Patrick Bade
Alexander Scriabin, 1872-1915

Patrick Bade | Alexander Scriabin, 1872-1915 | 07.01.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- So here is Alexander Scriabin with his big hair and his amazing moustache. I think it tells you already a little about his character. Genius, mystic, prophet, would-be-Messiah, megalomaniac, charlatan, totally bonkers. I think he was all of the above. It didn’t help really, that according to the Julian calendar, he was born on Christmas Day. I think that certainly encouraged his messianic tendencies. His father was a diplomat who spent most of Scriabin’s childhood abroad. His mother was a very gifted pianist, but she was tubercular and she died when he was still quite a small child. So he was brought up by doting elderly female relatives. And that also probably encouraged his tendencies to megalomania. He early on showed great musical talent, particularly at the piano. Oh, there he is with his father on the left hand side and his mother, who I said died very young on the right hand side. So as an adolescent, he was sent off to the same teacher, Nikolay Zverev, who taught Rachmaninov. And this is an extraordinary photograph. You see Zverev in the middle, Rachmaninov immediately behind him, Rachmaninov was clearly his favourite pupil. And there is Scriabin on the extreme left. In a certain way, both of them, I think, were a bit of a disappointment to Zverev, ‘cause Zverev was not intending to produce composers. His job was to turn them into virtuosi.

So certainly he was upset when Rachmaninov showed that he was more interested really in a career as a composer than as a piano virtuoso. And it must have probably been even more so with Scriabin who refused to play the work of other composers. He wanted to play his own work. Now, as a young man who, you can see him looking very soulful, he was obsessed with Chopin. And his early work is very, very influenced by Chopin. So I’m going to start off with one of his first pieces played by Vladimir Horowitz. This is the Etude Op. 2, No. 1. And I think probably, if I just played this to you, you might have assumed it was by Chopin, probably could have gone away with persuading you that it is Chopin’s. I almost a sort of pastiche, I would say, of Chopin.

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Very, very lovely, but that’s yet not really, I would say, a personal voice as a composer. Now, early on there was a somewhat artificial rivalry between him and Rachmaninov. I think this was more Scriabin’s followers. It certainly didn’t come from Rachmaninov himself. And Rachmaninov admired the music, at least the earlier music of Scriabin. When Scriabin died in 1915, Rachmaninov played homage to him by devoting a whole concert to Scriabin’s music. And he, from time to time, included Scriabin’s works in his concerts for the rest of his life. Only one piece by Scriabin that Rachmaninov recorded. And that is the Prelude Op.11 No.8 in F sharp minor. I’m going to play this to you. It’s a very, very lovely, very, you can tell that Rachmaninov loves this music and devotes great… It’s a very poetic rendering of it. This is also, it’s a fairly early work, but I think here we can begin to hear more of a personal voice in the piece than in the piece I just played you.

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He soon began to pick up wealthy patrons and supporters. Notably was Mikhail Morozov and his wife Margarita here, both painted by Serov. And when Morozov died in 1903, Margarita Morozov continued to be a big supporter of Scriabin for the rest of his career. Now, in the early 1900s, Scriabin began to become interested in various kinds of mysticism. And he was influenced by the ideas of Madam Blavatsky, who we see here. She was born in 1831 in Dnipro. So it’s interesting how the current war is changing, I suppose, how we all describe things. I’ve always described her as a Russian mystic, but being born in Dnipro, of course, she was Ukrainian. Although her reputation was certainly worldwide. She published a popular book in 1877 called “Isis Unveiled” and then continued to publish books promoting the ideas of the theosophical movement, theosophy, which was meant to be a combination of religious, philosophical, and scientific thought. She was, as I said, she was very, very influential. Many artists, many intellectuals picked up on her ideas, although there were other people who also denounced her as a charlatan.

She apparently faked all sorts of experiments with paranormal phenomena and so on. And so there’s a lot of these ideas swirling around in Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, I imagine. Judy’s talked quite a lot about this as well. And also sometimes an interest in very dark things, interest in satanism. And this is a novel , published in 1819 “La-Bas,” which was actually inspired by the drawings and paintings of a Belgian symbolist artist called Felicien Rops, you see one of his works on the right hand side, who was very interested in black masses and satanism. And we find that along with getting into all these kind of weird forms of religiosity and mysticism, a much more individual and personal style of music, actually, a much more modern style of music harmonically coming from Scriabin. And it’s particularly, I would say, in the works of the last four or five years of his life that he really explores new worlds of sound. And the next excerpt I’m going to play you is from his, he wrote 10 sonatas altogether, and his ninth sonata is always called “The Black Mass Sonata.” He apparently did not give it that name himself that he accepted that it should be called that. And it’s certainly a fantastically sinister piece of music that could be well used to accompany a horror film or a black mass.

