Piano Music - Alexander Scriabin

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Scriabin Alexander

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Гершензон Русские пропилеи, том 6, Записи Скрябина, 1919 (Scriabin's Notebooks)

📖 "Some composers lead interesting lives, others don't, but no other composer has a more multidimensional allure than Scriabin. It's not just that the music on the page and its vibrations in the air is only the beginning of an understanding of the Russian composer, but the force of the artist behind the notes draws us into a beguilingly strange world where music and mysticism, sense and spirit blur and blend."
Stephen Hough, in The Alexander Scriabin Companion. History, Performance, and Lore by Lincoln Bllard and Matthew Bengtson (2017)

📖 "The legacy which Scriabin had time to pass to us is so great and grandiose with its innermost and deep contents, great and daring achievements, spiritual force, power and beauty that a thought occurs involuntarily: would we have the right, in our unlimited insatiableness, to give in to sombre despair having received from Scriabin such a great deal of imperishable treasures! Throughout its history art has known very few prophets which equal Scriabin's significance."
Evgenij Gunst Scriabin i ego tvortchestvo [Scriabin and his Works] (1915)

📖 "Performing, he [Scriabin] seemed to be creating anew."
Evgenij Gunst Scriabin i ego tvortchestvo [Scriabin and his Works] (1915)

📖 "One time I just dropped off. I wake up to som charming sounds. I didn't even want to move, so as not to break the magic spell. The I ask: 'What is it?' It turned out to be his D flat major prelude [op.11/5]. That is one of the best memories of my life."
Vasily Safonov, Scriabin's piano professor at Moscow Conservatory
Quoted in Engel's Ocherk

📖 «Эльф среди людей, Скрябин, обладал цветным слухом, как до него им обладал могучий Берлиоз, пламенный Лист, и зиждительно-свежий Римский-Корсаков. Цветовой слух выражается в том, что звуки или певучия суммы звуков, гармонии, тональности, сочетаются с ощущением цвето-света. Эта способность личная, обособленная. … Присутствие отдельной редкой способности у двух самых выдающихся русских музыкантов является как бы первовестью новой человеческой впечатлительности, которая в будущем сумеет создать нерукотворный храм Светозвука. … Сочетание света именно с музыкой Скрябина неизбежно, ибо вся его музыка световая. В музыкальном творчестве Скрябина жив Восток. Потому его музыка нравится людям Востока, которые в общем совсем нечувствительны к европейской музыке, или же ощущают её враждебно. Скрябин не переставши быть европейцем и русским, был индусом, как о нём кто-то сказал. Он угадал Восток, воздух которого всегда исполнен симфониями света …»
Константин Бальмонт, Светозвук в природе и световая симфония Скрябина (1917)
"An Elf among humans, Scriabin…"
Konstantin Balmont, in Light-Sound in Nature and Scriabin's Light Symphony

📖 «… я приехал в Москву и здесь увидел Скрябина. Эта встреча навсегда сохранится в моей душе, как видение ослепительной музыкальности. Это было видение поющих, падающих лун. Музыкальных звёздностей. Арабесок, гиерогрифов, и камней, изваянных из звука. Движение Огня. Прорывы Солнца. Клич души к душе. Откровенье, дошедшее с другой планеты. Певучая озарённость самого воздуха, в котором двигался этот пленительный ребёнок богов. Это было то же фортепиано. Но на этот раз оно оправдывало своё наименование. Это была сильная нежность. Могучая нежность.»
Константин Бальмонт, Светозвук в природе и световая симфония Скрябина (1917)
Konstantin Balmont, in Light-Sound in Nature and Scriabin's Light Symphony

📖 «Но его [Скрябина] рука была противоположность тяжести. Она порхала как летние стрекозы, у которых крылышко есть солнечное зеркальце, и как пляшут в вулканическом огне саламандры, которые, по слову Парацельса, не имеют части с человеками и не говорят совсем, а поют огненные песни. И суть духи, но не призраки, — когда ж являются, то обладают плотью и кровью, но только легки и быстры и духи.»
Константин Бальмонт, Светозвук в природе и световая симфония Скрябина (1917)
Konstantin Balmont, in Light-Sound in Nature and Scriabin's Light Symphony

