1872–1915 · Russia · Romantic
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (25 December 1871 [6 January 1872] – 14 [27] April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist. Already at five he could play the piano, and he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in Vasily Safonov's piano class; throughout his life he wrote mainly for solo piano — études, preludes, sonatas and poems. For a player, he stands out for a vivid harmonic language that grew ever more complex from early works close to Chopin.
Alexander Scriabin was born on 25 December 1871 (6 January 1872) in Moscow, into a noble family. His father, Nikolai Alexandrovich Scriabin, was at the time a student at Moscow University and later became a diplomat and an active state councillor. His mother, Lyubov Petrovna (née Shchetinina), was a pianist and graduated with distinction from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in the class of Theodor Leschetizky.
Scriabin was a year old when his mother died of tuberculosis while undergoing treatment in the Tyrol. At the end of 1878 his father was posted to serve at the embassy in Constantinople, and care of the boy was taken up by his grandmother Elizaveta Ivanovna, her sister Maria Ivanovna Podchertkova (who became Sasha's godmother) and his grandfather, artillery lieutenant colonel Alexander Ivanovich Scriabin; his aunt, Lyubov Alexandrovna, also took part in raising him. His father's second wife was later the Italian Olga Ilyinichna Fernandez, and five more children were born of that marriage, among them a daughter, Ksenia.
The Scriabins' nobility was not an old one: the composer's great-grandfather, Ivan Alekseevich Scriabin, began life as a soldier's son from Tula and only gained a military order for bravery in the battle of Friedland, and hereditary nobility later. Scriabin was also connected, at a distance, to his mother's musical circle: Anton Rubinstein had once been Lyubov Petrovna's teacher at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and called her his "daughter"; learning of her death and of her son, he took an interest in the boy and asked his aunt not to force Sasha to play or compose against his will. According to contemporaries, Lyubov Petrovna herself performed Liszt and Chopin remarkably well — the same composers who later became points of reference for her son.
Scriabin could already play the piano at five, and his interest in composing came later. As the Scriabins were a military family, the boy was placed, by tradition, in the Second Moscow Cadet Corps, which he finished in 1889. Having chosen music for himself, he took private lessons first with Georgy Konyus, then with Nikolai Zverev — the same piano teacher the young Sergei Rachmaninoff had — and with Sergei Taneyev, studying music theory.
Scriabin entered the conservatory while still in his last year at the Cadet Corps: he studied piano with Vasily Safonov and composition with Anton Arensky. Things did not work out with Arensky, and in 1891 he was expelled from the composition class for poor progress. A year later, in 1892, he nonetheless finished the piano course brilliantly and received the Small Gold Medal; Rachmaninoff, who graduated from the conservatory the same year, received the Great Medal, having also passed composition successfully.
Having finished the conservatory, Scriabin was counting on a career as a solo pianist, but in 1891 he damaged his right hand and lost the ability to perform; later, the hand's movement returned to him.
Scriabin's first appearance as a pianist came in 1894, in Saint Petersburg, where he played pieces of his own to a warm response. The publisher Mitrofan Belyayev, whose catalogue also included Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov, began that same year to pay Scriabin to compose music for his publishing house.
In August 1897 Scriabin married the pianist Vera Isakovich at the Varvarinsky church in Nizhny Novgorod. As soon as his hand healed, the couple went abroad, where he supported the family by giving concerts of his own works, and in 1898 they returned to Russia.
In September 1898 Scriabin was invited to become a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, and in 1901–1902 he also taught at the women's Ekaterininsky Institute; in 1903 he gave up teaching because it distracted him too much from his own composing.
In these same years children were born into the family: in July 1898, a daughter, Rimma, who died at the age of seven; in 1900, a daughter, Elena, who later became the wife of the pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky; in 1901, a daughter, Maria; and in 1902, a son, Lev, who likewise died at the age of seven.
Scriabin grew close to Tatiana Fyodorovna Schlözer, niece of the conservatory professor Paul de Schlözer, at the end of 1902; his class had earlier been attended by Vera Isakovich too, but he never formally married Tatiana Fyodorovna. The next few years, up to 1910, were spent largely outside Russia: the composer lived for long stretches in France and then in Brussels, on rue de la Réforme, earning his living from concerts. One such trip — a tour of the United States in 1906–1907 — was arranged by his former teacher Safonov, and Scriabin's playing made a strong impression on audiences there.
In 1907, having settled in Lausanne, Scriabin took part in concerts arranged by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was then promoting Russian music in the West.
After returning to Moscow, Scriabin gave up neither concerts nor composing. In the summer of 1911 he lived with his family at a dacha on the Obraztsovo-Karpovo estate in Serpukhovsky Uyezd, Moscow Governorate — the ideas for his Sixth and Seventh piano sonatas took shape there. He last appeared before an audience on 2/15 April 1915, in the Small Hall of the conservatory in Petrograd.
The cause of death was sepsis, brought on by a carbuncle that had formed on his upper lip. Scriabin was buried in late April 1915 at the Novodevichy Cemetery, and a great many people came to see him off; among them was his teacher Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev, who caught a chill at the funeral and died of it.
Scriabin spent his last years in a Moscow apartment at 11 Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane. On 10 October 1918 a museum dedicated to him opened there — the initiative came from Tatiana Fyodorovna Schlözer, and Alexander Goldenweiser and Anatoly Lunacharsky helped her obtain a protective charter for it. The museum officially opened to visitors in 1922 and still receives them today.
In his early works Scriabin deliberately followed Chopin, turning to the same genres: études, waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, impromptus, a polonaise, sonatas, a piano concerto. Even then his own voice was showing through, and later he turned to the genre of the poem, both for piano and for orchestra: three symphonies (1900, 1902, 1904), The Poem of Ecstasy (1907), and Prometheus (1910). His music carries a restless, searching quality; its harmony grows gradually more complex, yet its form remains almost always clear and complete.
Scriabin wrote almost exclusively for piano and for orchestra, without seeking variety of forces. The development of his style is easiest to trace through his ten piano sonatas: the earliest of them are still close to Chopin and, in part, to Liszt, while the last five carry no key signature at all.
Prometheus (1910) was the first work in history whose score included a part for a light keyboard — this is how Scriabin brought colour music into music. He never managed to realise a far larger plan, Mysterium, meant to unite sound, light, scent and movement. At the end of the twentieth century, drawing on Scriabin's sketches and verses, the composer Alexander Nemtin turned only the opening part of that plan, the Prefatory Action, into a finished musical work.
Scriabin's hands were small — by some accounts, he could barely stretch to a ninth — but this did not stop him from becoming a noted pianist of his time. Among the twentieth-century pianists particularly associated with his music are Heinrich Neuhaus, Samuil Feinberg, Vladimir Sofronitsky and Vladimir Horowitz.
Dana-piano.kz has a selection of seven Scriabin pieces for solo piano. Four of them — the Prelude Op. 11 and three preludes from Op. 16 — are marked as upper intermediate and belong to his earlier period, still close to Chopin. The other three — the Prelude Op. 16 No. 2, the Etude Op. 2 No. 1, and the Prelude Op. 59 No. 2 — are advanced, and suit players who are already comfortable with the Romantic repertoire and want to try Scriabin's more complex harmonic language.