In early April 1915, the Russian music critic Leonid Sabaneyev visited his friend, the composer Alexander Scriabin, at the latter's Moscow home. He found the composer in bed with the covers tucked up to his nose, suffering from an infected boil on his upper lip. Scriabin tried to make a good fist of it, making small talk and insisting he would be better in no time, though the furuncle nestling amidst his fulsome moustache was now so big he couldn’t pronounce his consonants properly.
Sabaneyev noticed the piano lid was open, a familiar white notebook on its music stand. Inside were notes and sketches for a work that had occupied Scriabin’s thoughts for over a decade; a vast Gesamtkunstwerk more ambitious in scope and conception than any composition before or since. In comparison, Wagner’s late, great opera Parsifal would seem a mere bagatelle.
'A seven-day tumult of light and sound, perfumes and pyrotechnics'
Scriabin’s work was Mysterium – a medieval miracle play raised to the point of cosmic transfiguration. A tumult of light and sound, perfumes and pyrotechnics, it would last seven whole days. And it would climax – its composer believed – with the end of the world as we know it and the birth of a new, ‘nobler’ human race.
The composer’s grand plan was never completed. Mere weeks after Sabaneyev’s visit, Scriabin was dead from septicaemia, aged just 43. Thousands lined the streets for his funeral. The newspaper obituaries in his homeland declared him the greatest of contemporary composers.
Yet all he left behind of his magnum opus was a handful of scattered notes and drafts: 54 pages of fragmented piano score and a single sheet of orchestrations. Forty-six years later some small fulfilment of his cosmic ambitions finally came about when Soviet state radio beamed Scriabin’s music into the Vostok spacecraft as Yuri Gagarin shot into space.
'I shall possess the world!'
It was in the autumn of 1902 that his friend (and later brother-in-law) Boris de Schloezer first heard Scriabin mention plans for the Mysterium. The composer was then working on an opera. Entitled Act of the Last Fulfilment, its protagonist was an unnamed artist-philosopher who Schloezer felt sure was based on the never-knowingly self-deprecating Scriabin himself.
‘I shall possess the world!’ this hero declares at one point in the libretto. The action was to conclude with his triumphant death during a great festival celebrating the new religion of the hero’s own devising. Scriabin was, at that time, reading obsessively from Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Also Sprach Zarathustra.
‘If you only knew how eager I am to write this opera!’ Scriabin wrote to Schloezer in the summer of 1903. When they saw each other again in the spring of 1904, Scriabin was confident that he would have the opera completed the following year.
But Schloezer had an inkling that this would never happen. Already Scriabin had mentioned another vision, lurking in the wings of his imagination. He spoke of a truly magisterial work which, according to Schloezer, ‘Scriabin firmly believed would lead to cosmic collapse and universal death.’
'People aren’t ready for it... I must show them a new path’
‘I have an idea to create some kind of a Mysterium,’ Scriabin said in the spring of 1904, on a boat trip in the Alps. ‘I need to construct a special temple for it, perhaps here...,’ he continued, gesturing airily towards the surrounding mountains, ‘...or perhaps far from here, in India. But people aren’t ready for it. I must show them a new path.’
He stopped mentioning the opera to his friends around that time. By 1907 it was quite abandoned. But the Mysterium persisted. Picking up some of the motifs developed for Act of the Last Fulfilment, it grew in scope, encompassing all the arts and many sensations not previously judged art at all: perfumes, acrobatics, taste, and touch. He never doubted it would one day see the light.
In retrospect it seems strange that Scriabin ever considered composing an opera. Aside from a fondness for puppet shows as a child, he had never shown much attraction towards the theatre. He saw in it something fake, lacking in sincerity. ‘Our entire society is being converted into a theatrical production,’ he once complained. ‘We become actors performing for ourselves, possessed by a passion for self-analysis.’
'Something ethereal': Scriabin the man
This was true, perhaps, of no one more than Scriabin himself. Even in his photographs as a child, one can detect an affected, quasi-aristocratic demeanour off-set only by a certain dreaminess to his eyes, as if he were already concerned with matters far loftier than any around him could comprehend. The son of a diplomat father and pianist mother, his first piano teacher detected ‘something ethereal’ in his playing that he considered a sign of weakness.
Later, it would be precisely this quality of empyrean weightlessness that would draw people to his music. Boris Pasternak’s father, the painter Leonid Pasternak, once remarked that it seemed as though Scriabin’s fingers were not so much falling upon the keys as ‘fluttering above them.’
His earliest music drew equally on the surging passion of Tchaikovsky and the folkloric colours of Rimsky-Korsakov. But as he grew older, he professed to despise Tchaikovsky and showed less and less interest in anyone’s music but his own, socialising with artists and poets rather than other composers. His fame spread thanks to performances by conductors like Serge Koussevitzky, Alexander Ziloti, and Sir Henry Wood. By the first decade of the 20th century, as he began Mysterium, he was at the top of his game.
