Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин [ɐlʲɪˈksandr nʲɪkəˈɫaɪvʲɪtɕ ˈskrʲæbʲɪn]; 6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871] – 27 April [O.S. 14 April] 1915) 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.
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (; Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин [ɐlʲɪˈksandr nʲɪkəˈɫaɪvʲɪtɕ ˈskrʲæbʲɪn]; 6 January 1872 [O.S. 25 December 1871] – 27 April [O.S. 14 April] 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist. In his beforehand 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 severely influential contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical language, which accorded in the broadcast of his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and united colours considering 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.
Scriabin was one of the most open-minded and most controversial of early ahead of its time 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 drying of genius.” Scriabin’s oeuvre exerted a salient influence upon the music world more than time, and influenced composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Karol Szymanowski. However, Scriabin’s importance in the Russian and later Soviet musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined after his death. According to his biographer Bowers, “No one was more well-known during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death.” Nevertheless, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated back the 1970s, and his ten published sonatas for piano and further works have been increasingly championed, garnering significant acclaim in recent years.
Scriabin was born in Moscow into a Russian noble family on Christmas Day 1871 according to the Julian Calendar. His daddy Nikolai Aleksandrovich Scriabin (1849–1915), then a student at the Moscow State University, belonged to a modest noble relations founded by Scriabin’s great-grandfather Ivan Alekseevich Scriabin, a simple soldier from Tula who made a brilliant military career and was settled hereditary nobility in 1819. Alexander’s paternal grandmother Elizaveta Ivanovna Podchertkova, daughter of a captain lieutenant Ivan Vasilievich Podchertkov, came from a rich noble home of the Novgorod Governorate. His mommy Lyubov Petrovna Scriabina (née Schetinina) (1850–1873) was a concert pianist and a former student of Theodor Leschetizky. She belonged to the ancient dynasty that traced its history urge on to Rurik; its founder, Semyon Feodorovich Yaroslavskiy nicknamed Schetina (from the Russian schetina meaning stubble), was the great-grandson of Vasili, Prince of Yaroslavl. She died of tuberculosis taking into account Alexander was isolated a year old.
After her death Nikolai Scriabin completed tuition in the Turkish language in St. Petersburg’s Institute of Oriental Languages and left for Turkey. Like whatever of his relatives, he followed a military lane and served as a military attaché in the status of Active State Councillor; he was appointed an honorary consul in Lausanne during his progressive years. Alexander’s father left the infant Sasha (as he was known) with his grandmother, great aunt, and aunt. Scriabin’s father would innovative remarry, giving Scriabin a number of half-brothers and sisters. His aunt Lyubov (his father’s unmarried sister) was an amateur pianist who documented Sasha’s ahead of time life until the get older he met his first wife. As a child, Scriabin was frequently exposed to piano playing, and anecdotal references describe him demanding that his aunt sham for him.
Apparently precocious, Scriabin began building pianos after inborn fascinated bearing in mind piano mechanisms. He sometimes gave away pianos he had built to house guests. Lyubov portrays Scriabin as unconditionally shy and unsociable similar to his peers, but appreciative of adult attention. Another anecdote tells of Scriabin trying to conduct an orchestra composed of local children, an try that the end in irritation and tears. He would do its stuff his own amateur plays and operas in the express of puppets to pleasant audiences. He studied the piano from an further on age, taking lessons when Nikolai Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was furthermore the moot of Sergei Rachmaninoff and extra piano prodigies concurrently, though Scriabin was not a pensioner when Rachmaninoff.
In 1882 he enlisted in the Second Moscow Cadet Corps. As a student, he became associates with the actor Leonid Limontov, although in his memoirs Limontov recalls his reluctance to become links with Scriabin, who was the smallest and weakest among everything the boys and was sometimes teased due to his stature. However, Scriabin won his peers’ approval at a concert where he performed upon the piano. He ranked generally first in his class academically, but was exempt from drilling due to his physique and was unlimited time each daylight to practice at the piano.
Scriabin sophisticated studied at the Moscow Conservatory next Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his little hands, which could barely stretch to a ninth. Feeling challenged by Josef Lhévinne, he damaged his right hand while full of life Franz Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan and Mily Balakirev’s Islamey. His doctor said he would never recover, and he wrote his first large-scale masterpiece, his Piano Sonata No. 1 in F minor, as a “cry neighboring God, against fate.” It was his third sonata to be written, but the first to which he gave an opus number (his second was edited and released as the Allegro Appassionato, Op. 4). He eventually regained the use of his hand.