📖 "Scriabin rarely expounded his ideas in a finished and fixed form; rather, he improvised his theories, as it were, then and there. These conversations, with their constant exchanges of queries and responses, with their discussions and debates, contributed a great deal to Scriabin's menatal discipline, stimulated him, gave him a sense of direction."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "… for Scriabin this mystical inner experience, which he felt with an almost agonizing intensity, was also a source of ineffable delight and the most immediately evident reality, the most absolute certainty, the sole criterion against which all else, including daily occupations, were measured."
Marina Scriabine, in Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin's grandiose visions of the Mysterium, which was to transfigure humanity, and his theoretical speculations that gave these visions a philosophical foundation were not connected with his music in subject matter or development, thematic content or comment, theory or realization. They were parallel actions that enabled Scriabin to communicate the incommunicable."
Marina Scriabine, in Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin's irrepressible passions for freedom, a total, absolute, and unlimited freedom, … was more than simple human freedom. It was not the freedom to act according to one's wishes, which is the choice of the 'little I' - a relative freedom, certainly important in everyday life, but much more important as a preliminary to the manifestation of the 'great I.' It may appear paradoxical to speak of freedom in light of Scriabin's distrust of spontaneous practices, his dream of a volitional, elaborate art effected by the conscious will of its creator. Let us not forget that the freedom Scriabin sought was an absolute, divine freedom that could only be attained through the ultimate integration of an entire human being, which, in the terrestrial state, is disunited, dismembered, and replete with self-contradictions. This unification could be realized through art, but in order to perfuse the terrestrial man, somber and chaotic, with spiritual light, all the constituent elements of art - sonorous, visual, and otherwise - must be integrated in formal unity. And only after this unification had been attained would inner illumination confer, on a transfigured man, a freedom truly divine, truly universal."
Marina Scriabine, in Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "When we attempt to pass through the door, which Scriabin left ajar, to a world that appears to be a replica of out own, we must make a choice at the threshold. And those who do not - who, deceived by apparently obvious similarities, venture into Scriabin's world in the belief that it is like our own - risk finding themselves total strangers. They no longer recognize the landscape; the vistas that open before them reveal not the imagined horizons of some ideal human siciety, living in unity and happiness, but a strangely disquieting world of mystery."
Marina Scriabine, in Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "The meaning of Scriabin's art can be fully understood only in terms of general culture. His desire to probe the ultimate mystery of unification with the One among the worldly multitudes was an autonomous effort. He found the proper form and images to approach this mystery with the utmost precision, lucudity, and completeness, and he was able to explore it logically. The vision of an ultimate unification has pervaded human history; single individuals and even whole nations have been inspired by this vision. It therefore does not suffice to examine the inner meaning of Scriabin's eschatology; it is imperative to discern its dependence and at the same time analyze the relationship of his ideals to those of other mystics. In this light, Scriabin's Mysterium must be regarded as one of the greatest human mystical creations, as an individual phenomenon in humanity's mystical life. The same must be said about Scriabin's concept of extasy, the rebellious individualism of his early life, and the pantheistic religiosity of his later period. Only after establishing these affinities and differences in their successive apprearences can we understand Scriabin's inner world and find a proper place for him among the world's artists."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "To Scriabin, spiritual action always exercised priority over theoretical thought."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin's regard for the world as it appears to us at the present time [1919] was conditioned by his vision of the future, of a world that ought to be, of a world that will assume a new form inconceivable to our senses. He sought his personal truth not as an external, separate, and alien entity, he saw it by intuition. To him the birth of that new world signalized the completion of the entire cosmic cycle. And yet in this poet, in this prophet, there lived a refined, almost pedantic formalist who demanded accuracy in all that concerned his creative work. Perfection of form and precision of execution were his characteristic traits. He was aware of contradictions, disharmonies, and inconsistencies in life, and he strove to reconcile them, to find their resolution, not only on a psychological and intuitive plane, but also in rational thought. In this tendency to formulate and schematize, in this peculiar rationalism, was Scriabin's salvation. … His rationalism was a mask that concealed his irrational self, a mask that unconsciously but wisely held in check his creative spirit, essentially limitless and transcendental. 'To create is to limit oneself,' Scriabin liked to say. Hence the formulas and schemes designed to limit, to confine, to reveal in a word the flame burning within him, threatening to consume him."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin's metaphysical constructions were not only logical, but also graphical; he drew them out, using ruler and compass, with great diligence and accuracy. He endeavoured to represent in lines and geometric figures the interrelations he intuitively perceived between the world and the individual, between God and reality, in art, religion, and science."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "The most extraordinary aspect of Scriabin's congnitive strivings was his perseverance towards maximum clarity and logic."