Scriabine

There are solemn and gorgeous pages in the symphonic poems of Scriabine.

And yet, despite their effulgence, their manifold splendors, their

hieratic gestures, these works are not his most individual and

significant. Save only the lambent "Prometheus," they each reveal to

some degree the influence of Wagner. The "Idyl" of the Second Symphony,

for instance, is dangerously close to the "Waldweben" in "Siegfried,"

although, to be sure, Scriabine's forest is rather more the perfumed and

rose-lit woodland, Wagner's the fresh primeval wilderness. The "Poème de

l'extase," with its oceanic tides of voluptuously entangled bodies, is a

sort of Tannhäuser "Bacchanale" modernized, enlarged, and intensely

sharpened. For, in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it with

rare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper medium. The piano was

his instrument. It is only in composition for that medium that he

expressed indelibly his exquisite, luminously poetic, almost disquieting

temper, and definitely recorded himself.

There have been few composers more finely conscious of the piano. There

have been few who have more fully plumbed its resources, few who have

held it in greater reverence, few who have hearkened more solicitously

to its voice that is so different from the voices of other instruments.

Of all piano music, only that of Debussy and Ravel seems as thoroughly

steeped in the essential color of the medium, seems to lie as completely

in the black and white keys, part of them, not imposed on them. And

Scriabine, the barbarian and romanticist, is even more free of the hues

of the keyboard than they, the Latins, the classicists. His works make

one keenly aware of the rhythmical, the formalistic limitations of

Chopin's piano pieces, of the steeliness of much of Brahms', of the

shallow brilliancy, the theatricality, of Liszt's. They even make us

feel at moments as though in them had been realized the definitive

pianistic style, that the hour of transition to the new keyboard of

quarter tones was nigh. For Scriabine appears to have wakened in the

piano all its latent animality. Under his touch it loses its old

mechanical being, cries and chants like a bird, becomes at instants cat,

serpent, flower, woman. It is as if the currents of the man's life had

set with mysterious strength toward the instrument, till it became for

him an eternally fresh and marvelous experience, till between him and

the inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of life. There is

the rarest of science in his style, especially in that of his last

period, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. He

wrote for it as one of two persons who had shared life together might

address the other, well aware with what complexity and profundity a

smile, a gesture, a brief phrase, would reverberate. No one has caressed

it more lightly, more tenderly, more voluptuously. No one has made of

the piano-trill, for instance, more luminous and quivering a thing. And

because he was so sensitive to his medium, the medium lured from out him

his creative strength.

He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant and aristocratic

craftsman of the school of Chopin. More than that of any modern master,

his art is rooted in the great romantic tradition as it comes to us

through Chopin, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss; and develops almost logically

out of it. And in the compositions of his first period, the period that

ends, roughly, with the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, the

discipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous.

Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, études, nocturnes and waltzes in

his master's cool, polite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too,

might seem to have been written in order to be played in noble salons

lit by massive candelabra, to countesses with bare shoulders. The

twenty-four preludes Opus 11, for instance, are full of Chopinesque

turns, of Chopinesque morbidezza, of Chopinesque melodies. The harmonic

scheme rarely transgresses the limits which Chopin set himself. The

pieces are obviously the work of one who in the course of

concert-playing has come to discover the finesses of the Pole's

workmanship. And yet, César Cui's caustic description of the preludes as

"Bits filched from Chopin's trousseau," is eminently unjust. For even in

those days, when Scriabine was a member of the Russian salon school,

there were attractive original elements in his compositions. There is

real poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces. The treatment of

the instrument is bold, and, at moments, more satisfactory than

Chopin's. Scriabine, for instance, gives the left hand a greater

independence and significance than does as a rule his master. Nor does

he indulge in the repetitions and recapitulations that mar so many of

the latter's works. His sense of form is already alert. And through the

silken melodic line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makes

itself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Russian iron is to

Polish silver.

It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to Opus 50 that

Scriabine emerges in the fullness of his stature. For it is only in them

that he finally abandoned the major-minor system to which he had

hitherto adhered, and substituted for it the other that permitted his

exquisite delicious sense of pianistic color, his infinitely delicate

gift of melody, his gorgeous, far-spreading harmonic feeling, free play.

