Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)

Prometheus
The Poem of Fire
for large orchestra and piano with
organ, chorus and light keyboard
Op. 60

~23 min.

This may be the most unnerving piece of music I know. I mean that as a good thing. I’ve been listening to it a lot recently because I like the way it’s unnerving.

Enjoying it requires investing some time in listening repeatedly – it’s not particularly “easy” – but it’s well worth the effort. The three main reasons that it’s not “easy”: 1) The crucial melodies/motifs are rather eccentric and aren’t likely to “catch” too firmly on a first listening. 2) The piece is long, with many distinct episodes, but the form isn’t clear, so it’s easy to feel structurally lost. 3) What the piece is famous for (well, one of the two things): it’s made up almost entirely of variants on a single chord (“The Prometheus Chord”), which means there are very few clear harmonic guideposts to help the listener. The harmony is in fact handled brilliantly, but on the first several listens the sense of homogeneity will probably be numbing.

Once you’ve gotten on its wavelength, these things all end up being really marvelous characteristics of the piece. The strange little melodies are, I think, some of the best in late Scriabin. They’re more cleanly carved than a lot of his other melodies, at least to my ears. He had a fascination with fragmentation that I think undermined the listenability of some of his other works from this period, but in Prometheus, the fragments are bold little molecules full of character, and once you know them, the whole thing sings continuously. There are four or five very short ideas that make up most of the material in the piece, and two or three less important ideas that account for the rest of it. It’s actually not that much to learn, but because they are so short, it takes some listening before you can hear them and remember them as melodies.

As for the form: the long, ambiguous course of the piece is still a little confusing to me (and I’ve been spending a lot of time with it these past few weeks), but the overall flow is compelling once you have a rough sense of the landscape. I never like it when liner notes describe a piece as “building to a series of climaxes,” because I think it’s a worthless description; that said, this piece builds to a series of climaxes, and now that I know the particular character of each of those climaxes, I feel comfortable enough following the piece’s progress even though I can’t see any clear scheme that governs it.

The reason the form of the piece is so difficult to map is probably because, like several of Scriabin’s other works, it has an explicit – and yet totally abstract – mystical program. As I understand it, it’s about man’s place in the cosmos; man as a rebel who steals the power of creation from the eternal gods (hence the title). Some of the musical motives have to do with the life and efforts of man; some of them have to do with the universe/the eternal/nature/god. The solo piano is man, sort of. The chorus that joins toward the end is all mankind. Scriabin may have been a bit of a nut, but I’m willing to take this stuff moderately seriously.* But without more specific play-by-play information, I can’t use it to help me make sense of the overall structure.

Nonetheless, the really remarkable thing about this piece is that it actually sounds like a piece about man and the cosmos. At times it sounds like it’s about something even more awesome and unthinkable than that. Frankly, I think it’s absolutely terrifying. I’ve heard people say that Scriabin’s music is sexual, or spiritual, but for me, the strongest connection is with horror. I’m talking about heavy-duty horror of the unknown, “cosmic and uncanny” in the Lovecraftian sense. Several times while listening to the piece and getting a creepy feeling of supernatural discomfort, I’ve been reminded of Arthur Machen’s The White People, and in particular this passage:

“Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the ‘sin’ of meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”

“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.

“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

“Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.”

Scriabin’s late works, like horror of the Machen variety, have some of that power of overwhelming one with a sense of something being profoundly wrong, something weird and sour in the center of your mind.** Some of the strangest, most pungent sensations I have ever experienced have been tiny flickers of weirdness, neither smells nor sounds nor textures but reminiscent of them, that every now and then pop into my head, particularly when I’m exhausted or sick. I’ve compared notes on this experience and I know that at least some of my friends have occasionally experienced something similar. Scriabin’s best music reminds me a bit of those weird, wrong, not-quite sensations. He takes some peculiar, gooey little idea – usually containing a single chord-change and a temperamental melodic fragment – and then obsesses over it. The weirdness never explains itself, it just is; over and over and over, looked at from every point of view, built in to all sorts of different configurations, but never evolving into anything other than itself, like a creepy Magritte man who turns around to reveal that his head is continuous back, but no face. There are some very beautiful moments in Prometheus that induce in me a kind of exquisite nausea.

I get some of the same creepy-crawly uncanny-beauty feeling from Tristan und Isolde, actually, and I think it’s part of the experience that one is expected to have with that piece (it’s certainly part of the experience you’re expected to have with the faux Tristan score to Vertigo). But Wagner’s idea was to delay resolution at great length, to create a heightened sense of striving and yearning. At the end of the opera, famously, the resolution comes as promised. Scriabin’s music, too, strives and yearns, but not for any earthly closure we can anticipate. Prometheus certainly creates a sense of expectation, but it’s hardly the expectation of resolution. It’s more like the expectation that the fabric of reality will tear open. Or, to put it another way, the expectation that the universe will end and all creation will be reunited with its creator in transcendent, incomprehensible flaming oblivion.