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "… There was in him [Scriabin] an unlimited and fanatical faith, but its subject was not ideology, not philosophy, not those rational constructions that he erected with such care but was willing to destroy without pity once he had realized their fallacy. This faith, which excluded all compromise, was generated by the irrational impulse which possessed him and which he tried to rationalize, an impulse that demanded its realization in himself. he never doubted the absolute truth and importance of the inner voice that he heard in his soul. When it was questioned, he responded as a fanatic, refusing to grant any consessions and categorically dismissing all arguments by referring to his own inner experience as an ultima ratio. Scriabin readily accepted criticism of his work; he even conceded doubts regarding his own intellectual constructions and debated freely on the subject. The validity of his vision, on the other hand, his peculiar sense of being the reality of the world within him, were not to be challenged."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "He [Scriabin] intended to achieve human and cosmic oneness; his ideology was essentially a theory of oneness and the means by which it could be achieved."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "In his search for new forms of expression, in his attempts to reationalize his intuitive perceptions and to impart to them the character of a universal imperative, Scriabin proceeded with complete independence from others."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "… When I was once asked under whose influence Scriabin's ideology was generated, I was at a loss to reply. Such influences could be discernible only on the periphery of his thinking, in his manner of expression perhaps, but not in the substance of his ideology. He occasionally made use of conventional formulas and propositions, but he filled them with his own peculiar meaning, which was sometimes at odds with the semantic value of the original concept."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "[Scriabin's] mode of ratiocination… was that of intuition and analogy. Analogical constructions guided his intuition in a definite direction. … Scriabin in this respect is akin to Goethe, and this is perhaps the only point of contact between these two men who are in other respects so different from each other. Logic served Scriabin only as a tool to demonstrate and to expound his ideas, and he made use of logical constructions only as premises for already confirmed conclusions. Scriabin displayed a certain skill in deductive reasoning, having acquired it through arduous practice. Although he had a highly developed analytic sense, he could never master the scientific aspect of logic. While analyzing himself and his own process of thinking, he applied a psychological approach, discovering that his own reasoning progressed by juxtapositions and analogies and that only with the aid of these analogies could he arrive at helpful deductions. These deductions he then endeavoured to justify by syllogism or some other device of formal logic."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "There are … artists who make an earnest effort to understand themselves, their creative work, and the world in which they live. They try to attain clarity, lucidity, and comprehensibility. They aspire to reveal themselves in rational terms, to articulate the elements that reflect their ideas. Having created something, they attempt to reconstruct intellectually the inexpressible and to rationalize the transcendental. They intend to illuminate the apperception to their desire by appropriate ideology. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Goethe, and Wagner were among the creative spirits who strove to achieve such wisdom. Scriabin, too, belongs in this category, for in him this desire for congnition was combined with a passion for formal perfection and systematization. Those who were close to Scriabin were often struck by the grandeur of his creative designs, over which he himself seemed to lack control, and by the earnestness and intensity of his intellect. His creative and theoretical tools operated with equal acuteness. We witness in Scriabin a very strange phenomenon in which the artist fails to be satisfied solely by his artistic achievement and is constantly striving to justify it morally, religiously, and scientifically, to explain to others the meaning of his productions, to reveal their significance not only from an aesthetic but also from a metaphysical standpoint."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "To understand the nature of Scriabin's personality, which can be so easily misconstrued in all his multifarious activities - as a musician, poet, philosopher, and even as a prophet - we must realize that they all represent different aspects of the same essence."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin's synthesis of the arts was based on the idea of an intimate intermingling of all artistic disciplines. He called this process 'counterpoint,' as opposed to Wagner's parallelism of music and drama. Scriabin's method was the result of his musical philosophy. He reduced the Wagnerian synthesis to a system of intricate multilayered constructions flowing from poetic expression. Such 'counterpointing' of the arts in an intimate interpenetration represents a denial of the separateness of different arts and the assertion of their essentail oneness in an all-emracing Omni-art. To Scriabin this Omni-art, or synthetic art, was not a vestige of the past. He did not evoke remote antiquity in his art, nor did he defer it to a distant future. It was to him a living presence, the content of his own psychological experience."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin first realised that universal art was a function of his own artistic personality during the composition of his Fifth Piano Sonata, which immediately followed Le Poème de l'extase. When he played this sonata for me [Boris de Schloezer] in Lausanne in the winter of 1908, he remarked that the music existed outside of him in images that could not be expressed verbally. He was not creating this music out of nothing, he declared, but rather he had removed a veil that obscured it, and this made it visible. His task was to render this inner image into sounds, without distortion; he liked to call this image a 'sounding body' possessing a color of its own. He observed it in his inner self and at the same time separate from him or, rather, above him. He sensed it with his entire self, not only through the medium of sense organs. In trying to describe this extraordinary state, he had, despite his skill in self-analysis, a great difficulty of expression. That is why he sometimes used different terms in referring to the same psychological state.
