Music in the 19th-century Europe has gone through vast changes and transformation, especially towards the end of the century. However, this evolution has begun to take place subtly even as early as in the mid-19th-century, where the “Music of the Future” group, led by Wagner and Liszt have played an important role in it. The decades from 1900 to 1920 especially, saw important changes in the very language of music. Traditional tonal organization gave way to new forms of musical expression and many of the foundations of modern music were laid. This attenuation of tonality from this group was part of a tradition that extended from the mid-19th into the early 20th-century through Schoenberg and his pupils and beyond. But Busoni, Debussy, Bartok and Stravinsky later reinterpreted this tonal expansion, whereas Scriabin, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Szymanowski took a different path, the path to atonality. As a result, a new “period”, Modernism emerged, as most scholars called it, was a multi-faceted but distinct and continuous tradition within 20th-century composition, which took shape as a historical phenomenon between 1883 and 1914.

In 19th-century Russia, many composers committed to a positivistic nationalism, for example Balakirev, or positivistic realism, such as Dargomizhsky and Musorgsky; and by the end of 19th-century, composers like Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov and Taneyev committed themselves to a more “classical” academicism. It can be said that every Russian composer during that period, except Scriabin, explicitly rejected Wagner as an artistic role model; while Scriabin not only embraced him, but also attempted to surpass him. The beginning of the 20th-century, at the period of around 1910, marked a division between the old Nationalist school and the rising avant-garde. However, Russian folk song still plays an important role, not only had it influenced the Nationalist composers, but also continue to influence the Modernist composers, especially in their pitch schemes and scale patterns, and their use of dominant type chords in nonfunctional and even final positions. Nevertheless, Scriabin paid no attention whatever to nations or nationalism spirit, and he was rarely characterized in national terms. Only a few of his works, as identified by Roberts, were influenced by folk song, for example, in the opening melody of his Study Op. 42 No. 2, and the modal passages in his Prelude Op. 74 No. 2.

Many of Scriabin’s works are written for the piano, and only a small number for the orchestra, but significantly important. It is generally acknowledged that an important influence on the early piano works of Scriabin was the music of Chopin and Liszt, both of whom were interested in East European folk music and its modal inflections. In addition, Scriabin also includes music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the etude, the prelude and the mazurka. His works in this early period are not stylistically unusual, and though the harmony is chromatic, it is not daring; but the use of ostinatos is a particularly Russian trait in itself, often combined with other layered and rhythmically independent voices. Apart from his earliest pieces, his works are strikingly original, especially the mid and late-period music, which employed very unusual harmonies and textures. Scriabin’s compositions can roughly be divided into four divisions, or periods, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: The four periods in Scriabin’s life

The change in Scriabin’s styles started from about 1903, when he gave up a teaching post in Moscow to devote himself entirely to composing, mostly in Brussels, and performing. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1910 when Scriabin began work on a series of compositions for piano, and then he developed his own harmonic language and original constructional methods. The development of Scriabin’s style can be followed in his ten piano sonatas: the earliest are in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom, which shows the influence of Chopin and Liszt, but the later ones moved into a new territory, where the last five were being written with no key signatures. Single-movement structures became the norm. Many passages in them can be said to be atonal, though from 1903 through 1908, “tonal unity was almost imperceptibly replaced by harmonic unity”. According to Samson, the sonata-form of Sonata No. 5 has some meaning to the work’s tonal structure, but in Sonata No. 6 and Sonata No. 7, formal tensions are created by the absence of harmonic contrast and “between the cumulative momentum of the music, usually achieved by textural rather than harmonic means, and the formal constraints of the tripartite mould”; while the later sonatas such as Sonata No. 9, employs a much more flexible sonata-form. His harmonic language, in the three pieces (Op. 58, Op. 59 Nos. 1 and 2) of 1910 for example, Scriabin gradually increased the range of intervals above the root, which could be allowed in his chords. As a result, in the context of dominant and whole-tone sound, the major 9th is easily absorbed without the need for resolution.

Modernity, according to Hull, reveals itself in two ways in music: by texture, style of handling, and also by the subject matter or the thought itself. Scriabin’s music manifested itself through these two ways – in the texture and the style of his later period, he demands a new language, a new scale, a new way of listening and composing; while in the subject matter, Scriabin has been wholeheartedly indulging in mysticism, based on Theosophist philosophies, and attempted to bring Art, Religion, Philosophy, and even Science into closer relationship in his music. An aspect of Scriabin’s artistic persona, which connects him with Nietzsche and the Russian symbolists, is his solipsism, particularly evident in his diaries, as witnessed by this excerpt from 1905:

… I am God!
I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life.
I am the boundary, I am the peak.

