Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915), looking every inch the dandy that he was

On January 6, 1872 – 148 years ago today – the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was born in Moscow. He died in Moscow just 43 years later, on April 27, 1915.

Scriabin was not just “the odd person out” of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian composers; he was, very arguably, one of the two or three “oddest-people-out” in the history of Western Music.

Scriabin didn’t start out as an oddball. He was a piano prodigy and a friend and classmate of Sergei Rachmaninoff, first in the piano studio and private school of Nikolai Zverov and later at the Moscow Conservatory. When they graduated together in 1892 (at which point Rachmaninoff was nineteen and Scriabin was twenty), Rachmaninoff received the “Great Gold Medal” and Scriabin the “Little Gold Medal”, somehow appropriate given that Rachmaninoff stood 6’6” tall while Scriabin stood just over 5’ tall. (That variance of physical stature notwithstanding, the Moscow Conservatory Class of 1892 was pretty impressive!)

Scriabin’s early career was not marked by any particular “oddness” either. He began his career as a touring pianist and composed charming piano miniatures a la Chopin. He married and quickly fathered four children. When he wasn’t on tour, he taught at the Moscow Conservatory.

Scriabin and Tatiana Schloezer

Then, in 1902, at the age of 30, something in his mind sparked and fizzled and started giving off smoke. Suddenly pre-occupied with issues philosophical and mysterious, he quit his teaching job, took up with a former student named Tatiana Schloezer, and abandoned his family, telling his wife Vera that he was going to live with Tatiana as “a sacrifice to art.” 

I’m not even going to contemplate what would happen to me if I tried that line on my wife.

Depending upon who you talk to, Scriabin went on to become either one of the great visionaries in the history of Western music or a total crackpot. However, the one thing we must all agree on is that Scriabin proceeded to create an extraordinary body of utterly original, intensely lyric, and marvelously crafted music.

Behavioral Issues

Based on even the most cursory reading of the biographical literature, it’s pretty much impossible not to conclude that Alexander Scriabin was a narcissistic egomaniac whose behavior bordered on megalomania. Some writers attribute his developing behavior to mental illness. Others attribute it to overcompensation for his diminutive size (as a pianist, he could not reach more than an octave in either hand and almost ruined his right hand trying to learn to play Mily Balakirev’s virtuosic showpiece Islamey). Still others claim that his narcissism and egomania were the result of his upbringing.

(Scriabin’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was just one year old, and his father, who was a member of the Russian consular service, was posted to Turkey. As a result, according to the English musicologist Hugh Macdonald writing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:“Scriabin was brought up by his aunt Lyubov, his grandmother and his great aunt, all of whom doted passionately on the boy, pampered him endlessly and set his mind towards the fastidiousness and egocentricity of his later years as well as giving him a certain effeminacy in his manners[!].” )

Scriabin spent the years after 1902 contemplating the work that would have been his magnum opus: an apocalyptic, Wagner-inspired, all-inclusive-art-work-on-steroids entitled Mysterium, a massive, no-holds-barred, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink “happening” that would combine: