Scriabin: Mazurkas – Eric Le Van

THE twenty-one Mazurkas Scriabin penned over a period of some fifteen years (from 1888 to 1903) are musical treasures from one of the most remarkable tone-poets Russia ever produced. Longtime neglected by pianists, they were for the most part relegated to the limbo of early efforts, or often regarded as inferior—albeit interesting—imitations of Chopin’s more ‘authentic’ creations. Doubtlessly, the mystery and melancholy of Chopin’s Mazurkas found a sympathetic echo in the hypersensitive soul of the young composer, whose affection for the Polish master began in boyhood and was indeed never to wane. Yet in adopting the dance most indigenous to Poland and most closely associated with Chopin, Scriabin —even at the early age of sixteen—by his very nature could do no less than transform it into something striking and original. It could not be helped: his vision was unique, a way of apprehending the world very much estranged from commonplace notions of reality, where angels, dark imaginings, intense nostalgia, and intimations of unseen realms were the norm. Refracted through the prism of an extraordinary sensibility, his mazurkas would become essentially mazurka-fantasies. They would rake on the allure of pieces improvised in the bleakest hours of the night, where subterranean, atavistic passions unexpectedly surge forth and an eerie desolation sets in. At other times, they would beguile by sheer charm and sensuality, often self-indulgently so.

Then Ten Mazurkas op. 3 were written between 1888 and 1889, while Scriabin was a sixteen and seventeen-year-old student at the Moscow Conservatory. At the time, he was studying piano with Safonov as well as theory and composition with Taneyev and Arensky. His background before entering the institution was not that of the typical conservatory aspirant. His mother, a concert pianist, died when he was an infant, and he was raised by a grandmother and two doting aunts. Everything was done to nurture little Alexander’s creativity and suppleness of the mind. He would freely improvise at the piano, compose poems, write plays, adapt Gogol’s The Nose for the theater. Although taught the rudiments of piano by his aunt Liubov, he did not begin any formal musical training until the age of ten. Then the composer Georgy Konyus began teaching him how to read music and gave him his first serious piano lessons. Curious and brilliant in many areas, the young Scriabin learned quickly. By fourteen he was already composing fervent and novel pieces such as the Etude in C sharp minor opus 1, no. 2. At the time he produced the first ten Mazurkas, his personal writings began to show signs of a preoccupation with spiritual matters that eventually was to become an obsession. In the end, it would overwhelm everything he did. Like the Russian symbolist poets Balmont, Blok, Ivanov, and Bely, Scriabin would in due course consider art as nothing less than a gnosis, a way of revealing secret knowledge and ultimate noumenal truth. And in the end, he imagined that his creative activity would precipitate the spiritual transfiguration of the world.

But these were future developments that were to take hold and bloom in the artist’s psyche primarily after the age of thirty. During the seminal years in which the first two sets of mazurkas were written, the composer’s metaphysics remained largely latent and intuitive; he had yet to develop those reified and esoteric ideas that were to guide and structure his later creations. With the early works, it is always the poignantly specific emotion, the youthful aspiration, the restless stirring of the soul that fashions the style and structure. Yet this is not to imply that Scriabin did not grasp at the time music’s power to evoke what is in essence beyond rational cognition. Nor should one underestimate his ability to imbue schematically simple mazurkas with sophisticated but hidden subtexts. Years later, in a conversation with Boris Pasternak, he was to laud the untapped riches inherent in what some considered to be artificial and hackneyed genres—notably those of the salon type. A master illusionist, he was intrigued by the possibility that outwardly innocent forms could veil allusive, ineffable meanings. He would turn to limpid designs as a kind of trompe-l’oeil for the revealing of deeper insights. And in his music there would be dim and mysterious entities moving behind the shimmer of a seductive dance, like the haunting shadows of silent vessels passing by.