… I am God!
I am the blossoming, I am the bliss,
I am all-consuming passion, all engulfing,
I am fire enveloping the universe,
Reducing it to chaos…

Although scholarly opinion has been split on the question of whether Scriabin was significantly influenced by Theosophy, his Poem of Ecstasy is originated as a literary project, where the text is replete with Nietzschean subjects: the sun, the heights, beauty, acceptance of both suffering and joy, and the desire to be God. In addition, according to Baker, the structure of Scriabin’s Preludes Op. 59 No. 2 has the geometrical proportions of a crystal, which might well have mystical ramifications. For Theosophists, the crystal is the perfect reflection of cosmic principles, and it gives us the sense that “we have in some mysterious way penetrated to a plane higher than the purely physical.”

From 1900 onwards, Scriabin became more and more deeply drawn into a mystical philosophy of art, “a fusion of all the arts, but not a theatrical one like Wagner”s’. “Art”, he said, “must unite with philosophy and religion in an indivisible whole to form a new gospel, which will replace the old Gospel we have outlived”. In his last orchestral work, Prometheus: Poem of Fire, one of his most daring compositions, Scriabin carried his harmonic language a stage further to the very brink of atonality. This was a preliminary study for the long contemplated “Mysterium” in which Scriabin never lived to compose- a liturgical act combining dancing, music, poetry, colors, and scents.

Scriabin also rarely wrote music that was either whole-tone or octatonic in the strictest sense, even though the whole-tone scale had been used in Russian music since Glinka; and the octatonic scale was in particular vogue in St. Petersburg, around the turn of 20th-century. Rather, he combined the two, and thus arrived at his own later language. Scriabin’s musical language in this respect is in the use of “mystic chord”, also known as Promethean chord, which is based on dominant and French Sixth chords (c – f# – bb – e’ – a’ – d”). The mystic chord was for a long time regarded as the starting point of all of Scriabin’s later experiments, together with his theosophy, colour and supposed effeminacy, contributed greatly to his mystique. It is interesting to note that, when this chord is presented horizontally, while it is neither whole-tone nor octatonic, it contains elements of both. Later in his five Preludes, Op. 74, Scriabin introduced a profusion of foreign chromatic notes in his mystic chord, that he reached a kind of twelve-note music, though it is certainly not the Schoenbergian kind, nor atonal, and these preludes also contain a synthesis of symmetry, traditional modality, tonality and chromaticism. The scales that Scriabin applied in his Op. 74 Preludes formed a very important basis in which Messiaen derived for his modes of limited transposition about a decade later.

Scriabin’s association of color and music is one of his attempts to combine Art and Science. However, the difficulty in applying color to music is increased by the confusion of ideas in its manner of relationship. Some connect the various colors with the various single notes, while others will give certain colors to certain key. Scriabin would connect certain colors to specific keys. Indeed, influenced also by his theosophical beliefs, Scriabin developed it towards what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance. In his autobiographical, Rachmaninov recorded a conversation he had with Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin’s association of color and music. Rachmaninov was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colours; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colors involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. According to Rimsky-Korsakov, a passage in Rachmaninov’s opera, The Miserly Knight, supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Later Scriabin revealed that it is Rachmaninov’s intuition that has unconsciously followed the laws, which the very existence he has tried to deny. In his Prometheus: Poem of Fire, Scriabin includes a part for clavier à lumières, also known as the Luce, which was a color organ designed specifically for the performance of the symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected colored-light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. In the original score, there is a supplementary stave denominated for Luce, where there are musical notes corresponding to the colors determined by the composer.

In his book, Musical Poetics, Stravinsky asks a question, which at the same time requires an answer and displays a great deal of admiration: “After all, is it possible to link a musician like Scriabin to any tradition? Where did he come from? Who are his predecessors?” This question is a touchstone for all of those who look at the work of this intriguing composer. It is regrettable that Scriabin’s place in music history has never been fully understood or appreciated. This phenomenon is partly due to the indifferent of Scriabin to widen the horizons of his art; rather they grew gradually narrower, and focused more and more closely on himself. Regardless of what one might call him, whether a mystic, a philosopher, a madman, a genius or a visionary, he is indeed a 20th-century modernist, who has influenced many composers in Russia and abroad.