2. The Mysterium and the Late Piano Works

Scriabin’s heart was closest to the symbolist poets, and the whole literary temperament of Russia evolved around symbolists”.178 All of Scriabin’s late period compositions were his

attempt to express mystic ideas through music.

2. The Mysterium and the Late Piano Works

Scriabin’s fascination with Theosophy and mysticism during the last decade of his

life inspired his unfinished Mystery, or what is better known in the literature as the

Mysterium (Prefatory Act). The surviving sketches of this magnum opus indicate a

progression towards clarity and simplicity, as do all the works starting from his

Prometheus Op. 60. Scriabin wrote in a letter to a friend:

The Mysterium will have enormous simplification. Everybody thinks that I make everything more and more complex. I do, but in order to surmount complexity, to move away from it. I must attain the summit of complexity in order to become simple. The Preparatory Act I [of the Mysterium] will have two-note harmonies and unisons.179

Scriabin’s Mysterium was envisioned as a rite lasting seven days in India, in which the

audience would participate in the all-encompassing event, including music, dance, speech

as well as an incorporation of projected colors and even perfumes. Nuno Cernadas writes

in his Master’s Thesis: “The public would not only experience this art work but actively

participate in it, using dance as the medium to enter a state of trance, of ecstatic bliss that

would lead to the dematerialization of all things and the fusion with the Oneness, hence bringing forth the Apocalypse.”180 This ties in to the overall ideas of mysticism discussed

earlier.

178 Bowers, Biography, 2:239. 179 Morrison, Opera, 229. 180 Nuno Cernadas, “Alexander Scriabin: Aesthetic Development through Selected Piano Works”, Master’s Thesis, Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, 2013, 76.

Many of the experimental sonorities of the Mysterium sketches are found in

virtually every work of the late period, especially chords built by perfect fifths and

tritones. “While Scriabin thought over his Mysterium—in conversation, schemes, plans

and poems—and sketched its themes, motifs and moments, fragments of the music kept shaping into individual entities [his published compositions]”, writes Bowers. 181

The 12-note chord and Scriabin’s 8-note reduction from the Mysterium sketches suggest

that Scriabin was experimenting with building chords using one interval as the basis for

pitch organization (see Ex. 79 below). In the 8-note chord, that interval is the perfect fifth.182

Ex. 79. 12-note and 8-note chords from the sketches of the unfinished Mysterium183

The 3 Etudes Op. 65, written in 1912, are the only works in Scriabin’s output that

feature such highly restrictive intervallic techniques. Each etude in the opus is focused on

one specific interval in the right hand: major ninths in the Op. 65 No. 1, major sevenths in

the Op. 65 No. 2 and perfect fifths in the Op. 65 No. 3.

181 Bowers, Biography, 2:229. 182 Ibid., 2:326. 183 Reproduced from the surviving 15-page manuscript of Scriabin’s Mysterium: Prefatory Act.

As mentioned previously, Scriabin first employed an entirely new method of

harmony in his orchestral work Prometheus Op. 60 (1910). This was his only finished

composition which (partially) realized his goal of unifying the arts. Swan writes:

Certain elements of the Mystery [more on this later] are obviously found here. The chorus - Scriabin wished to see dressed in white robes to give the whole a festal, ritualistic appearance. Is this not a foretaste of the mystery in which all to the number of 2000 were to be performers? Most remarkable of all, the score provides for a clavier a lumiere. This new instrument, shaped like a toneless piano, would cast the concert hall into the most beautiful symphony of colors.184

The original program notes for Prometheus Op. 60, printed in the booklet at the work’s

1911 Moscow premiere (authorized by Scriabin and written by Leonid Sabaneyev), are

connected to Blavatsky’s writings. Scriabin’s text begins:

Prometheus, Satan, and Lucifer all meet in ancient myth. They represent the active energy of the universe, its creative principle. The fire is light, life, struggle, abundance, thought. 185

This is a paraphrase of Blavatsky’s description of the Lucifer/Prometheus figure in her

Secret Doctrine:

Satan, [or Lucifer], represents the active, or . . . the ‘Centrifugal Energy of the Universe’ in a cosmic sense. He is [the] Fire, Light, Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization, Liberty, Independence.186

It is quite clear that Blavatsky’s writings, centered around the ideas of mysticism and

theosophy, had a direct influence on Scriabin’s own philosophical writings and in turn, the

new harmonic system of his late period (which appeared in his Prometheus). Scriabin

wrote in his notebooks c. 1904-1905:

From center to center. Centrifugal and centripetal forces, the desire for activity and the desire for repose… With time individuality develops more and more and the rhythmic figure finishes as all-embracing individuality - as God.187

184 Swan, Scriabin, 98. 185 Leonid Sabaneyev, program notes for the March 2, 1911 premiere of Prometheus in Moscow. 186 Gawboy, Prometheus, 30. 187 Nicholls, Notebooks, 71.

An examination of Scriabin’s philosophical writings preserved in his notebooks reveal that

he was fascinated with mystic concepts before he found a way to express those ideas in his

music. Several relevant extracts from Scriabin’s notebooks dating from 1904-1905 are

reproduced below:

Creation is the act of distinguishing. Only a multiplicity can be created. Space and time are forms of creation, sensations are its content… States of consciousness coexist… Space and time is not separable from sensation. It, together with sensation, is one single creative act… And so I wish to create... to bring into being a multiplicity, a multiplicity within a multiplicity and a oneness within a multiplicity.188

Scriabin’s Etudes Op. 65, like all of his works starting from Prometheus, Op. 60 (1910),

were bound to a new compositional aesthetic. Sabaneyev (quoted by Nicholls), preserved

Scriabin’s thoughts related to performance (and composition) in his late period:

The effect of art on the psyche may evoke catharsis… in the highest manifestation it may evoke artistic ecstasy…. Even the performance of a work of art… become a divine sacrament… Art is not just a magical, invocatory element applied to theurgic testaments but a direct, effective path to knowledge.189

Sabaneyev continues:

From the primal creative languor, from a thirst for life in the spirit, a primal polarity is born, two principles: the masculine and the feminine. The exhausted Universe thirst for a miracle, the great final Act of Completion, the act of reunification of the Masculine—the Spirit-Creator—with the Feminine World; material strives to become spirit, in a passionate hunger for Death and Ecstasy the whole world is united and disappears in the contemplation of the Moment of Harmony. The new Messiah [Scriabin himself] will grant mankind a moment of universal harmony through the liturgical Act of a Mystery.190

These concepts helped shape Scriabin’s new approach to harmony, as the detailed analysis

of the Etude Op. 65, No. 3 in the next chapter will reveal.

188 Nicholls, Notebooks, 75-76. 189 Ibid., 216. 190 Ibid., 218.