Scriabin biography pdf

Alexander Scriabin: A Life in Conflict Author: Roozbeh Tabandeh Editor: Oona Ostrowski This article was first published in Concordia journal of art history, Vol XIV, April 2018 Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) (fig. 1) is one of the most controversial and problematic composers of the twentieth century, not only because of his compositional techniques and personal harmonic language, but also for his ideological and (pseudo-) philosophical beliefs, as well as his extravagant lifestyle. The variety of critical and musicological perspectives about his character and his music portray a love-hate relationship between the artist, his audience, and scholars. Even with a short glance at the repertoire of papers written on his music and style in the past one hundred years, it becomes evident that each argument provides a basis for a responding counterargument. This essay does not aim to add to the debate of the so-called ‘mass of controversies.’ Instead, it seeks to furnish a platform to read some of these opposing arguments in parallel, and through this survey, provide a chance to put the facts together. The cited literature includes a variety of texts, from newspaper reviews to biographies, academic articles, and books. The dates of publication range from the composer’s time, moving towards the Russian revolution, postwar period, post-modern era, and more recently, books published in the twenty-first century, up to 2017. The parallel reading of these sources provides a chance to observe waves of acceptance and rejection of the composer in relation to the socio-political revolutions that have swept through the past century. Scriabin’s spiritual assertions had a significant impact on his popularity in Russia, Europe, and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the same mystic beliefs, paired with some other incidents that will be discussed, resulted in a revitalization of his music in the second half of the twentieth century. The primary goal of this paper is to re-examine Scriabin’s mindset in the musical context of post-war aesthetics up to the twenty-first century. This article aims not to examine exclusively the composer’s mystical beliefs, but also their impact on his artistic output. A century full of extravagant artists with eccentric behaviors and ideas situates Scriabin’s beliefs and provides a fair and impartial basis for their judgement. Finally, the foremost area of interest in this essay, besides the ideologies themselves, lies in the relationship between the composer’s mystic beliefs and his musical language, and the impact this connection had on his popularity. It might come to mind that today, a hundred years after his death, there exists an overwhelming amount of studies and analyses, as well as enough historical distance, to provide a solid and conclusive judgement on the subject matter. Nevertheless, despite having access to all these available resources, the case of Scriabin remains a controversial one because of conflicting points in his aesthetics and philosophy. In most cases, a composer’s explanations or theoretical justifications tend to remove obscurity and provide a better understanding of their style, the complexities of their aesthetics, or their compositional techniques. However, in the case of Scriabin, it seems that his spiritual reflections and explanations were intended to enhance this ambiguity rather than remove it. According to Faubion Bowers (1917-1999), Scriabin always asserted that his music adhered to strict laws, although he refused to provide any explanation. Bowers refers to an anecdote from Alexander Goldenveizer, who said that “one day [Scriabin] invited Taneyev (Scriabin’s teacher) and me to his apartment so he could explain his theories of composition. We arrived, and he dilly-dallied for a long time. Finally, he said he had a headache and would explain it all another day. That another day never came.”1 In the absence of technical clarifications, Scriabin exhausted his friends and audiences with semi-philosophical ideas about the apocalyptic role of the artist to unite the world, which furnished a fertile ground for skepticism in both Europe and the United States regarding the real value of his artistic output. In the first half of the twentieth century, his ideology and mystic beliefs had a deprecating effect on his reputation as a composer of serious art music. As the historian Martin Cooper (b. 1928) describes, “Scriabin, like many other idealists, was occasionally guilty of a bombastic rhetoric which leads even his admirers to mistrust a little his apparently sincere utterances for purely emotional and illogical reasons.”2 According to many biographers, Scriabin believed that the whole universe was waiting to be united by means of art