In 1892 he graduated in imitation of the Little Gold Medal in piano performance, but did not unmovable a composition degree because of mighty differences in personality and musical instruction with Arensky (whose capacity signature is the without help one absent from Scriabin’s graduation certificate) and an unwillingness to compose pieces in forms that did not interest him.
In 1894 Scriabin made his debut as a pianist in St. Petersburg, performing his own works to certain reviews. During the similar year, Mitrofan Belyayev totally to pay Scriabin to compose for his publishing company (he published works by notable composers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov). In August 1897, Scriabin married the youngster pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, and next toured in Russia and abroad, culminating in a affluent 1898 concert in Paris. That year he became a theoretical at the Moscow Conservatory and began to confirm his reputation as a composer. During this times he composed his cycle of études, Op. 8, several sets of preludes, his first three piano sonatas, and his deserted piano concerto, among other works, mostly for piano.
For a period of five years, Scriabin was based in Moscow, during which become old the first two of his symphonies were conducted by his old scholarly Safonov.
According to future reports, between 1901 and 1903 Scriabin envisioned writing an opera. He talked a lot approximately it and expounded its ideas in the course of usual conversation. The play would center around a nameless hero, a philosopher-musician-poet. Among new things, he would declare: I am the apotheosis of world creation. I am the hope of aims, the fall of ends. The Poem Op. 32 No. 2 and the Poème Tragique Op. 34 were originally conceived as arias in the opera.
By the winter of 1904, Scriabin and his wife had relocated to Switzerland, where he began work on the composition of his Symphony No. 3. While active in Switzerland, Scriabin was estranged legally from his wife, with whom he had had four children. The feign was performed in Paris during 1905, where Scriabin was now in the middle of Tatiana Fyodorovna Schloezer—a former pupil and the niece of Paul de Schlözer. With Schloezer, he had supplementary children, including a son named Julian Scriabin, a precocious composer of several piano works back he drowned in the Dnieper River at Kiev in 1919 at the age of 11.
With the financial counsel of a rich sponsor, he spent several years travelling in Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and the United States, working on more orchestral pieces, including several symphonies. He was also arrival to compose “poems” for the piano, a form taking into account which he is particularly associated. While in New York City, in 1907, he became acquainted similar to the Canadian composer Alfred La Liberté, who went upon to become a personal friend and disciple.
In 1907, he arranged in Paris following his family and was energetic with a series of concerts organized by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was actively promoting Russian music in the West at the time. He relocated following to Brussels (rue de la Réforme 45) with his family.
In 1909 he returned to Russia permanently, where he continued to compose, working on increasingly grandiose projects. For some times before his death he had planned a multi-media put it on to be performed in the Himalaya Mountains, that would cause a so-called “armageddon,” “a grandiose religious synthesis of everything arts which would herald the birth of a additional world.”[failed verification] Scriabin left solitary sketches for this piece, Mysterium, although a preliminary part, named L’acte préalable (“Prefatory Action”) was eventually made into a performable bank account by Alexander Nemtin. Part of that unfinished composition was performed as soon as the title ‘Prefatory Action’ by Vladimir Ashkenazy in Berlin in the same way as Aleksei Lyubimov at the piano. Nemtin eventually completed a second portion (“Mankind”) and a third (“Transfiguration”), and his entire two-and-a-half-hour success was recorded by Ashkenazy past the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for Decca. Several late pieces published during the composer’s lifetime are believed to have been intended for Mysterium, like the Two Dances Op. 73.
Scriabin gave the supreme concert of his lifetime on 2 April 1915 in St. Petersburg, performing a large programme of his own works. He received rave reviews from music critics, who called his playing “most inspiring and affecting”, as skillfully as saying “his eyes flashed flame and his perspective radiated happiness”. Scriabin himself wrote that during his appear in of his Third Sonata, “I completely forgot I was playing in a hall once people almost me. This happens certainly rarely to me upon the platform.”
Scriabin returned triumphantly to his apartment in Moscow upon 4 April, when he noticed a resurgence of a little pimple on his upper right lip. He had mentioned the pimple as in advance as 1914 even if in London. His temperature rose, he took to bed and cancelled his Moscow concert for 11 April. The pimple became a pustule, then a carbuncle and over a furuncle. Scriabin’s doctor remarked that the eruption looked “like purple fire”. His temperature shot happening to 41 °C (106 °F) and he was now bed-ridden. Incisions were made upon 12 April, but the sore had already begun to poison his blood, and the composer became delirious. Bowers writes: “intractably and inexplicably, a easy spot had grown into a terminal ailment.” On 14 April 1915, at the age of 43 and at the height of his career, Scriabin died in his Moscow apartment, on the thesame day his lease expired.