Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин, Aleksandr Nikolajevič Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skriabin, Skryabin, or Scriabine (–27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist who developed a highly lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language. Driven by a poetic, philosophical and aesthetic vision that bordered on the mystical, he can be considered the primary figure of Symbolism in Russian music.

His music has been performed by musicians such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Sofronitsky, Andrei Gavrilov, Marc-André Hamelin, Claudio Arrau and Vladimir Ashkenazy. He also influenced composers like Olivier Messiaen, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, although Scriabin was reported to have disliked Prokofiev's and Stravinsky's music.

Scriabin stands as one of the most innovative and most controversial of composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that, "No composer has had more scorn heaped or greater love bestowed...". Leo Tolstoy once described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius"

Scriabin was highly regarded during his lifetime and his music has resurged in popularity in the last few decades after suffering a period of some decline in the middle of the 20th century. He has consistently remained a favorite composer among pianists.

Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family in Moscow on Christmas Day 1871, according to the Julian Calendar (this translates to 6 January 1872 in the Gregorian Calendar). When he was only a year old, his mother, a concert pianist, died of tuberculosis. Scriabin's father left for Turkey, leaving the young infant with his doting grandmother and great aunt. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolay Zverev, a strict disciplinarian, who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninoff and a number of other prodigies at the same time.

Scriabin later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev, and Vasily Ilyich Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands with a span of barely over an octave. Feeling challenged by Josef Lhevinne he seriously damaged his right hand while practicing Liszt's Don Juan Fantasy and Balakirev's Islamey. His doctor said he would never recover, and he wrote his first large-scale masterpiece, the F-minor sonata, as a "cry against God, against fate". In 1892, he graduated with the Little Gold Medal in piano performance, but did not complete a composition degree because of strong differences in personality and musical taste with Arensky and unwillingness to compose pieces in forms that did not interest him. Ironically, one requirement that he did complete, an E-minor fugue, became required learning for decades at the Conservatory.

In 1894 Scriabin debuted as a pianist in St. Petersburg, performing his own works to positive reviews. This was followed by period of extensive touring, in Russia and abroad, culminating in a highly successful 1898 concert in Paris, where he performed with his recent wife, Vera Ivanova Isakovich, also a pianist. The same year he accepted the offer by Safonov to become a professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory. In this period he composed his cycle of etudes op. 8, several sets of preludes, his first three piano sonatas, and his only piano concerto, among other works, mostly for piano.

Scriabin had several children, but eventually left his teaching position and divorced his wife, marrying Tatiana Fyodorovna Schloezer (Tatiana de Schloezer), a younger pupil. As well as his two prominent amorous attachments, Scriabin may have had some homosexual encounters.

With the financial support of a wealthy sponsor, he left Russia in 1904 and spent several years traveling between Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and America, working on more orchestral pieces, including several symphonies. He was also beginning to compose "poems" for the piano, a form with which he is particularly associated.

In 1907 he settled in Paris with his family and was involved with a series of concerts organized by the impressario Sergei Diaghilev, who was actively promoting Russian music in the West at the time.

In 1909 he returned to Russia permanently, where he continued to compose, working on increasingly grandiose projects. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalayas, that would bring about the armageddon, "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world" (AMG http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=41:7982~T1). Scriabin left only sketches for this piece, Mysterium, although they were eventually made into a performable version by Alexander Nemtin.

The Mysterium was, psychologically speaking, a world Scriabin’s genius created to sustain its own evolution http://www.componisten.net/downloads/ScriabinMysterium.pdf.

Scriabin was small and reportedly frail, and a hypochondriac his entire life. He died in Moscow from septicemia, contracted as a result of a shaving cut or a boil on his lip.

With Tatiana Fyodorovna, he had a son named Julian who was himself to prove a musical prodigy who composed several sophisticated pieces before drowning in a boating accident at age 11 in 1919.

Scriabin, previously interested in Friedrich Nietzsche's übermensch theory, also became interested in theosophy, and both would influence his music and musical thought. In 1909–10 he lived in Brussels, becoming interested in Delville's Theosophist movement and continuing his reading of Hélène Blavatsky . Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician", and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group."