in the hands of a Messiah, and, as Cooper indicates, “he was convinced that this Messiah was himself.”3 Cooper concludes that, “highly strung to the verge of a perpetual neuroticism, he became the victim of an idée fixe which he could not afford, in the end, to renounce, for he had staked so much upon it.”4 These “illogical reasons” were not acceptable even for the admirers of his time such as Arthur Eaglefield Hull (1876-1928). One year after Scriabin’s death, Hull wrote a glorifying survey of his piano works. The article starts with this phrase: “No revolution in musical art—perhaps in the whole history of the arts in general—is more striking than that effected by Alexander Scriabin, the great musical genius of the Russia of today.”5 Worship of Scriabin’s art is apparent in every section of Hull’s essay. However, even within such a piece of glorifying praise, Hull seems to deem the composer’s philosophical inclinations as unnecessary. Later, he criticizes: “But why did he ticket his symphonies with the labels of a queer pseudo-theosophy? I prefer my music without labels and even without titles. Everyone hears music differently, and ought to do so.”6 Paying attention to the dates of articles and books cited until now in this essay (1916, 1935, and 1973) demonstrates a chain of negative reactions among musicologists to Scriabin’s mystic beliefs for much of the twentieth century. Scriabin was not the only prominent Russian mystic individual around the turn of the century. He was born two years after one of the most well-known mysterious characters of the era, Rasputin (1869-1916), who had a close relationship with the Czar’s family and especially the Czarina. Rasputin’s bizarre nature and rapidly increasing influence on the royal family led to his assassination, which happened one year after Scriabin’s death. The existence of such a mysterious character in the highest level of Russian government as well as the superstitious character of the Czarina, which led her to trust Rasputin, are only a few instances among many which prove that Scriabin was not alone. As Cooper indicates: At one extreme society, led by the Czarina herself, surrendered itself the pseudo-religious ravings and the erotic excesses of Rasputin: the other, artists and intellectuals developed a prophetic, apocalyptic sense, dimly foreseeing the near end of the world they knew and the birth of some new era of which social reform and a universal heightening of spirituality were the only two clearly distinguished traits.7 These claims were not far from reality, considering that the October Revolution (1917) and the First World War (1914-1918) were turning points that heavily influenced the socio-political relations of the following century. Cooper continues: “the chief guide and inspirer of this movement was the mystic and philosopher Solovyov; its greatest exponents in the arts were the poet Alexander Alexandrovich Blok and the composer Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin.”8 In the first chapter of the Alexander Scriabin Companion, John Bell Young (1953-2017) claims that, with few exceptions, most of musicologists and historians dismissed the composer’s mystical beliefs as “pathological, egocentric, and unworthy of serious discussion.”9 In his opinion, Boris Fyodorovich Schloezer (1881-1969), a historian and the composer’s brother-inlaw, was the only exception. All others simply viewed Scriabin as “a product of his time and national environment.”10 For the same reason, he is considered as part of the ideologies and the socio-political mechanisms of the Russian empire, which collapsed in the October 1917 revolution, two years after his death. This series of events might have had an overwhelming influence on the image of Scriabin as one of the last leftover Russian romantic artists. For decades after his death, the regulations of the communist party were a huge barrier that blocked the path of many artists, including Scriabin. Much like the fluctuations in popularity of composers Anton Webern (1883-1945), Alban Berg (1885-1935), Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), and Richard Strauss (1864-1949), the nuances of Scriabin’s acceptance were deeply related to political issues of the time, in parallel with aesthetical concerns. Although Scriabin had less to do with the politics himself, his compositional style and especially his ideological justifications provided grounds for the Bolsheviks to find his music to be in opposition with the realistic goals of the Russian Revolution.11 As a result, an extended period of denial began, lasting about four decades. The revival of his music in Europe and the United States happened around the same time as the rise of the counterculture movement in the United States after the 1960s.12 Thus, several