Motives and successions of chords were associated in Scriabin's consciousness with outside forces guiding his composition. When Scriabin worked on his thematic material, gradually building the sonorous edifice of the Fifth Piano Sonata, he sensed with different degrees of clarity the basic image that seemed to exist outside the framework of time. 'I am the translator,' he once blurted out, speaking about his Fifth Piano Sonata. During the process of its composition he felt as though he were projecting a three-dimensional body on a flat surface, stretching and flattening in time and space a prophetic vision that he experienced as an instant revelation, simplifying and at the same time impoverishing it. The integral vision that he perceived with his entire being, in which all the human sense participated, he reduced to a system of sounds, thus utilising only one sensory medium. He also said that in the apperception of this primary vision he did not feel that he was merely a passive recipient, but was at all times creatively active."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin unconsciously emphasized a certain element of his inner experience in order to impart to it a more subtle and yet more definite form. But the difference here is only in details. In the process of work, Scriabin always progressed from the general to the particular, from oneness to individual moments. these moments did not exist autonomously beyond the general vision; Scriabin postulated them as parts of the whole. From this whole he deduced its constituent parts, and his creative process became therefore a revealing analysis of the object envisioned by hum in an act of synthetic contemplation - an analysis which was followed by a synthesis of the whole. When Scriabin composed, his work never went in a single direction, from inception to conclusion. Rather, previously fixed elements served as the coordinates that defined the system of sound, through which he drew corresponding lines. His work progressed simultaneously in all directions, developing from different points of departure according to a plan worked out in the most minute details. This plan, which determined the general form of a musical composition and its structure, whether it be a sonata, a symphony, or a tone poem, was sketched by Scriabin in advance, when the thematic material was only beginning to shape itself. Sometimes, carried away by his imagination, he was tempted to break away from the scheme, but upon reflection he invariably returned to it, even if he had to sacrifice some of his abundant materials. indeed, when his creative strength failed him, Scriabin would interrupt his work and seek to regain the idealized image. He called it, in theosophic parlance, 'to place oneself on the plane of oneness.'"
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Scriabin's creative process of composition … proceeded from an intuition of the intire work. The act of synthesis, harmonious unity, constitutes the first phase; the act of analysis, the separation of the idealized image intuitively observed, forms the second phase; and reconstruction, during which a new and integral image is created and harmony is transferred to another plane, is the third phase."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "The perfection that marks every work of Scriabin is also characteristic of the entire evolution of his creative life."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "A work of art, he [Scriabin] never tired of repeating, must carry the observer beyond its own appointed limitations; it must stimulate action and crative effort and animate further developments. To Scriabin, art was a means of transforming phenomenological reality, of liberating it and making it transcend its limits; it was also the refliection of the revolutionary essence of his own being. Indeed, Scriabin was a revolutionary in his innermost self. He was not satisfied with the creation of the material world; he was not satisfied with transcending these limitations even at a greately accelerated pace within a given period of time. His objective was an instanteneous, catastrophic abolition of reality and a spiritual translation to a higher place of consciousness. Scriabin believed in the disparate nature of the historical process, a view typical of his revolutionary state of mind; he sensed gaping chasms in the fabric of reality that had to be spanned by leaps and bounds. He harbored apocalyptic expectations of a new earth, a new heaven, awaiting the palpitating fulfillment of the promise of that angel who vowed to the 'eternally living' that 'time will cease to be.'"
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "… All Scriabin's works, beginning with the Third Piano Sonata and ending with the Tenth Piano Sonata, are built according to a uniform succesion of states - languor, longing, impetuous striving, dance, ecstasy, and transfiguration. This outline is basically simple; it is built on a series of upswings, with each successive wave risinfg higher and higher toward a final effort, liberation, and ecstasy."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "Skryabin wanted to express in his music not this or that mood, but a whole world view, and it was this that he tried to develop in all aspects. … Although I considered that Skryabin sets art a task it cannot perform, it seemed to me that this mistake of his was extremely useful to him: very powerfully widening the circle of his spiritual interests, by that very means it significantly increased the already immense specific gravity of his artistic gift."
Georgy Plekhanov, Marxist materialist philosopher, on Skryabin's opposite idealist viewpoints in a letter to Dr V. V. Bogorodsky