And it is only in these later pieces that he achieved the perfection of

form, particularly of the sonata form, of which the Ninth Sonata is the

magistral example, and which makes his craft comparable to Bach's in

its mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "Chromatic

Fantasy and Fugue" and the Ninth Sonata justly in a single breath. And

yet, the compositions of the middle period, the one that follows

immediately the early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely less

rich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt the influence of

Scriabine's masters, though considerably on the wane, is still evident.

The "Poème satanique" refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite its

lambent andante, is patently the work of one who has studied his Liszt

and loves his Chopin. And yet, these works are characteristically male

and raging and proud. And in all the works of this period there appears

something new and magnificent that has scarcely before informed piano

music. There is a truly Russian depth and vehemence and largeness in

this now languid, now mystical, now leonine music, that lifts it

entirely out of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon school

into that of those composers who made orchestra and opera speak in the

national tongue. The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almost

frenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirely

from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes

monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march

with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the

orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has

the sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern stuffs, in

silken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the orchestral faëry of some of

the Russian composers, in the orchestral chemistry of, say, a

Rimsky-Korsakoff, such brimming, delicious colors. Nevertheless, the

voluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious restraint. Scriabine

is always the fine gentleman, intolerant, for all the splendor of his

style, of any excess, of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. And

throughout the work, there is evidence of the steady, restless

bourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, almost Chinese delicacy which

in the work of the last period attains its marvelous efflorescence.

These final works, these last sonatas and poems and preludes of

Scriabine are but the essentialization of the personal traits adumbrated

by the compositions of the earlier periods. It is as if in adopting the

system based on the "mystic chord" that persisted in his imagination,

the chord built up in fourths from the tones c, d, e, f-sharp, a, b, he

had managed to rid himself of all the influence of the classic masters,

to give every note that he employs an intense, poignant, new value, and

through that revolution to achieve form comparable to the most eminent.

His fantasy ranges over the keyboard with complete freedom; he creates

new rhythms, new combinations of tones that cause the hands of the

performer to become possessed of a new and curious intelligence, to

make significant gestures, and to move with a delightful life. And these

latter compositions are entirely structure, entirely bone. There is a

complete economy. There is not a note in the Ninth Sonata, for instance,

that is not necessary, and does not seem to have great significance.

Here everything is speech. The work actually develops out of the

quavering first few bars. The vast resonant peroration only gathers into

a single, furious, tragic pronouncement the material deployed in the

body of the work. Scarcely ever has the binary form, the combat between

two contradictory themes, been more essentialized. Scarcely ever has the

prelude-form been reduced to simpler terms than in the preludes of

Scriabine. These works are indeed radical. For they give us a fresh

glimpse of the archetype of their forms.

And yet, how strange, how infinitely complex and novel a thing they are.

There is indeed little music that throws into sharper relief the miracle

of communication through material form. A few sounds, broken and

elusive, are struck out of an instrument, die away again. And yet,

through those vibrations, life for an instant is made incandescent. It

is as though much that has hitherto been shy and lonely experience has

undergone a sudden change into something clarified and universal. It is

as though performer and auditor have themselves been transformed into

more sensitive instruments, and prepared to participate more graciously

in the common experience. It is as though in each one the ability to

feel beauty has been quickened, that each for an instant becomes the man

who has never before seen the spring come over the land, and who,

glancing upward, for the first time beholds an apple-bough flowering

against the blue. And Scriabine fills one with the need of making

wonderful and winged gestures. It is as if for instants he transforms

one into strange and radiant and ecstatic beings, into new and wonderful

things.

For this music is full of the wizardry of perhaps the most exquisite

sensibility that has for a long while disclosed itself in music. Perhaps

only in the Far East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have more

delicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered themselves in music.

Beside this man, with his music that is like clustering flowers breaking

suddenly from the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating of

luminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whispers of one

sinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool,

silvered by the fine temperance of France. For Scriabine must have

suffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations of

beauty, must have been consumed with a passion for communicating his

burningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcely

able to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation.