Which is indeed what happens.

Programatically speaking, of course. It happens in the form of a terrifying, tremendous, world-destroying chord; quite possibly the loudest in all music. By contrast, the piece Scriabin was working on when he died, Mysterium, was meant to actually end the world. Seriously. Luckily for those of us who like the world, he didn’t manage to write very much of it.***

The real climax of the piece a few minutes earlier, an enormous flaring ball of overwhelming awe, never fails to give me goosebumps. It could kick Daphnis et Chloé‘s ass.

Scriabin commissioned a special cover illustration for the score from fellow wild-eyed mystic Jean Delville, who had concidentally already painted this on essentially the same exact theme. Delville’s work in general seems to me to be a very good match for Scriabin, albeit much inferior – there’s something trashy and overbearing about a lot of it, like fantasy-novel covers. But there’s no question that he too had his finger on something inexplicably terrifying. I’m never clicking on that link again. I think I’m gonna have nightmares.

Anyway, Delville’s Prometheus cover is really amazing and a perfect, perfect match for the piece. Sadly, it hasn’t been reproduced very often or well since the first editions. I have the following lovely scan courtesy of the Sibley Music Library at the Eastman School of Music. The clipping at the top and right side apparently occured during binding, long ago. Oh well.

The end of the piece sounds exactly like that picture.

That’s actually the cover from the original two-piano reduction by Sabaneyev, a ridiculously dense, viciously difficult arrangement that’s nonetheless a convenient way of studying the score. And you can (quite legally) download a pdf of the whole thing here!

Here’s a smaller scan I found online of the unclipped cover as it appeared on the full score, plus the title page from the original pocket score (first issued somewhat later).

Koussevitzky’s publishing house, the Edition Russe de Musique, had offices in Berlin as well as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I get the impression that the different locations sometimes issued different covers for the same scores – French for the European market and Russian for Russia. Hence the rather different cover designs seen here. That’s my guess anyway.

Recordings: I’ve heard several recordings, and none of them really struck me as perfect. Nobody seems to want to take Scriabin’s melodies seriously – conductors and pianists just revel in the harmonies and textures and don’t properly deliver the actual rhetoric of the piece. Everyone also plays everything a lot slower than Scriabin marked it. I’ve read reviews saying that Ashkenazy’s performance is the best and I haven’t heard that one. I’ll let you know when I do. Because of the excellent sound quality and instrumental polish, the one I’ve been listening to is the recent Gergiev/Toradze recording. But I’m sure the piece can be done better.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the second of the two things for which this piece is famous: the “light keyboard.” What is a light keyboard? It’s an imaginary instrument; you play it like an organ but instead of sound it produces light. There’s a part for it in the score; certain notes correspond to certain colors. Has it ever existed? No. But people talk about this ambitious, nutty idea a lot more often than they talk about the music itself. You can bet that absolutely any discussion of “visual music” will eventually touch on Prometheus.

The reason I haven’t talked about it here is because for most intents and purposes, it isn’t part of the experience of listening to this piece. Some live performances attempt to realize the light part in some form or another – read all about it – but Scriabin himself never saw it performed with lights. I know I certainly haven’t, and I still like it.

I’m also putting off talking about the light thing because I’ve got a little multimedia presentation in the works but it’s not done yet. Stay tuned.

Addendum 11/05 – Okay, now it’s done!

*In college I took a seminar on 20th-century music where Scriabin was discussed. After distributing a handout containing outlandish quotes from Scriabin about the relevance of mystico-sexual energies in his life and work, the professor furrowed his brow and tentatively said, “I think we should try not to just dismiss this.” As I recall we didn’t live up to his request and he didn’t really know what to say either. I respected his attempt, though.

**I’ve read that John Ireland composed several works explicitly in relation to Machen’s writing. I’m certainly curious about those, though I suspect they’re more “mystical British pastoral” rather than “world-rending horror.”

***I’m not sure why this hasn’t been made into a sci-fi/occult movie, yet. I mean, we’re talking about actual madman-style end-of-the-world plans, here! The story would start with someone discovering a previously unknown complete copy of the score, and then it would get stolen by a mysterious group of villains, and our hero has to find them and stop them from performing it. The movie would be called Mysterium, obviously. Someone needs to tell Jerry Bruckheimer about this. Or Dan Brown, or Neal Stephenson, or some other jerk.****

**** Addendum 1/06: I have been roundly encouraged to take this ridiculous suggestion seriously (along with some other related ridiculous suggestions), so as of now, that other jerk is me. Hands off, everyone! Don’t worry, I’ll keep you all posted regarding the movie rights and the tie-in CD. Boffo, Lenny! Socko, Lenny!