer himself apparently forgot that he had written it: ‘Who wrote that? It sounds familiar’ shouted Scriabin from the next room in his Moscow flat as Sabaneyev sat down to play the second subject. ‘It is your Fantasia!’ was the reply. Goldenweiser introduced it to the audiences with huge success in 1907 yet Scriabin himself never played it. Something keeps drawing me back to this piece. 

Etudes 

Scriabin invited controversy even as a pianist. Both praised and criticised for his ‘nervous technique’ it seems clear that Scriabin’s playing was as volatile as his music and often characterised by extreme rhythmic freedom and even lack of adherence to his own written text. Scriabin’s teacher Safonov spoke highly of his pianistic abilities: ‘Scriabin internalised to a high degree what I always impress upon my students: the less the piano sounds like itself under the fingers of a performer, the better it is…he had a special variety of tone colours, a special subtle use of the pedal; he possessed a rare gift, exclusively his own: with him the instrument breathed.’ I always felt that Scriabin’s music lends itself ideally to the modern pianos (better than the pianos of his time) precisely because Scriabin had such a special forward-looking intuition of the possible colour palettes; the overtones, voicing, harmonic progressions, use of pedal, phrase tension (and release) and how it all comes together in the end to create a reaction where you feel the music ‘in your skin’. His etudes are a tribute to him as both an individualistic pianist and a composer-magician who holds his own key to the mysteries of what makes (or breaks) a pianist. I only chose this small selection because there is only so much available recording time, but in truth, every single one of the etudes is a true gem. The earliest set, Op. 8 (1894-1895), like the preludes, may also have had an inspiration from Chopin as an idea to explore the genre, but in my view the only thing they have in common is perhaps the conviction that one should never allow the exercise of the fingers to interfere with the central lyrical inspiration. Stylistically, one would never mistake it for Chopin due to the particular nature of Scriabin’s rhythmical and musical fluidity as in No. 4 Piacevole in B major, volcanic and tumultuous outbursts of no. 3 Tempestoso in B minor, or fleeting yet graceful (Con grazia) cheekiness of no. 7 in Bb minor and the desolate melancholy, occasionally venturing into the burning tragedy of no. 11 Andante cantabile, also in Bb minor. 

The Etude Op. 42 No. 5 in C sharp minor (1903) is another stormy affair (marked Affanato, breathless) and belongs to his middle, more mature period. I prefer it more articulated, as I find the piece can easily sound overpedalled due to the rich textures and the essence of it can easily get lost in noise. The relentless force throughout the piece, with brief interludes of another soaring lyrical melody (similar in quality to that of the Fantasie), is overwhelming and continues until the last breath is taken (with the last chord). 

Poème Op. 32 No. 1 in F# major, also composed in 1903, is suspended in the air and one feels time stops as one becomes progressively high on the aromas of all the subtle harmonic changes. This piece is another delirious erotic experience of a Scriabinesque kind, with occasional interruption of the melody seductively running up on tip toes (in the upward staccato semi-quavers), briefly stopping on Scriabin’s Major 7♯11 chord, just to fall back into a bath of lust, delaying gratification of a resolution once again. Each wave gets stronger and more intense, until a brief climax (con affetto, with affection). The hypnotic Inaferando (elusive), a term coined by Scriabin, as if caressing gently with a feather, requires such a delicate touch that only Scriabin himself must have possessed, makes pleasure and pain find a way to melt into one at the end of the piece. Here, at last, Scriabin finally provides the comfort of a resolution (into F sharp major) for a whole four bars. You don’t get such mercy in his later works. 

Speaking of which, his last sonata, Sonata No. 10 Op. 70 (1913), takes seduction and ‘caresses’ to a whole new level. Entitled by the composer ‘Insect Sonata’, he likened its abundance of trills and tremolos to flutterings and stridulations of insects which he in turn naturally likened to ‘caresses in sex’ (and if by the end of the piece you are still able to feel your hands after all the tremolos, then you probably have not done all of the ‘caressing’ properly). It must have made for some interesting walks with Scriabin, if you caught him in the mood ready to expand on this, as he did once to his bewildered friend Sabaneyev: 

‘All plants and little animals are expressions of our psyches. Their appearance corresponds to movements of our souls. They are symbols, and oh! what wonderful symbols. Surely you feel that an animal can correspond to a caress in sex.’ 

