This week we return to the field of Classical music. This time with a Russian composer who was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff and in fact they both had the same piano teacher. This week’s composer is Alexander Scriabin. Born in 1872, his mother was as Concert pianist, who unfortunately died when Scriabin was just an infant. He was raised by his grandmother but obviously inherited some musical genes, since he exhibited talent at the piano at an early age. He enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory and graduated when he was 20 years old.
He began to compose in earnest after graduation writing all sorts of musical forms from piano solo music, like sonatas, to grand orchestral symphonies. By 1897 when age 25, Scriabin had become notable enough that he was hired to teach at the Moscow Conservatory and he got married at the same time. Scriabin was a great admirer of Chopin and much of his music exhibits the same kind of melancholy as Chopin’s music. Soon the allure of Europe and its reputation as the hotbed of music found Scriabin and his wife moving to Switzerland in 1903. While Switzerland was a strange choice of residence having no musical venues, it was a quick train ride to Paris and Vienna where the action was, and briefly living in Paris for less than a year.
The emotional tug to return to Mother Russia was strong enough so that he returned to Moscow in 1909 to continue to write music and perform. His reputation at this point in his life was significant and positive – the high point of his musical life. However, Scriabin was always frail and sickly and died in Moscow in 1915 at the young age of 43 from a sepsis blood infection. Rachmaninoff was a pallbearer at Scriabin’s funeral and subsequently went on tour playing only Scriabin’s music. This solidified forever the genius of Scriabin in the minds of the public
To illustrate Scriabin’s music I have chosen his Etude in C#m op2 #1, written when he was 15. Ordinarily I would have picked a YouTube of Vladimir Horowitz playing this piece but could not find one with a good audio track so I picked Evgeny Kissin playing. As has been pointed out in previous Great Music chapters, music is a very personal thing for everyone and I’m sure that others who try to curate a list of Great Music will come up with an entirely different list. However, I am trying to expose TMV’ers to music they might not otherwise ever listen to.
Scriabin- Etude in C#m, op2 #1
Photo by unidentified pre-revolutionary russian Photograf (1905) – 1979, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24931520