After having completed the first set of mazurkas, ten years were to elapse before Scriabin turned again to the genre with his Nine Mazurkas op. 55. Here the inspiration and enthusiasm of the twenty-six-year-old composer are in full swing. An extra richness, urgency. and magic are audaciously brought to the form, which at times is stretched to the furthest reaches of sonorous density and pathos. Much had happened since the artist left the conservatory in 1892 without the least recompense in composition (Rachmaninov had received the gold medal). Before graduation, a painful injury to his right hand had ushered in a period of self-doubt and depression. Through force of will he overcame the handicap and embarked on a brilliant career as a pianist, choosing only to perform his own works. In 1897 he married pianist Vera lvanovna Isakovich after which he began teaching piano at the Moscow conservatory. By 1902 the Scrabins had three daughters and one son. 1903 was a catalyst year: he left his post at the conservatory and moved abroad with Tatiana de Schloetzer, a woman similar to him in mind who shared the same passion for idealist philosophy and the mysticism elaborated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

These events, however interesting to biographers, were of but secondary importance to Scriabin as a creator, and of far less significance than what was occurring on the level of his intense inner existence. Whatever his worldly circumstances might have been, he made little or no mention of them in the extensive notes and reflections he jotted down throughout the course of his life. His concentration was exclusively focused on the metaphysical problem preoccupying him at the moment. Musical developments were always concomitant with the state of his spiritual evolution and any technical innovation was but its mirror. Thus if one considers Scriabin’s entire oeuvre from the retrospective vantage point of its progress through time, it becomes clear to what extent the language of the first two books of mazurkas reflects what may be understood as the initial phase in the artist’s spiritual quest. It is defined by human suffering, yearning, perpetually unfulfilled desire. Out of these states wells forth a music essentially born of pain. In the first book it is a particularly Slavic sadness that permeates its textures, whereas in the second the quality is more elusive and original. But in each case the sadness is cloaked in countless guises, each so novel as to constitute an altogether separate feeling. Since they are incommunicable in words, these myriad shades of emotion can only be conveyed in the highly variegated patterns of the music itself. Scriabin succeeds in capturing them in sound essentially through wielding an almost inexhaustible range of color, from the darkest to most luminous reaches of the spectrum. Like an alchemist, he stirs his own fantastic blend of hues by experimenting with the intricate workings of harmony, cultivating ambiguities between the major and minor modes and making the most subtle use of chromatic inflexions.

Then as we follow the progression from the earliest to the later Mazurkas, Scriabin develops a way to create a sensation of increasingly unsatisfied desire by thwarting our expectations for harmonic resolution. This strategy of denial is pushed to its utmost limits in the prophetic works corresponding to a second phase in the composer’s spiritual quest. In such masterpieces as the Poème de l’extase and the Fifth Piano Sonata (1907), an almost unbearable tension is fomented by ceaseless prolongation of the dominant function. When release finally does come in an explosive tonic, or, in, the case of the Fifth Sonata as a frenetic — if harmonically arbitrary—ascent into the piano’s uppermost register, it is experienced as a a transcending breakthrough (or poriv, to borrow the term most frequently employed by the Russian theurgic symbolists whose aesthetic aims Scriabin so closely shared). It is the sort of cataclysmic burst that not only signals the overcoming of all struggle and suffering, but also signifies the dissolving of the self and its mundane preoccupations into an immaterial, timeless and beneficent state of being.

The state of ecstatic bliss is a luminous one. Starting about 1903, Scriabin turns towards the otherworldly with ever-increasing frequency, edifying his spiritual vision in luxurious sonorities. His music becomes ‘brighter’, diaphanous, and in consequence major-key oriented with a strong bias towards radiant, dominant-derived harmonies. The last two Mazurkas op. 40 (1903), contemporaneous with the groundbreaking F-sharp major Fourth Sonata, portend the new style. Gone are the dark, minor keys associated with some of the earlier samples of the genre. Here all is light, a jubilant play of color, a “divine dance” within a magical realm free of shadow.

But his final goal—a complete transcendence of the world—was still to be realized in musical terms. In such works as the Poème de L’extase, the will of the protagonist (Scriabin himself) hovers over us as a palpable presence at all moments; he pleads, struggles, and asserts himself throughout. His personal—and largely solipsistic—drama is one of incessant turmoil, played out in a highly charged rhythmic forward thrust accompanied by an equally driven harmonic momentum. Yet what the composer ultimately wished to attain was nothing less than cosmic dissolution—the total collapse of space and time into an altogether higher dimension. This state could only be reached through a music free of tension, a music that creates no desire, that is literally ‘suspended’ in time. Such a state is adumbrated in the so-called ‘mystic chord,’ which is, in harmonic terms, completely static. It generates no tension, can be transposed ad infinitum, yet infers no forward motion. It appears in such incandescent works as Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), but the kind of music its particular qualities foretell was never to fully take form. Its essence can only be glimpsed in the incantatory, awe-inspiring and utterly terrifying last three piano sonatas — the eighth, ninth, and tenth; in the visionary Vers la flamme (1914); and above all in the hypnotic, entirely otherworldly Preludes op.74 (1914). Yet the closest realization of what the composer finally envisioned is to be found in the inchoate sketches of the Mysterium: Prefatory Act, a work left unfinished at the time of his premature death in 1915. Here the twelve-tone chords on which the Prefatory Act is built leave no possibility for harmonic progression or a sense of movement, The music becomes literally fixed in a free plane of being—timeless, infinite, where all struggle is finally extinguished. It is, in short, a vision of immortality.