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So that’s really quite a modern harmonic language there, very quite dissonant. But in many ways, it seems to me that Scriabin is a man of the fin de siecle. Fin de siecle just means end of the century. But you associate it with symbolist movement, with Art Nouveau, with some idea of decadence and perversity. And there’s all that there certainly in Scriabin’s music. Now, his final piano sonata dates from 1913. He called “The Insect Sonata.” The insects are not creepy crawly insects. They’re fluttering iridescent insects. And the music certainly makes me think of the exquisite jewellery of Rene Lalique, which he was making from the end of the first decade of the 20th century. Well, you can see here he’s using diamonds and sapphires but often using semi-precious stones to create incredibly delicate and exquisite effects. It’s another piece of jewellery by Rene Lalique, often inspired by butterflies, dragonflies, and other insects.

This is Lalique as well. And there is a, once again, I think, a slightly sinister element both to the jewellery of Lalique and to “The Insects” sonata of Scriabin. I mean, think if you are an elegant woman and you are wearing that in your corsage or this, what kind of message are you sending to gentlemen, visitors with jewellery like that? And I also think very much of the wonderful iridescent effects of Favrile glass of Tiffany. And so in this sonata, again, these are Art Nouveau pieces with Favrile glass, which is iridescent. These were made by experimenting actually with as glass sickness. You know, there’s wonderful iridescent pieces of ancient Roman glass. They weren’t iridescent when they were made. They became iridescent because there’s some kind of chemical decomposition going on. And Tiffany and his contemporaries, they experimented with that and induced this kind of decomposing, iridescent effect. And in this music you’ll hear how Scriabin creates an effect of iridescence, it’s neither one nor the other, through constant trilling. I mean, this sonata is also nicknamed The Trill Sonata 'cause the pianist has to trill pretty well all the way through it.

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Now his final piece of piano music is quite short. It’s only about five or six minutes long. And it’s called “Vers la Flamme,” Towards the Flame. And he had this theory, which does really make him sound quite prophetic, he thought that the world was heating up. This is just at beginning the First World War. And he thought that that process was going to accelerate and the world would get hotter and hotter, until it would eventually self-combust and destroy itself. This is really what’s being described in this piece of piano music, which over, as I said, over about five minutes is just one continuing buildup to a tremendous climax. Again, lots and lots of trilling, and it’s a piece that, well, of course, Horowitz is very famous for playing this, I play Horowitz now, but it’s a piece of absolutely insane virtuosity. Just think, my God, how does any human being get their fingers around this piece of music?

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Certainly has a very apocalyptic character to it. And around the beginning of the First World War, I suppose, quite a number of artists whose work has rather apocalyptic characteristics. But Scriabin was very preoccupied with the end of the world. And he thought that he could bring it about himself. And he was working on what he decided would be his final masterpiece, well, anybody’s final masterpiece 'cause it was going to bring about the end of the world, it was called “The Mysterium.” And it was going to be a vast work. It was going to be performed in India. There was going to be a special festival building created for it in India. Of course there are echos here of Wagner and Bayreuth. And he composed the fragments of it, but perhaps just as well he didn’t live long enough to complete the whole thing and actually carry out his scheme, which was to create this work of art that was so ecstatic, so amazing that the whole universe was going to dissolve into one everlasting orgasm. Now, another aspect of his work right at the end of his career is eroticism. And this again, he’s a man of his time. Of course, the thought of music of Wagner, particularly “Tristan” is extremely erotic. And we find many of the great artists of the fin de siecle, the beginning of the century, they’re very preoccupied with sex.

Sex was in the air, it’s the time of Freud. Think Freud’s interpretation of dreams out in 1901. And we have artists like Munch on the left hand side, Rodin on the right hand side, Beardsley, Klimt and , very, very much preoccupied with sex. So far, of course, everything I played to you .has been for the piano. But towards the end of his life, his short life, Scriabin became more interested in writing for the orchestra. And he’s actually a really superb orchestrator, gets incredible coloristic effects out of the audience. And his penultimate masterpiece is called “The Poem of Ecstasy.” Again, I think very much the starting point for this really is the Libretto from “Tristan and Isolde,” which is a kind of, I suppose, in a way a musical metaphor for sex. It’s a great buildup of unresolved chords building up, building up, building up till you get a colossal resolution through a climax. And so over nearly 20 minutes Scriabin does this in his tone poem, “The Poem of Ecstasy.” And here we’ve got Munch on the left hand side and Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the right hand side. Both of these images really are sort of visual equivalent of the “Liebestod,” love, the climax of love as the little death and the big death. So I’m going to do two excerpts from this piece. I’d love to play you the whole thing, but I’m going to play you the start and the conclusion. So here is the start of “The Poem of Ecstasy” with these yearning chromatic harmonies gradually building up in intensity.

