Essential Scriabin
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is remembered chiefly as a composer of solo piano works, but he produced also a significant body of orchestral music, in a career that increasingly began to reflect his own esoteric world view.
Read more…Scriabin's mother was an outstanding pianist and the young Alexander was a prodigy, beginning piano studies at the Moscow Conservatory early in his teens – and going on also to study composition, with Taneyev and Arensky for composition. He soon attracted the attention of one of the major Russian publishing houses, which funded early concert tours as a pianist. The youthful piano works betray the influence of Chopin and Liszt, but Scriabin's heavily chromatic and emotional style grew ever more characteristic. After coming into contact with Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy movement in 1908, he became ever more susceptible to visual influences, the concept of synesthesia (relating colours to music), and "mystical" harmonies. But he didn't live to explore these ideas as much as he might have done, dying in his early 40s of septicemia brought on by a tumour on his lip.