A fellow student of Rachmaninov’s at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied under Arensky and Taneyev, Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) occupies a unique sphere in Russian music. Rejecting the vocal and folkloristic music that occupied most of his contemporaries, he wrote exclusively for piano and for orchestra. His musical language constantly evolved over the length of his life, passing from the early influence of Chopin and Liszt, through a Wagnerian period, before reaching an atonal style that gazes far into the future of the 20th century’s sound world. Scriabin was a typical representative of the symbolism that flourished at the turn of the 20th century: fascinated by philosophy and esoteric doctrines, particularly theosophy, as well as by synesthesia, he studied the links between sounds and colours and elaborated a complementary colour wheel where the circle of keys and the light spectrum were paralleled. A fantastic and eccentric character, he believed himself to be music’s Messiah, and plotted to build a temple in India for himself, where his planned masterpiece would be performed, entitled Mystery, which would be humanity’s aesthetic and spiritual culmination. His premature death at the age of 43 put an end to that chimera. For or with orchestra, Scriabin composed, along with a short prelude entitled Rêverie, a piano concerto, three symphonies, and two symphonic poems: the Poem of Ecstasy (1907) and Prometheus (1910). His large pianistic output consists of ten sonatas and a great number of miniatures: preludes, etudes, mazurkas, nocturnes, waltzes, poems, and assorted other pieces…
Scriabin’s ten sonatas (to which must be added two youthful attempts) punctuate some twenty years of his life from 1893 to 1913. It is important to note that he is the first composer to regularly return to the piano sonata, which had fallen into marked disfavour since Liszt’s monumental Sonata in B-minor and Brahms’s three scores from the early 1850s. Other Russians would follow his example, notably Medtner (fourteen sonatas) and Prokofiev (nine).
