Music has provided many eccentrics, but few are stranger or more contradictory than Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, who died a century ago this year.
A mystic, he believed the first performance of his masterwork, to be performed at a specially built temple in the Himalayas, would bring to an end the world as we know it. Perhaps fortunately, he never finished it. He was also a serial predator of young women and girls, and a vain man who died of blood poisoning when a sore under his luxuriant moustache became infected.
Pianist Valentina Lisitsa plays on new collection of Alexander Scriabin's complete works.
Scriabin claimed: "I am God, I am nothing, I am freedom, I am life, I am a frontier, a peak. Not only to teach have I come, but to love." Strongly influenced by the theosophists, he confected a mystical alchemy centred on himself, "simmering in a warm nurturing bath of his megalomania", as BBC music broadcaster Donald Macleod put it.
Musicologist Hugh McDonald says a more self-absorbed composer never lived – "he was convinced form an early age of his quasi-divine position as the central, if not the unique, creative force of his time". His self-supposed divinity sat at odds with his dependence through his career on wealthy patrons.
Russian composer Alexander Scriabin.
Yet his musical legacy is of first importance. Inventor and perfecter of the piano "poeme", his music was orgiastic (his own term), ecstatic, finely filigreed and amazingly inventive, with new harmonies and sonorities of extraordinary richness and complexity.
His mother, a fine pianist, died when Scriabin was one, and he was raised by his grandmothers and an aunt. He would crawl under the piano to hear his aunt play, and declined to go to bed without giving a goodnight kiss, not to his aunt, but to the piano.
Heavily influenced by Chopin, as a child he slept with the Polish composer's scores under his pillow, and his early works are mostly delicate, often lovely miniatures. Later, as he developed his own style, he still preferred miniatures, but these became intense, distilled glimpses of his mystical vision – "bridges to the beyond", according to the Guardian's Tom Service.
Although Scriabin never came close to finishing his apocalyptic masterpiece Mysterium, Service believes the composer did succeed in expressing his musical dream.
Vladimir Ashkenazy recorded the prefactory Preparation for the Final Mystery in 1996.
"Much of this music really is a vision of another world because of the heightened invention and compression of Scriabin's forms and the intensity of his unique harmonic language," Service says. The last two symphonic works, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, achieve their other-worldly ambitions in 20 minutes or so.
He was a colourful character in another way. Claiming to have synaesthesia (this is now thought doubtful), he associated keys with with colours and wanted to develop a light-keyboard to project light on screen. C was red, C sharp violet, D yellow, F dark red, F sharp dark blue, and so on. The light-keyboard was to accompany Prometheus, but the technology of the time limited him.
Mysterium was even more ambitious. It would have taken a week to perform, including audience participation, and required a hemisphere-shaped temple to be built by a lake in the Himalayas. Scriabin intended it to unite all the senses, and believed its performance would end the world as we know it in a purifying ecstasy, ushering in a new era of "nobler beings".
According to Macleod, Scriabin bought a tropical suit and pith helmet but never got to India. He sketched some 70 pages of notes for Mysterium before he died, and Russian composer Alexander Nemtin spent three decades turning the introduction into a three-hour work.
That prefatory act, Preparation for the Final Mystery, occupies two and a half CDs on a splendid new collection of Scriabin's complete works released by Decca. It was recorded using vast forces in Berlin by Vladimir Ashkenazy in 1996.
The whole collection takes 17 CDs, with a bonus CD of performances by legendary pianists such as Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Shura Cherkassky and Mikhail Pletnev.
Most of the piano works are impeccably performed by Ashkenazy, Gordon Fergus-Thompson and Valentina Lisitsa,several recorded just for this set. They range from delicate reflection to white-hot intensity. Richter puts in the odd appearance, as does Horowitz, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Anna Gourari, among others.
Many of the early works are a tribute to Chopin, including several mazurkas and nocturnes, but the sonatas are fascinatingly individual, and even more so the poemes. For the uninitiated, his most famous poeme – Op 32, No. 1 – is an ideal place to start. One sonata was called White Mass, another Black Mass, while with the sixth, Scriabin said, he frightened himself.
As Hugh McDonald observes in the CD notes, before Stravinsky's emergence Scriabin was regarded as the most advanced living Russian composer and, with Richard Strauss, at the forefront of the new in Europe. World War I changed music's direction, and "Scriabin's reputation sank to that of an important but eccentric composer of the Russian school, steeped in the same late Romanticism as his contemporaries Rachmaninov and Medtner. A hundred years after his death, however, it is possible now to take a more balanced and more generous view of his unusual gifts."
It may be that his time is only now arriving. If so, this set – a truly rich resource – will surely help.
Alexander Scriabin
COMPLETE WORKS
(DECCA)
★★★★½
BARNEY'S PLAYLIST
Bellini, Norma; Maria Joao Pires, Complete DG Recordings