decades after his death, the revitalization of romantic paradigms turned the page in favour of both his music and his mystical beliefs. In his article, A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius, Lincoln Ballard (b. 1975) provides a useful calendar of Scriabin’s popularity in the United States. Ballard delineates four extensive periods while describing the relation between public audience, music critics, and the composer. He starts from Joseph Hofmann’s concert of Scriabin preludes in 1898 at Carnegie Hall, which impressed the audience. This first promising opening was followed by a series of shows where Scriabin took on the soloist role in his piano concertos and other individual works until around 1907.13 As Ballard admits: Although he ultimately failed to win over critics, he gained confidence in his public offerings and carved out a modest reputation in the United States…his reputation as an innovative composer and spiritual guru became solidified in the United States in the decade after his death. However, Scriabin’s halcyon days were numbered, and these enthusiastic supporters would soon be drowned out by the noisy protests of critics.14 After this first period of complicated relationship with the critics, Ballard labels the period of 1925–1965 as an “inevitable decline.”15 However, around 1965, with the rise of neo- romanticism in the United States, Scriabin’s music came out of oblivion after four decades. The revitalization of Scriabin’s music was the result of several incidents: one reason, among many, was the impact of his mystic beliefs. As Ballard explains, “the composer’s metaphysical preoccupations, a source of embarrassment only a few years ago, had become a selling point.”16 On January 6, 1972, Carnegie Hall was at capacity, packed with concertgoers for the centennial of Scriabin’s birth. In parallel with the neo-romantic revival, the rise of American Psychedelia from the 1960s onwards seems to be another case in which Scriabin’s association with mysticism and theosophy revived his legacy. These associations “satisfied counterculture members’ curiosity about alternative spiritual practices and his alleged synesthesia bears qualities that resemble the altered states of perception hippies sought through meditation and hallucinogens.”17 Another influential factor was the publication of an analysis of Scriabin’s music in 1984 by music theorist George Perle (1915-2009), although this was not the first published analysis on the subject, Russian analyst Varvara Dernova’s comprehensive essay published in 1948, Scriabin's Harmony, certainly bears mentioning. In Perle’s article, the primary focus is Scriabin’s strange orthography which was simply considered as transcription error by some publishers and has been “corrected” accordingly.18 Perle analyzed Scriabin’s music separately from his beliefs. For him, the lack of clear explanations from composers is commonplace. He even questions any composer’s assertions regarding their own music as he opens the article with the following sentence: “What authority does a composer have as analyst of his music?” He continues later, “we cannot always trust the relevance of the vague and spacious generalities they give us instead [of analysis] or the motivations behind these.”19 By putting the composer’s assertions aside, he provides a detailed explanation to prove the relevance and punctuality of the orthographies in Scriabin’s music. Although Cheong Wai-Ling justified some inaccuracies in Perle’s analysis about a decade later, it was through Perle’s explicit rationalizations that Scriabin’s music regained academic attention. The proof nourished a counterattack against those critics like Gerald Abraham (1904-1988), who “mercilessly mocked ‘the whole of the later development of Scriabinesque harmony’ as ‘a mere side-track in the history of music as a whole.’”20 Perle’s article was an example of similar efforts to prove that, although Scriabin’s aesthetics were mixed with ambiguous and even suspicious messianic assertions, the music is strict and well organized in itself. This argument paved the way for studies of Scriabin’s music that are disconnected from his personal life and beliefs. Indeed, for many analysts of the past century, the music can be analyzed separately from the man. As mentioned earlier, in many cases scholars writing about Scriabin either distrusted or did not show interest in his prophecies for one reason or another. In his massive book on Scriabin’s music, the analyst James Baker (b. 1930) believes that as we become more distanced from the composer’s time, it becomes more difficult to comprehend Scriabin’s messianic character and beliefs; today, we have no choice but to refer only to his music to discover the truth. However, even Baker does not deny the impact of the composer’s ideologies on his musical language. As he declares: “Although his visions were the primary motivation for his experimentation and innovation, what remains today is his music…Much as he might have been disappointed; it is through the study of his musical structures that we can best know him today.”21 Conversely, some historians like Young believe that one cannot study Scriabin’s music outside the context of his mystic beliefs. Young finds it unacceptable that “even theorists favourably disposed toward the music have chosen to toe academia’s official party line: the music, not the mysticism, is all that matters.”22 In his opinion, those who ridiculed the composer for his theosophical ideologies and his ideas of combining sound and colour have forgotten that the roots of the same ideas can be traced back to ancient Greece and in this respect, he refers to Friedrich Nietzsche as a source of the quotation. For Young, “in the household of symbolism and psychology, Scriabin’s music is inseparable from the spiritual ideology that informs it. Mystery, sanctity, myth and transfiguration seek symbolic expression in the music of Scriabin— these are the metaphors of his legacy.”23 Richard Taruskin (b. 1945) provides the roots of this perspective in his detailed review of two major Scriabin biographies of the past century: books by James M. Baker and Boris de Schloezer. In the final paragraph of his essay, Taruskin comes to the same conclusion as some did thirty years earlier when he asserts: “Those who have professed to dig deeper have all too often seemed attracted to the music not out of any greater understanding of it, but because in its details it exhibits conspicuous technical ‘progress.’ It is really only those who have taken seriously Scriabin's ‘cosmic hocus-pocus,’ to recall Hugh MacDonald's appreciative comment, to whom Scriabin's music really seems to have spoken.”24 Finally, rather than simply examine the validity of the ideologies themselves, it becomes important to investigate their profound impact on the final artistic output. The history of the twentieth century is a collection of examples of famous strange artistic behaviors from the Dadaists and Surrealists to the Futurists, among others. For instance, in the Manifesto of Futurism (1909), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti declares that: “Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd.”25 As Scriabin asserted to one of his friends: “I cannot understand how to write just music now. How boring! Music, surely, takes on idea and significance when it is linked to a single plan within a whole view of the world.”26 His so-called “cosmic hocuspocus” is neither less rational nor less pertinent than hundreds of thousands of assertions and emotional writings of the artists of the first half of the twentieth century, it can even be regarded as their precursor. Whether valid or invalid, these semi-religious beliefs altered Scriabin’s mental state, bringing him to imagine himself as a creator-god and changing his musical language. Based on Bower’s explanation, the evolution of his aesthetics is highly associated with his various encounters with theosophical texts, including Helena Blavatsky’s book The Key to Theosophy (1889), which he first read in 1905, and later her two-volume manifesto titled The Secret Doctrine (1888).27 As Bowers indicates: “He already knew that sounds had colours, but now he added to his palette Theosophy’s colour for vowel sounds and emotions[:] red for anger, yellow for intellect, green-gray for deceit, black for hatred, etc. All this was according to Theosophy.”28 One other area where the impact of his ideologies seems inevitable is in his harmonic structure. One of the characteristic elements of Scriabin’s harmony is the central role of his mystic chord.29 Although analyzing the harmonic properties of the chord is not the focus here, one must investigate the connection between this compositional strategy and his mental state. As Ballard indicates in a later book, “since Symbolists believe that art imparts divine wisdom and reveals hidden realities, the mystic chord provides a sonic analogue for an alternate existence or a higher state of consciousness. With its harmonic scheme based on unconventional chord relationships, the sonority could be interpreted as transcending consciousness or an approximation of the cosmic world.”30 Although some might not agree with Ballard and disagree with the mystic chord’s supposed ‘mysticism,’ it is hard to deny the fact that the chord is the result of a specific state of mind which was unimaginable in the absence of Scriabin’s spiritual beliefs. The core of the argument here is not the mysteriousness of the mystic chord, as the composer labelled it himself, but its impact on Scriabin’s