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And now building up towards this colossal, ecstatic orgasm, really musical orgasm. We’ve got two images, more or less contemporary, slightly earlier images of, literally of an orgasm. You’ve got the Munch “Madonna,” where you have the little sperm cells whizzing around the border at the moment of orgasm and the moment of conception of the foetus. And perhaps an even greater equivalent, really, for this multicoloured shimmering extraordinary orchestral score of Scriabin is the “Kiss” of Munch, which again is very much a representation of sexual ecstasy. The moment of orgasm with the two figures united inside a womb-like shape and the the stylized spermatozoa, again, pouring down on the right hand side of the image. Now this performance is conducted by the great Leopold Stokowski, and he was in his 90s, wow, I hope I’m up to this when I’m in my 90s, when he made this recording, and actually when I was very, very young, must have been about 1970, I did see him induct this in London at Festival Hall. It was a performance I’ll never forget. He was extremely frail. He had to be practically carried onto the podium. But the moment he picked up the baton, the performance was absolutely electrifying.

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I hope your sound equipment is a lot better than mine. So you could appreciate the amazing orchestral colour there. A great theme of the late 19th century and early 20th century is synesthesia, that is correspondences between the senses, and connected with the idea of synesthesia, of course, is the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, where all the different arts brought together to work on your senses simultaneously. Now the idea of correspondences between the senses was floated by the great poet Baudelaire in his very influential poem “Correspondances.” That’s as early as the 1850s. And then of course, you’ve got Wagner in the 1850s and '60s, developing his ideas for music drama and the Gesamtkunstwerk. And another very important thinker in this line was the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans, you see it on the right hand side, and his novel “A Rebours,” Against Nature. I’ve mentioned it many times in different contexts of different lectures, it’s a fascinating book. You can get it in paperback in translation. I strongly recommend it. It’s more of a manifesto in a way than a novel. But it’s about a very decadent aristocrat. And each chapter is devoted to a different aspect of his tastes and his experience. And he’s very fascinated by the idea of correspondences and synesthesia. One of the most famous incidents in the novel, he has a live tortoise, which he gives to a jeweller in Paris who has to insert precious jewels into the case of this living tortoise. And the idea is that the tortoise is going to crawl around on top of oriental carpets and create exquisite colour harmonies as it crawls around the floor in his townhouse. And there’s another bizarre incident in the novel where he has what he calls a taste organ and it has all sorts of different liquores and different tastes, and he tries to recreate famous pieces of music by Weber and Schumann and so on in terms of tastes. Another very important book that Scriabin certainly knew and many artists read was “Thought-Forms.” And this was published in 1901, and the authors were Mrs. Annie Besant and the Reverend W. Leadbeater. And they were part of, they belonged to the Theosophical Society in London. And Mrs. Annie Besant claimed to be a clairvoyant and she claimed to see colours. She could translate or she could see emotions, feelings, states of mind in terms of colour. So this is an idea which is very much floating around at the time. And Kandinsky knew this book and was apparently very influenced by it. I remember when I was a student at the Courtauld, that would’ve been in nearly 1970s, a controversial article was published by Norwegian art historian called Stephan Tschudi-Madsen in which he pointed out the parallels between the illustrations in the “Thought-Forms” book and certain paintings of Kandinsky, again, exactly contemporary with the music that I’m talking about, so just before the First World War, and in the first year or so of the First World War. And another distinguished art historian called Peter came to the Courtauld, and he tried to completely demolish this. So you know how academics love to argue with one another and demolish each other’s ideas. And I went to that lecture and certainly it sounded quite convincing. He was saying, well, this is absolutely ridiculous. How could a great artist like Kandinsky be influenced by somebody like Mrs. Annie Besant and the Reverend W. Leadbeater. But as soon as the images came up on the screen, I thought, of course, it’s absolutely evident that Kandinsky knew this book and that he was influenced by these images, which is no way to detract from Kandinsky’s genius. You know, a man or a woman, a genius can find very banal ideas from other people and pick them up and run with them and do something with them. Well, all of that, to preface my final musical excerpt, which is Scriabin’s final work, “Prometheus, The Poem of Fire.” And this was clearly intended to be a dummy run for the great “Mysterium” that was going to bring the world to an end. And he created a huge score for an absolutely enormous orchestra, plus a choir who had just actually brought in the last two or three minutes of the piece. They have no words, they just kind of moan ecstatically as the piece reaches its climax. He also created a colour score for coloured lights. And it’s too bad that he didn’t have all the resources we have today. I mean, if he had the resources of just an ordinary disco club, I’m sure, he would’ve been very excited by that. But this is the first performance in New York Carnegie Hall, of course, rather poor illustration here, gives you a little bit of an idea of the projections of coloured lights that was going on behind the orchestra during the performance. So I’m going to finish off with the final two or three minutes of “Prometheus, the Poem of Fire,” building up, again, to this colossal erotic, ecstatic, sexual climax. And I’m picking up on the moment where the wordless choir enter and and start moaning ecstatically in the background. And to go with that, I’ve got two paintings of Kandinsky.