📖 "If it is true that every person of genius has one great idea which is a mania for him - and I think that this is true - then Skriabin was one of those people. Already in adolescence he carried within himself, like the ovary of a fruit, the embryo of that world-embracing idea - an idea which is also a feeling, an idea which is also a wish - which in the last two years of his life he considered to have ripened in him and which he wanted to express in his grandiose Mystery."
Mikhail Gershenzon in The Writings of Scriabin (1919)

Alexander Scriabin

1872 - 1915
Alexander Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist. Scriabin is one of the most significant corner stones of not only Russian music but also the infusion of piano repertoire with more than one type of mysticism. Endeavouring to express the inexpressible, Scriabin transcended the dimension of time, trying to formulate something with the means of musical form that has never before been realised in time and space. "Scriabin came to believe that he had a mission to regenerate mankind through art. This goal was to be achieved by means of a work which he referred to as the Mystery, which was to last seven days, would involve all means of expression and all of humanity, and would transform the world." Simon Nicholls in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

Scriabin Says:

📖 "God in the general meaning of this word is the cause of the totality of phenomena. … To believe in God means to believe in the truth of the doctrine of morality and to allow it. Prayer is the impulse towards God. Religious feeling is the consciousness of the Divinity within oneself."
Written at the age of 16, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "In order to become an optimist in the real meaning of this word, one must experience despair and conquer it."
Around 1900, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "It was not by my own desire that I came into this world.
Well, what of it?
In tender youth, full of the delusion of hopes and desires, I admired it with radiant light and awaited a revelation from the heavens; but there was no revelation.
Well, what of it?
I sought eternal truth also among people, but alas! they know it less than I do.
Well, what of it?
I sought eternal beauty and did not find it. Feelings fade like flowers which have barely opened. Radiant day was replaced by cold rainy night.
I sought consolation in a new spring, in new flowers, but did not find it; these were but efforts to replace something, to bring back what had been lost, to remember what had been experienced. In the life of every person spring occurs only once. And yes how people hasten to separate themselves from this enchanting delusion, from these wonderful dreams! Finally I sought consolation in memories, but I became used to them too, i.e., I lost them.
What of it?"
Around 1900, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "The caressing deception of religions
No longer lulls me
And my reason is no longer darkened
By their softly gleaming mist.
My judgement, always free,
Affirms to me: you are alone;
You are the slave of cold chance,
You are the master of the whole universe.
Why do you entrust your fate
To the Gods, O pitiful mortal?
You can and you must yourself
Bear on your shining countenance
The glorious impress of victory."
Around 1901-1903, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "I am the apotheosis of the universe
I am the aim of aims, the end of ends.
With the strength of daring thought
Long ago I took possession of the world
I should like to impress my love
Upon the hearts of people"
Around 1901-1903, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "When my star flares up into flame
And magic light embraces the earth,
Then will my fire be reflected in people's hearts
And the world will understand its vocation.
By the strength of the spells of heavenly harmony
I will waft caressing dreams to people,
And by the power of love, immeasurable and marvellous,
I will make their life a likeness of spring.
I grant them the peace they have long yearned for
By the strength of my own wisdom.
Peoples, rejoice, the end of suffering and affliction,
Awaited through the ages, has come.'
Around 1901-1903, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "If only I were able with one ray
Of that caressing light
Which lives within my soul,
For just one moment to illumine
The sorrowful life of people with no happiness, no ray of hope."
Around 1901-1903, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "In the dimensions of time and space I am subject to temporal and spatial laws, but the laws of time and space are the creatures of my great 'I.'"
From Notebooks, quoted in Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "I don't understand how it is possible to write 'just music' now. … You see, that is so uninteresting … After all, music receives meaning and significance when it is a link in a single, unified plan, within an entire world view. … Music is a path of revelation."
Sabaneev Vospominaniya

📖 "Nothing exists, the only thing that is, is what I create."
In Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "I will not discuss with you [to Schloezer] the truth of theosophy, but I know that Mme. Blavatsky's ideas helped me in my work and gave me power to accomplish my task."
In Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "I am not expounding theories, I express ideas."
In Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

📖 "A fusion of all the arts is essential, but not such a theatrical one as in Wagner; music must be combined with philosophy and religion into something indivisible and united, which could replace the old outdated Gospel. I have a dream of creating a Mystery of that kind. A special temple has to be built for it - maybe here [Lake Geneva] but maybe far from here, in India. But humanity is not ready for this yet. They must be proselytised, they must be led onto new paths. And I am proselytising. Once even from a boat - like Christ. I have here [Switzerland] a little circle of people who understand me excellently and will follow me."
In Yuly Engel Ocherk

📖 "I am God!
I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life
I am the boundary, I am the summit
I am God
I am a blossoming, I am bliss
i am a passion burning everything,
devouring everything
I am a fire which has enveloped the universe
and plunged it into the abysses of chaos
I am chaos
I am the blind play of dispersed forces
I am consciousness asleep, Reason extinct

Everything is exterior to me
I am uniform multiplicity
I have lost freedom
Lost consioucness
And only its after gleam
Lives in me
As a blind striving
Away from the centre
Away from the Sun
Away from the after gleam
Of my former Divinity
Which now oppresses me,
Toward freedom
Toward unity
Toward consciousness
Toward truth
Toward God
Toward myself
Toward life
O life, o creative impulse
All-creative striving
Away from the centre, eternally away from the centre
Toward freedom
Toward consciousness"
Around 1904-1905, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "Individuality is necessary, and its full flourishing is necessary."
Around 1904-1905, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "States of consciousness coexist. To experience a state of consciousness means to distinguish it from another state of consciousness, and it is only in relation to it that it exists. To create means to distinguish: all states of consciousness are connected by the single act of distinguishing; this explains their succession in time and their coexistence in space. To come to know the world means to come to know the nature of free creation."
Around 1904-1905, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "I am nothing.
I am only what I create.
I want to create."
Around 1904-1905, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "The universe is a unity, the connection of the processes co-existing in it. In its unity it is free. It exists in itself and through itself. It has within it the possibility of everything, and everything. The possibility of everything is nothing (in the sense of time and space); it is creative force, free activity, the wish to live."
Around 1905-1906, in The Notebooks of Alexander Skryabin

📖 "I am a moment illuminating eternity.... I am affirmation... I am ecstasy."

📖 "In love's God-like breathing, there's the innermost aspect of the universe."

Quotes by Alexander Scriabin

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Scriabin's Piano Music

👉 Download works of Alexander Scriabin on IMSLP / The Petrucci Music Library (free)

Books about Scriabin

👉 Download Константин Бальмонт, Светозвук в природе и световая симфония Скрябина (1917)

👉 Вячеслав Иванович Иванов Взгляд Скрябина на искусство (1915)

Articles about Scriabin

👉 Maria Carlson Fashionable Occultism: The World of Russian Composer Aleksandr Scriabin

Philosophical and Other Readings for Understanding Scriabin

📖 "Unlike most specialists, who regarded philosophy merely as a professional occupation separate from everyday life, Scriabin was constantly immersed in philosophical speculation. Whatever he was doing or saying, an intense inner process of reasoning accompanied his actions … . Scriabin … suffered real agony, almost physical pain, when he found himself unable to cope with a thorny problem. He … abhorred superficiality and approximation in his thinking. This metaphysical passion, if one may so describe it, possessed him to the very end of his life."
Boris de Schloezer Scriabin Artist and Mystic (1923/1975/1987)

Philosophers, Poets and Other Writers:

📚 Arthur Schopenhauer

📚 Johann Gottlieb Fichte

📚 Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater (theosophists)

📚 Nietzsche

📚 Vyacheslav Ivanov

📚 Konstantin Balmont

📚 Valery Bryusov

📚 Nikolay Berdyaev

Concepts:

📚 Mysticism (especially within the context of the Golden Age of Russian Mysticism)

📚 Solipsism

📚 Nihilism

📚 Theosophy

📚 Indian philosophy

📚 Antagonism to materialism

📚 Synesthesia

📚 Symbolism

📚 Russian Silver Age

📚 German idealism

📚 Spiritual collectiveness

📚 Messianism

📚 Unification, oneness

📚 Apocalyptic foreboding

📚 Purification, rebirth

📚 Ecstatic inspiration as basis of artistic creation and meaning

📚 Omni-art, or synthetic art, universal art, combination or recombination of the arts

📚 Reconnection of art with its mystic origins for unification of mankind in a spiritual sense

📚 World transitioning between eras with art bringing a new era into being

📚 Higher self as an identical concept with the divine principle and artistic creation reflecting the creation of the cosmos

Konstantin Balmont - Selected Poems (in Russian)

Scriabin Plays Scriabin

Welte Mignon Piano Rolls (1910)
Prelude Op. 11 No. 1
Prelude Op. 11 No. 2
Prelude Op. 11 No. 13
Prelude Op. 11 No. 14
Prelude Op. 22 No. 1
Mazurka Op. 40 No. 2
Désir Op. 57 no. 1
Etude Op. 8 No. 12
Poem Op. 32 No. 1

Sonata Fantasie No. 2, Op.19
Hupfeld Phonola recording (1908)

Sonata No. 3 Op. 23
Hupfeld piano rolls (1908)

Some Recordings of Piano Music by Alexander Scriabin

Vers la flamme, op.72
Vladimir Sofronitsky, piano (recorded in 1946)

Sonata Fantasy No. 2, Op. 19
Samuel Feinberg, piano (recorded in 1950s)

Sonata No. 3, Op. 23
Vitaly Margulis, piano

Sonata No. 4, Op. 30
Emil Gilels, piano (recorded live in London in 1957)

Sonata No. 5, Op. 53
Samuel Feinberg, piano (recorded in 1948)

Vladimir Sofronitsky, piano (life recording 1955)

Sonata No. 6, Op. 62
Boris Lvov, piano

Sonata No. 7, Op. 64 "White Mass"
Arcadi Volodos, piano

Sonata No. 9, Op. 68 "Black Mass"
Vladimir Sofnonitsky, piano (life recording)

Heinrich Neuhaus plays Scriabin Sonata No. 10 Op. 70 (recorded in 1953)

Some Recordings of Orchestral Music by Alexander Scriabin

Symphony No.1 in E major
Russian National Orchestra and the Moscow Conservatory Chamber Choir
Mikhail Pletnev, conductor
Svetlana Shilova, mezzo-soprano
Mikhail Gubsky, tenor

The Poem of Ecstasy (Le Poème de l'extase), Op 54
USSR State Symphony Orchestra
Evegeny Svetlanov, conductor
Live recording (1968)

The Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54 (Symphonic Poem, Symphony No. 4) (Le Poème de l'extase)
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Mravinsky, conductor
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra (Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra)
Recorded 22 December 1958, in Moscow [Melodiya]

Prométhée ou le Poème du feu / Prometheus or the Poem of Fire, Op. 60
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Anatol Ugorski, piano
Pierre Boulez, conductor
Duain Wolfe

Piano Music by Alexander Scriabin

— Noktyurn, A♭, 1881–2

— Canon, d, 1883

Op. 1 Valse, f, 1885

— Fuga, 1885–6

— Mazurka, C, 1886

— Sonata-fantaziya/Sonata fantasie, g♯, 1886

— Val′s/Valse, c♯, 1886 [labelled op.6 no.1]

— Val′s/Valse, D♭, 1886

— Variatsii na temu Yegorovoy [Variations on a Theme by Mlle Yegorova], 1887

— Sonata, e♭, 1887–9

Op. 2 Trois pièces, 1886–9
Etude C-sharp minor, Prélude B major, Impromptu à la Mazur

— Stranitsa iz al′boma Monigetti/Feuillet d'album de Monighetti, A♭, 1889

Op. 3 Ten Mazurkas, 1889

— Mazurka, F, ?1889

— Mazurka, b, ?1889

Op. 4 Allegro appassionato [after Sonata, e♭, movt 1], 1892

Op. 5 Two Nocturnes, 1885–90

Op. 6 Sonata no.1, F minor, 1892

Op. 7 Dva eksprompta v vide mazurki/Deux impromptus à la mazur, 1892

Op. 8 Dvenadtsat′ etyudov/Douze études, 1894

Op. 9 Prelyud i noktyurn dlya odnoy levoy rukoy/Prélude et nocturne pour la main gauche seule, 1894