The significant aspect of Scriabin’s lofty ambitions for the Mysterium (which was meant to be more a multi-sensory celebration than a musical composition in the traditional sense) is that they were — and always would be by their very nature —impossible to realize. Untimely death spared his being confronted with the reality that the highest aim expected to attain through this music—literal world transformation – was but an illusion. In this respect he was doomed from the start to fall short of achieving all that he had hoped from the project he believed represented the culmination of his life’s work. But if we look at it on another level, his entire creative existence may be seen as one grand Mysterium, a continuously evolving text — always unfolding towards ever higher realms, always striving for the ultimately unreachable. This is the true substance of his work and the underlying theme behind everything he wrote, and it is what makes Scriabin a romantic maximalist from beginning to end. It is also the thread that connects creations such as the Mazurkas to all that follows.

NOTE ON INTERPRETATION

Scnabin’s tendency to be perpetually dissatisfied with the existing order—whether spiritual or musical—as well as his proclivity to carry out his ideas to their extreme conclusion are also reflected in his singular approach to the piano. For the piano as an instrument certainly could not suffice in itself: it had to be transfigured into something that would surpass its limited physical properties. Whether it became a bubbling cauldron of strange sonorities, the ominous ringing of bells from the unknown, or the languorous meanderings of deep longings is of less importance than the fact that for him the piano was meant to evoke infinitely more than the mere sounds emanating from it. Even the composer’s famed gift of synaesthesia, or color-hearing, was less a reality in the physical sense than the manifestation of his generous imaginative faculty. He always aspired to bring forth multifarious sensual lives from a single sensory phenomenon.

Descriptions of Scriabin’s performances by his contemporaries tend to emphasize his highly idiosyncratic style. Rhythmically very free, sometimes erratically so, quasi-improvisatory, feverish, sumptuous, ethereal—these are some of the terms used to define his playing. The recording of 23 of his own short pieces (including the Mazurka op.40 no. 2) he realized in 1908 and 1910 for the Welte-Mignon and Hupfield reproducing piano seems to corroborate the numerous written testimonies of his pianism. But more importantly, Scriabin rarely appeared to be satisfied, with performances of his piano works, excepting those given by a few superlative artists such as Alexander Goldenweiser and the young Samuel Feinberg. Inevitably, he found most renderings too hard and insufficiently expressive. He rejected anything in music that recalled the mechanical. Music had become too rhythmically constrained, and it was up to the interpreter to liberate it, to make it as variable as the palpitating human heartbeat. Constantly shifting time values were needed to express rapidly changing moods. Hardly a measure would go by without some fluctuation in speed, without some delicate nuance of give-and-take—all too subtle and pervasive to accurately render in conventional notation. The interpreter would have to content himself with cryptic terms such as doloroso, fragile, ailé, cristallin, céleste volupté, souffle mystérieux, avec trouble. éclatant, lumineux. Here, a creative treatment of rhythm and inflection in dynamics on the part of the performer is no superfluous appendage to the score. Rather, it becomes an indispensable means by which the musical message is conveyed. The resulting style thus goes beyond the generalized fin-de-siècle rubato inherited from Chopin and his epigones. Only in Scriabin’s universe can chords, when extravagantly arpeggiated, resonate as prigovori, or magic spells; only with Scriabin can mere pianistic flourishes turn into zovi; or summons from obscure domains. In this context, any interpretive device, if it is to have significance, ultimately comes into being through personal vision and singular flights of the imagination. It does not result from any general rule or ready-made formulae, but rather draws its life from the pianist’s solitary inspiration.