Pianists who have performed Scriabin to critical acclaim include Vladimir Sofronitsky, Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter. Horowitz performed for Scriabin, in his home as an 11 year old child, and Scriabin had an enthusiastic reaction, but cautioned that he needed further training. As an elderly man, Horowitz remarked that Scriabin was obviously crazy, because he had tics and could not sit still. Despite Horowitz' assessment, Scriabin held the rapt attention of the musical world in Russia while he was alive.

Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano. The earliest pieces resemble Frédéric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the étude, the prelude, the nocturne, and the mazurka. Scriabin's music gradually evolved over the course of his life, although the evolution was very rapid and especially long when compared to most composers. Aside from his earliest pieces, his works are strikingly original, the mid- and late-period pieces employing very unusual harmonies and textures. The development of Scriabin's voice and style can be followed in his ten piano sonatas: the earliest are composed in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom and show the influence of Chopin and Franz Liszt, but the later ones move into new, original territory, the last five being written with no key signature. Many passages in them can be said to be atonal, though from 1903 through 1908, "tonal unity was almost imperceptibly replaced by harmonic unity." </bgref>

Aaron Copland praised Scriabin's thematic material as "truly individual, truly inspired", but criticized Scriabin for putting "this really new body of feeling into the strait-jacket of the old classical sonata-form, recapitulation and all" calling this "one of the most extraordinary mistakes in all music." 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." He also argues that the Poem of Ecstasy and Vers la flamme "find a much happier co-operation of 'form' and 'content'" and that later Sonatas such as Sonata No. 9 employ a more flexible sonata-form.</bgref>

Though these works are often considered to be influenced by Scriabin's synesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences sensation in one sense in response to stimulus in another, it is doubted that Alexander Scriabin actually experienced this. His color system, unlike most synesthetic experience, lines up with the circle of fifths: it was a thought-out system based on Sir Isaac Newton's Optics. Indeed, influenced also by his theosophical beliefs, he developed it towards what would have been a pioneering multimedia performance: his unrealized magnum opus Mysterium was to have been a grand week-long performance including music, scent, dance, and light in the foothills of the Himalayas that was to bring about the dissolution of the world in bliss.

In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin's association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff 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 colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favoured blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff'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. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that "your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny."

While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are frequently performed. They include three symphonies, a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier à lumières", also known as the Luxe, which was a color organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's symphony. It was played like a piano, but projected colored light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has erroneously been claimed that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction personally supervised and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.

Scriabin's original colour keyboard, with its associated turntable of coloured lamps, is preserved in his apartment near the Arbat in Moscow, which is now a museum dedicated to his life and works.

* A comparison of the creative trajectories of Rachmaninov and Scriabin has fueled psychoanalytic speculation on the distinction between talent and genius.

* The graphic above depicting a colored keyboard is not entirely correct: the colors shown do not relate to the particular tones of the twelve-tone system, but to the tonalities starting with those keys. Also note that Scriabin did not, as far as this theory is concerned, recognize a difference between a major and a minor tonality of the same name (for example: c-minor and C-Major).

* His symphony, Poem of Ecstasy, appears in the soundtrack of the 1987 film Barfly, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

* The Etude Op.8 No.12 was used in the 1988 film Madame Sousatzka, starring Shirley MacLaine

* The intro to Michael Martin Murphey's song Wildfire was based on a piece by Scriabin.

In January 1910 Scriabin played in Moscow nine of his own compositions for Welte-Mignon and his playing was transcribed on piano rolls. The results have been played back and recorded. Examples:

*Synthetic chord *Atonality *Sergei Rachmaninoff *Igor Stravinsky *Romantic Music *20th century classical music

*http://www.componisten.net/downloads/RachScriabinPsaRev.pdf *Scriabin Society of America *The mythical time in Scriabin by Lia Tomás *Was Scriabin a Synaesthete? by B. Galeyev & I. Vanechkina *Scriabin in Aspen No.2 on UBUWEB (A short biography by Faubion Bowers; four preludes and the tenth sonata available for download) *ChopinMusic - Scriabin (Scriabin - Biography, Links, Discussion, Recordings, etc.) *Scriabin's Sheet Music by Mutopia Project * * * *Kunst der Fuge: Aleksandr Scriabin - MIDI files * Alexander Scriabin Free Piano Scores * "Scriabin's Mysterium and the Birth of Genius" by Emanuel E. Garcia