Alexander Scriabin

Scriabin's early piano works sit comfortably in the late-Romantic tradition, openly indebted to Chopin. But from around 1903 his harmonic language began to dissolve traditional tonality from within, building toward what analysts call his "mystic chord" — a six-note stack of fourths that replaces conventional major-minor harmony with something more ambiguous and, in Scriabin's own understanding, more spiritually charged. The shift coincided with his deepening interest in Theosophy: he read Helena Blavatsky closely and made direct contact with Theosophists including the painter Jean Delville, though his brother-in-law Boris de Schlözer maintained Scriabin never took the movement's doctrines entirely seriously even as he drew constantly on its vocabulary.

He came to believe, with escalating conviction, that he had a personal mission to regenerate humanity through art — a conviction that shaped everything he wrote from his Symphony No. 3 (The Divine Poem, 1904) onward, through The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) to his fifth symphony, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910).

Prometheus called for an instrument that did not yet exist: the clavier à lumières, a keyboard designed to project coloured light into the concert hall in exact synchrony with the music's harmonic movement, keyed to a colour system Scriabin developed by combining Newtonian optics with Theosophical colour-sound correspondences. Whether Scriabin genuinely experienced synesthesia — involuntarily perceiving sound as colour — or constructed the system intellectually remains disputed; his colour mapping follows the circle of fifths too neatly to be purely involuntary perception, though his friend the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was a documented synesthete with an entirely different colour-sound mapping, which at minimum shows the idea was in the air among Russian composers of the period.

The instrument existed only on paper when Prometheus premiered in Moscow in 1911; a version was finally built for the 1915 New York performance, though it could only project light onto a screen rather than fill the hall as Scriabin had envisioned.

At the time of his death Scriabin was planning his most extreme project: the Mysterium, a seven-day performance combining music, dance, incense, poetry and architecture, to be staged in a specially built hemispherical temple in the Himalayan foothills of India. Every human sense would be engaged simultaneously; the intended effect was not aesthetic pleasure but a literal metaphysical event — a "supreme ecstasy" that would dissolve the boundary between art and reality and inaugurate a new spiritual age for the whole of humanity. He completed only preliminary sketches and a shorter preparatory work, Prefatory Action, before an infected lip abscess led to blood poisoning and his sudden death in April 1915 at forty-three.

Scriabin's harmonic innovations are taken seriously by mainstream music theory independent of his metaphysics — the mystic chord and his late tonal ambiguity anticipated aspects of twentieth-century atonal composition, developed in parallel with but independently of Arnold Schoenberg. What separates Scriabin from most musical modernists is that he did not treat his metaphysical claims as metaphor: he appears to have genuinely believed, by the end of his life, that his own music could trigger the literal transformation of human consciousness on a planetary scale. That conviction produced some of the most harmonically daring orchestral writing of the early twentieth century — and also a body of self-description bordering on messianic delusion, which his own family and biographers have never fully reconciled with the seriousness of his musical achievement.