sound. Musical influences come from diverse sources of inspiration, which are fundamentally different for each composer based on their cultural, political, and social connections. In most cases, the source is not the primary area of importance, and inspiration is not usually enough by itself. Music is the product of the composer’s craftsmanship. Without this essential mastery, inspiration evaporates into thin air. The so-called musical craftsmanship is precisely Scriabin’s area of expertise, as numerous analysts have proven the accuracy and punctuality of his compositional technique and particular harmonic structure. No matter how they are analysed by critical investigations, Scriabin’s spiritual beliefs acted productively and directly influenced his musical concepts. After all, it is not hard to notice the paradox in the aesthetics of the composer asserting that everything in his music has a logic, while at the same time overhanging his compositional concepts with the vague ideologies of theosophical beliefs. These two sources of artistic creation belong to two opposite sides of the intellectual mindset. One has roots in a scholastic and pedagogical perspective which can be considered as an initial sector of the new age around the turn of the nineteenth century, while the other is the antidote to the rational spirit behind modern society which portrays the ambiguity behind the myth and spiritual reflections of ego. However, this essay has aimed to demonstrate that it is through the clash of these opposing components that the aesthetics of Scriabin can be justified retrospectively. Even today, Alexander Scriabin stands at the summit of the list of problematic artists of the past because of the existence of these persisting controversial and conflicting ideologies. Endnotes 1 Faubion Bowers, The New Scriabin, Enigma and Answers (Britain: David & Charles Ltd., 1973), 129. Cooper, "Scriabin's Mystical Beliefs," Music & Letters 16, no. 2 (1935): 114, accessed February 5, 2018, 3 Cooper, "Scriabin's Mystical Beliefs," 112. 4 Ibid., 114. 5 Arthur Eaglefield Hull and Alexander Scriabin, "A Survey of the Pianoforte Works of Scriabin," The Musical Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1916): 601-14, accessed February 5, 2018, 6 Hull and Scriabin, "A Survey of the Pianoforte Works of Scriabin," 609. 7 Cooper, "Scriabin's Mystical Beliefs," 110. 8 Ibid. 9 Lincoln Ballard, Matthew Bengtson, and John Bell Young, The Alexander Scriabin Companion: History, Performance, and Lore. (United States of America: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 2. 10 Ballard, Bengston, and Young, The Alexander Scriabin Companion, 2. 11 Georges Dimitrov, “Music history, Post-romantic to Present” (Music history course lectures at Concordia University music department, Montreal, Quebec, November 2017). 12 Lincoln M. Ballard, "A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius: The U.S. Revival of Alexander Scriabin in the 1960s," American Music 30, no. 2 (2012): 215, accessed February 6, 2018, doi:10.5406/americanmusic.30.2.0194. 13 Ballard, "A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius," 215. 14 Ibid., 197, 201. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 210. 17 Ibid., 214. 18 In editing Scriabin's piano works for Edition 1960s and early seventies, Gunter Philipp briefly mentioned 'orthographical mistakes' contained therein. Cheong Wai-Ling, "Orthography in Scriabin's Late Works," Music Analysis 12, no. 1 (1993): 47, accessed February 10, 2018, doi:10.2307/854075. 19 George Perle, "Scriabin's Self-Analyses," Music Analysis 3, no. 2 (1984): 101, accessed January 30, 2018, doi:10.2307/854313. 20 Ballard, "A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius,"190. 21 James M. Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 270. 22 Ballard, "A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius," 1. 23 Ibid., 12. 24 Richard Taruskin, “Reviewed Works: The Music of Alexander Scriabin by James M. Baker; Scriabin: Artist and Mystic by Boris de Schloezer, Nicolas Slonimsky,” Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988): 168, accessed January 28, 2018, doi:10.2307/745797. 25 Marry Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2001), 186. 26 Bowers, The New Scriabin, Enigma and Answers, 108. 27 Ibid., 122. 28 Ibid. 29 Sabaneiev commented on Scriabin's use of the 'mystic' chord, displaying it as a vertical formation of superimposed fourths: C-F# -Bb-E-A-D. This particular spelling and spacing of the 'mystic' chord has since acquired a conventional status in the literature. Wai-Ling, "Orthography in Scriabin's Late Works," 60. 30 Ballard, "A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius," 203. 2 Martin Bibliography Baker, James M. 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