It gets better: 

‘And there are kisses of torment. Animals symbolize also our inner bestiality.Their colour is due to our animal motions which change into caresses…My Tenth Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun... they are the sun's kisses... How unified world-understanding is when you look at things this way…’ 

The two continue to discuss all the types of ‘caresses’; where birds correspond to elated caresses while harrowing caresses, correspond to beasts. ‘What about worms?’, the ever inquiring scientific mind of Sabaneyev wanted to know, by now probably feeling left out. 

As with Vers la Flamme, we return to the gender polarity in this sonata when Scriabin continues: ‘In nature, animals represent activity, the male. The growing world is the female, material, will-less and passive. Here again is polarity. Do you suppose there is some act between them possible - a polarity act? Sex. Yes, I must take walks more often’, Scriabin concluded. 

The introduction appears veiled and still, interlocked in descending thirds which may invoke terror, followed by a chromatic, slithering melody. Trills begin to gradually appear, in various different guises (and for different purposes: whether it be a jump-scare, a shimmering, a languid post-mating gesture, or just pure exultation) until the insect ‘noise’ intensifies into one glorious (but terrifying) orgy of a whole forest exploding in a symphony of tremolos. The music can occasionally feel random (if you don’t know it) and stop-and-go (even though the actual writing is highly structured) and suspended in the air, like the Poème. The Più vivo section towards the end is a shocking change, as if the insects suddenly lose their mind, organise and begin stampeding and suffocating each other. 

With late Scriabin, one feels sometimes too close to the edge of insanity, and the descent from gentle delirium into all-consuming madness can be imperceptible but real. Having experienced some of these states, I sometimes wonder whether modern psychiatry would have something illuminating to say on the apparent delusions: 

‘I am God!
I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life. I am the boundary, I am the peak.’ 

Even if he didn’t explicitly claim to be the Messiah, the fact that he was born on Christmas Day, died shortly after Easter at 43 under mysterious circumstances, believed he could walk on water or transport his body through the air, making travel plans to Tibet for his last work, ‘Mysterium’, for a week-long, multi-sensory experience, culminating in a cataclysm and the formation of a new world and the Age of Ecstasy which would bring forth a new era of human consciousness, to name just a few, certainly didn’t help to dissuade anyone from this image. All this throws up questions as to whether a potential clinical diagnosis would have been more appropriate.Especially since these flights of ideas were also quite frequently interspersed with periods where he felt rather ill or low (for no physical reasons), as noted from his letters. On the other hand, what is ‘normal’ is relative, not always clearly defined, and perhaps even counter-productive to humanity’s ‘spiritual evolution’, for, in the present age, everything and everyone is getting pigeon-holed and over-diagnosed. What is clear to me is that in order to ‘tune’ to the universe in a way where such extraordinary ideas (musical or otherwise) could even visit you, would without doubt require quite an extraordinary mind one way or another. 

Prelude & Nocturne for the Left Hand, Op. 9 

While practising Balakirev’s Islamey and Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan in 1891 for his graduation at Moscow Conservatory, Scriabin damaged his right hand from overuse. His doctor didn’t believe he would ever regain proper use of it, even though he made a miraculous recovery and managed to graduate with the Little Gold Medal the following year. This episode however caused Scriabin a profound emotional upheaval and the anxiety regarding the stamina of his right hand never left him since. He began developing his left hand during the injury and it is for this reason that his future compositions contained much more demanding material for the left hand. After the graduation (where he didn’t complete his composition degree because of personality clashes and ‘strong differences of musical opinion’ with his teacher) he focused his creative energies on composition, writing his first piano sonata and the Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, Op. 9 (1894). 

The prelude is a brooding and poignant miniature in C# minor that appears hopeless at first and ends in C# major, after all the grief has been inflicted. The following Nocturne, is an incredible invention of its own kind and envelopes you in its enharmonic equivalent, Db major, like a warm blanket. At last, heavenly comfort and full surrender is achieved as the glorious melody blossoms under the gentle waves of the left hand. The dreamy and relaxed character of the beginning and last sections are strongly contrasted by a dramatic middle section, characterised by rapid octaves and chordal jumps where the left hand has to travel quite large distances across most of the keyboard. At this point, you might be forgiven to be amazed at what Scriabin can achieve with the use of just one hand (and imagine what he would do with two!). For me however, this is Scriabin at his most magical; even before fire, before insects and inevitable destructions of the universe…you hear it and you become content and grateful for the fact that you (and this music) simply exist, lately a rather rare experience to contemplate and often taken for granted, I find.