Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus: Poem of Fire: In Full Score

by Alexander Scriabin

In the early years of the twentieth century, when vital new forces were revolutionizing the arts, Russian-born Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) was among the visionary pioneers who sought a new musical language. Scriabin began the process of a complete break with all musical conventions at least a decade before the advances of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. By 1905 he was immersed in a search for a way to express, in sound, his obsession with mystical and theosophical ideals.
Scriabin's last two orchestral works were the products of a virtual delirium of composing. Simultaneously refining his collection of verses called "Poem of Ecstasy" and the related symphony, Scriabin never forgot the rapture of composing this work about creation and "I gasp for breath, but oh, what bliss! The very meter kindles the meaning…"
" Poem of Fire," Scriabin's last and most revolutionary symphony, portrays humanity's epic journey from the beginning of time to the wondrous self-realization that followed the gift of fire and light, which made creative vision possible. Massively scored, "Prometheus" incorporates a "color organ" to bathe the performance space in a vast interplay of colored lights.
For the music professional and every student of composition, orchestration, and conducting, both scores are strikingly original and instructive. Equally fascinating are Scriabin's approach to composition, the extraordinary sonorities of his orchestra, and his fanciful, often supercharged performance instructions that replace conventional words for tempo, mood, and expression.

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Alexander Nikolayevich Skrjabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин) was a Russian composer and pianist. In his early years he was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and wrote works in a relatively tonal, late Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his highly influential contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical language, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also influenced by theosophy. He is considered by some to be the main Russian Symbolist composer. His son, Julian Scriabin, a child prodigy, was a composer and pianist in his own right, but he died by drowning at the age of eleven in Ukraine.

Scriabin was one of the most innovative and controversial of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that "no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed." Leo Tolstoy described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius." Scriabin's oeuvre exerted a salient influence on the music world over time, and influenced composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Karol Szymanowski. However, Scriabin's importance in the Russian and then Soviet musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined after his death. According to his biographer Faubion Bowers, "No one was more famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death." Nevertheless, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated since the 1970s, and his ten published sonatas for piano and other works have been increasingly championed, garnering significant acclaim in recent years.

Reviews

[Christopher Waller · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

Scriabin is the quintessential mad scientist of music. The man proclaimed "I am God" in his diaries (though he supposedly meant it as an expression of profound humility, as is the mystic's tradition). He wrote his own symbolist poetry to accompany his extravagant works. He died while working on an enormous multimedia presentation he claimed would bring about the apocalypse, because he wasn't careful about treating a boil on his lip which ended up giving him blood poisoning. A real character!

The Poem of Fire really does sound like fire, with all that ephemeral heat rippling away, but it never transcends its impressionist technique. The Poem of Ecstasy has that outrageous (and unintentionally lewd) crescendo-to-nowhere, but it's the little moment of (post-coital? I'm only mostly joking...) bliss which follows -- in which the rising leap is finally resolved to a blazing major chord -- which marks the crowning achievement of Scriabin's orchestral output.