Op. 10 Dva eksprompta/Deux impromptus, 1894

Op. 11 Dvadtsat′ chetïre prelyudii/Vingt quatre préludes, 1888–96

Op. 12 Dva eksprompta/Deux impromptus, 1895

Op. 13 Shest′ prelyudiy/Six préludes, 1895

Op. 14 Dva eksprompta/Deux impromptus, 1895

Op. 15 Pyat′ prelyudiy/Cinq préludes, 1895–6

Op. 16 Pyat′ prelyudiy/Cinq préludes, 1894–5

Op. 17 Sem′ prelyudiy/Sept préludes, 1895–6

Op. 18 Kontsertnaya allegro/Allegro de concert, 1896

Op. 19 Sonata no.2 ‘Sonata-fantaziya/Sonate-fantasie’, g♯, 1892–7

Op. 21 Polonez/Polonaise, b♭, 1897

Op. 22 Chetïre prelyudii/Quatre préludes, 1897

Op. 23 Sonata no.3, f♯, 1897

Op. 25 Devyat′ mazurek/Neuf mazurkas, 1898–9

Op. 27 Dve prelyudii/Deux préludes, 1900

Op. 28 Fantaziya/Fantasie, b, 1900

Op. 30 Sonata no.4, F♯, 1903

Op. 31 Chetïre prelyudii/Quatre préludes, 1903

Op. 32 Dve poemï/Deux poèmes, F♯, D, 1903

Op. 33 Chetïre prelyudii/Quatre préludes, 1903

Op. 34 Tragicheskaya poema/Poème tragique, B♭, 1903

Op. 35 Tri prelyudii/Trois préludes, 1903

Op. 36 Satanicheskaya poema/Poème satanique, C, 1903

Op. 37 Chetïre prelyudii/Quatre préludes, 1903

Op. 38 Val′s/Valse, A♭, 1903

Op. 39 Chetïre prelyudii/Quatre préludes, 1903

Op. 40 Dve mazurki/Deux mazurkas, 1903

Op. 41 Poema/ Poème, D♭, 1903

Op. 42 Vosem′ etyudov/Huit études, 1903

Op. 44 Dve poemï/Deux poèmes, 1904

Op. 45 Tri p′yesï: Listok iz al′boma/Feuillet d'album; Fantasticheskaya poema/Poème fantasque; Prelyud/Prélude, 1904

Op. 46 Skertso [Scherzo], C, 1905

Op. 47 Quasi-valse, F, 1905

Op. 48 Chetïre prelyudii/Quatre préludes, 1905

Op. 49 Tri p′yesï: Etyud/Etude; Prelyud/Prélude, Gryozï/Rêverie

Op. 51 Chetïre p′yesï: Khrupkost′/Fragilité; Prelyudiya/Prélude; Okrïlyonnaya poema/Poème ailé; Tanets tomleniya/Danse languide, 1906

— Prelyudiya [Prelude], F♯, 1907

Op. 52 Tri p′yesï: Poema/Poème; Zagadka/Enigme; Poema tomleniya/Poème languide, 1907

Op. 53 Sonata no.5, 1907

Op. 56 Chetïre p′yesï: Prelyudiya/Prélude; Ironiya/Ironies; Nyuansï/Nuances; Etyud/Etude, 1908

Op. 57 Dve p′yesï: Zhelaniye/Désir; Laska v tantse/Caresse dansée, 1908

Op. 58 Listok iz al′boma/Feuillet d'album, 1910

Op. 59 Dve p′yesï/Deux pièces: Poema/Poème; Prelyudiya/Prélude, 1910

Op. 61 Poema-noktyurn/Poème-nocturne, 1911–12

Op. 62 Sonata no.6, 1911–12

Op. 63 Dve poemï/Deux poèmes: Maska/Masque; Strannost′/Etrangeté, 1911–12

Op. 64 Sonata no.7, 1911–12 [known as the ‘White Mass’]

Op. 65 Tri etyuda/Trois études, 1911–12

Op. 66 Sonata no.8, 1912–13

Op. 67 Dve prelyudii/Deux préludes, 1912–13

Op. 68 Sonata no.9, 1912–13 [known as the ‘Black Mass’]

Op. 69 Dve poemï/Deux poèmes, 1912–13

Op. 70 Sonata no.10, 1912–13

Op. 71 Dve poemï/Deux poèmes, 1914

Op. 72 K plameni, poema/Vers la flamme, poème, 1914

Op. 73 Dva tantsa/Deux danses: Girlyandï/Guirlandes; Tyomnïye ogni/Flammes sombres, 1914

Op. 74 Pyat′ prelyudii/Cinq préludes, 1914

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