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Q&A and Comments

Susan says his daughter, Ariadna converted to Judaism. That’s very interesting. Oh, I didn’t know that. That’s extraordinary. And was in the Resistance and killed by the Gestapo. This is Barbara, “Some years ago my husband and I went on a river trip to Moscow, to St. Petersburg and had some free time in Moscow, came across Scriabin’s house in the Arbat area. A babushka at the entrance wouldn’t let us in.” That’s frustrating. Sofronitsky. Yes. I couldn’t play, I am going to play you some Sofronitsky in upcoming… He was a great virtuoso pianist who was great specialist in Scriabin, lived entirely in Russia, never performed in the West as far as I know. And I will play you him playing some Scriabin in a forthcoming talk. He died, sorry, he was born in 1871, 1872 on Christmas Day as I said. And he died in 1915.

This is… Oh, Ron. Yes, he heard, lucky, Ron, heard Horowitz play Scriabin at Carnegie Hall, and that’s where he first heard Scriabin. Yeah, lucky you. That would be a fantastic experience, I’m sure. So Arlene, thank you. Piece by Scriabin that had 13 harps. I wonder what that could be. There aren’t that many orchestral pieces. There’s “The Divine Poem.” It might be “The Divine Poem.” Mara likes that. Yes. The Art Nouveau. Yes. Well, Kristin, I do try to match the visual with the auditory and, of course, it’s key to the understanding of Scriabin, as I tried to point out at the end. And you’ve been to the Gulbenkian, which, of course, is the greatest collection of Lalique’s work. Gulbenkian bought all those things directly from Lalique, which is interesting 'cause I don’t think Gulbenkian was wearing them. He bought all that jewellery really, he bought them as works of art, to be admired as works of art rather than actually worn as jewellery. For me, Lalique is just the tops when it comes to jewellery and to that kind of exquisite metalwork, far more interesting than, you know, Russian Easter eggs and so on.

Yes. “Kiss” is by Klimt. That’s right. Well, there are various, the “Kiss” is a subject that was taken up by many artists in the late 19th century. There is the famous one by Klimt, which I just shown you. But of course there are versions by Munch and Rodin and others. Thank you very much, Romaine. I don’t think Scriabin could have been aware of Gustav Holst’s music. He died, and although, of course, “The Planets” is exactly contemporary, so I understand very very much why you may ask that question. But I think it’s, you know, Holst was not that well known in Europe. I think it’s very unlikely that Scriabin actually heard his music.

Thank you, Barbara. Public reaction to this… He was very divisive. I mean he had a real passionate following, but there are other people who found his music distasteful and really disliked it. And I think in, what’s sort of interests me, is what would he have done if he’d actually survived into old age. It’s interesting, again, you bring up “The Rite of Spring” 'cause “The Rite of Spring” completely changed the ballgame in the way that Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” changed the ballgame for the visual arts. And so if you compare what I’ve just played you, although it might, you know, it would’ve seen very modern at the time, but after “The Rite of Spring,” it would’ve seen backward looking. It would’ve seen, as I said, fin de siecle. I don’t think you could have written that kind of music in the 1920s in the age of Stravinsky and violin composers like that. But he was certainly born and died in Russia. But off the top of my head I can’t tell you exactly where.

Elisha Abas, the great Israeli pianist is a direct descendant of Scriabin. That’s very interesting. Thank you. And that’s all for today. Thank you very much. I’ll be speaking to you from London for my next presentation.

• Thanks, Patrick. Fabulous. Thank you very much. And thanks, Lauren. We see you soon. Safe travels to London.

• Bye-bye. Thank you.

• . Bye.