Indeed, the sensuality is at times so intensely communicated that it

almost excites pain as well as pleasure. If there is any music that

seems to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering, it is

this. One shrinks from it as from some too poignant revelation. One

cannot breathe for long in this ether. Small wonder that Scriabine

sought all his life to flee into states of transport, to invent a

religion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible burden of so

vibrant a sensibility, there could be no other means of existence.

And the gesture of flight is present throughout his music. Throughout

it, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutter

of glistening ephemeridæ that wheel and skim delightfully through the

limpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparing

themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of

pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poèmes ailés,"

flights toward some island of the blest. They are all aspirations "vers

la flamme," toward the spiritual fire of joy, toward the paradise of

divine pleasure and divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like the

marshaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant flyer launching

himself into the empyrean. White gleaming pinions wheel and hover in the

godlike close of the "Poème divine." Impotent caged wings poise

themselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata, beat for an instant,

are ominously still. Sometimes, as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is

like a gorgeous tropical bird preening himself in the quivering river

light. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspreading his mighty

pinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last,

bleeding, agonizing preludes, there is still the breath of flight. But

this time it is another motion. Is it "the wind of death's imperishable

wing"? Is it the blind hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthly

habitation in the moment of dissolution? One cannot tell.

And it was the flight of ecstasy that he sought to achieve in his

symphonic poems. He had made for himself a curious personal religion, a

bizarre mixture of theosophy and neoplatonism and Bergsonian philosophy,

a faith that prescribed transport; and these works were in part

conceived as rituals. They were planned as ceremonies of elevation and

deification by ecstasy, in which performers and auditors engaged as

active and passive celebrants. Together they were to ascend from plane

to plane of delight, experiencing divine struggle and divine bliss and

divine creativity. The music was to call the soul through the gate of

the sense of hearing, to lead it, slowly, hieratically, up through

circle after circle of heaven, until the mystical gongs boomed and the

mass emotion reached the Father of Souls, and was become God. With Jules

Romains, Scriabine would have cried to his audiences:

"Tu vas mourir tantot, sous le poids de tes heures:

Les hommes, delies, glisseront par les portes,

Les ongles de la nuit t'arracheront la chair.

Qu'importe!

Tu es mienne avant que tu sois morte;

Les corps qui sont ici, la ville peut les prendre;

Ils garderont au front comme une croix de cendre

Le vestige du dieu que tu es maintenant!"

In "Prometheus" he introduces a _clavier à lumière_ into his orchestra,

vainly hoping to induce the ecstasy through color as well as sound, and

after his death there was found among his papers a sketch for a

"Mysteria" in which the music was to be conjoined not only with light,

but with dance and perfume as well. It is a pity it was not granted him

to achieve this work. The theosophic programs of his orchestral works

are, after all, innocuous. Much of the half-mystical, half-sensual

coloration of his orchestra is due them. And had the score of the

"Mysteria" been as much an improvement over that of "Prometheus" as

"Prometheus" is over the other symphonic works, Scriabine might indeed

have proved himself as eminent a writer for the orchestra as for the

piano.

It is indeed likely that to-morrow the world will find in his

piano-works its new Chopin, that Scriabine will shortly be given the

place once occupied by the other. For not only is he in many ways the

artistic superior of the man who once was his master. He is, as well,

one of the beings in which the age that is slowly expiring about us

became conscious and articulate. Russia bore him, it is true, elemented

him, gave him her childlike tenderness and barbaric richness and mystic

light. But in developing out of the Russian "universal" school into

perfect liberty and individuality, he became indeed a universal

expression, the first really produced by the group. He became, like the

intensely "national" Strawinsky, one of those men into whom an age

enters. He is symbolic of his time. He seems to have felt his age's life

in its intensest form. The hour that created him was an hour in which

the power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point of

hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in

Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to

make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation

attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was

beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we

learn, not a little, how we feel.

His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony.

"Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal," Thomas Mann once wrote. For

Scriabine, the awakening of that aërial palpitant sensibility was such.

It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at the

destiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those last

quivering poems--"Guirlandes," "Flammes sombres," he entitles them,--or

in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of

the dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man who

could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with

unearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. The

man must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thing

suddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out.