Scriabin wrote his first great sonata as a cry against God
Told by a doctor that his damaged right hand would never recover, the young pianist Alexander Scriabin poured his fury into a piano sonata he called a cry against God and fate. The hand healed. He went on to invent a colour-coded harmony and a dissonant language that pushed beyond traditional keys.
Scriabin was born in Moscow on Christmas Day 1871 by the old Russian calendar, into a noble family. His great-grandfather, a soldier from Tula, had earned hereditary nobility in 1819; his mother, Lyubov, a concert pianist taught by Theodor Leschetizky, came from a dynasty tracing its roots to Rurik. She died of tuberculosis when he was one. His father went off to a diplomatic career in Turkey, leaving little Sasha with his grandmother, great-aunt and aunt, an amateur pianist who kept notes on his childhood.
He was precocious and odd: fascinated by the mechanics of the piano, he built small instruments and gave them to guests, staged puppet operas, and once tried, tearfully and unsuccessfully, to conduct an orchestra of local children. He studied with Nikolai Zverev, the strict teacher of Rachmaninoff. At the Second Moscow Cadet Corps he was the smallest boy and was teased until a piano performance won his classmates over; excused from drill, he practised daily and usually topped the class.
At the Moscow Conservatory he trained under Anton Arensky, Sergei Taneyev and Vasily Safonov, becoming a notable pianist despite hands that barely spanned a ninth. Competing with Josef Lhévinne, he injured himself practising showpieces by Liszt and Balakirev. The sonata that followed, published as his Piano Sonata No. 1, was actually the third he had written.
His early music echoed Chopin, but he later developed, independently of Arnold Schoenberg, a dissonant idiom that left conventional tonality behind without becoming strictly atonal. Drawn to theosophy, the ideal of a total artwork and synaesthesia, he matched colours to harmonies around the circle of fifths. He is regarded as Russia's leading symbolist composer. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia observed that no composer had drawn more scorn or more love, while Tolstoy heard sincere genius. Since the 1970s his ten published piano sonatas have won renewed acclaim. He died on 27 April 1915.
Source: Alexander Scriabin