Scriabin and synaesthesia
One evening, engaging in after-dinner conversation, Scriabin began toying with the idea of a sonata of pain with a solo for toothache – an early instance of this most idiosyncratic of composers describing how the experiences of one sense were inextricably linked to those of another. These days, researchers of synaesthesia, as this syndrome is known, tend to agree that the composer probably did not suffer from it as usually understood, but still the idea clearly fascinated him.
For his symphonic Poem of Fire, he scored a part for tastiera per luce – a sort of organ of coloured lights – only to scrap the part shortly before the premiere, apparently dissatisfied with the available technology. In 2010, the American academic Anna Gawboy determined to realise the part as faithfully as possible. She finally concluded that parts of the score were simply impossible until the invention of lasers and LEDs. Even today, if taken literally, some of Scriabin’s instructions pose near insuperable difficulties.
This constant testing of the limits was typical of Scriabin. Just think of the performance instruction in his Fourth Sonata requesting that the pianist play ‘even faster, on the verge of the possible’. He seemed perpetually to be reaching towards something just beyond his grasp.
Plans for the Mysterium totally consumed Scriabin
In fact, almost everything he wrote in his last decade and a half can be regarded as some manner of preliminary study towards the Mysterium. The Poem of Fire and the earlier Poem of Ecstasy, both the Sixth and Seventh Piano Sonatas, and the Two Dances, Op. 73 all are known to contain themes and ideas at one time destined for some incarnation of the Mysterium. The project consumed him totally.
But if, as Schloezer insisted, the outline of the Mysterium was essentially unchanged from 1902 up to Scriabin’s death in 1915, the details remained fuzzy. At one point, the composer set about constructing an entirely new language for it: based on ancient Sanskrit, it incorporated any number of unusual vocalisations, from cries and grunts to the sound of breaths exhaled and inhaled.
Many a Sunday afternoon was wiled away with his friend, the Belgian Theosophist and elocution professor Emile Sigogne, drinking wine in cafés and developing this strange new tongue. None of it survives in the extant libretto. At other times he spoke of dressing the entire audience – to consist of the entire population of the world – in white robes. ‘Animals, insects, birds, all must be there,’ he insisted while walking around his dacha in the summer of 1913.
Paradoxically, the work he spent all his time planning was supposed to happen spontaneously. To bypass his distaste for ‘fake’ theatricality, Scriabin planned for his audience an active role in the creation of the work as it happened. He finally resolved the contradiction by transferring everything he had written for Mysterium to a ‘Prefatory Action’ that would prepare the ground and plant the seed for it.
'There would be vast processions in which every glance, every hand movement was meticulously planned'
The production was to begin with bells suspended from the clouds and proceed to tell the history of the universe. There would be vast processions in which every glance, every hand movement was meticulously planned. He wanted columns of incense, fire and smoke effects, constantly shifting lighting patterns.
And it would all take place in a purpose-built temple in the foothills of the Himalayas, for which Scriabin went ahed and purchased a plot of land in Darjeeling. At the end of the Prefatory Action’s libretto, he wrote ‘We will all dissolve in the ethereal whirlwind We will be born in the whirlwind! And in the splendid luster Of the final flourish Appearing to each other In the exposed beauty Of sparkling souls We will disappear... Dissolve...’
What has survived of Mysterium?
Good question. Well, at the time of his (untimely) death, Scriabin had sketched out some 72 pages of the afotrementioned Prefatory Action, which acts as a kind of prelude to what would have been the grandiose, multi-sensory, week-long Mysterium itself.
The Russian composer Alexander Nemtin devoted some 28 years of his life working these notes into the 'Preparation for the Final Mystery', a three-hour work in three parts: 'Universe', 'Mankind', and 'Transfiguration'. 'Universe' got a recording in 1973, with Kiril Kondrashin conducting. Then, in 1996 the pianist, conductor and Scriabin devotee Vladimir Ashkenazy recorded all three parts with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.
Three more unfeasible works
John Cage As Slow As Possible
Should the instruction of the title of this 1987 organ work be taken literally, logic would dictate that the music would never move off the first chord. Still, a noble attempt to play the piece on a mechanically operated organ in Halberstadt, Germany, is due to finish in 2640. We suspect it might be abandoned before then. There was, however, grand excitement earlier this year, when the score demanded a chord change - the first in two years.
Rued Langgaard Carl Nielsen, our great composer
The title of Langgaard’s 1948 choral work is sardonic in the extreme, since he resented the fame of his fellow Dane. As for his instruction that, once begun, the music should ‘be repeated for all eternity’, this hardly seems practical despite philosophical discussions about the infinity of time.
La Monte Young Piano Piece for Terry Riley
La Monte Young’s exact instructions for this 1960 work say: ‘Push the piano up to a wall and put the flat side flush against it. Then continue pushing into the wall. Push as hard as you can. If the piano goes through the wall, keep pushing in the same direction...’ The words ‘basic physics’ spring to mind here.