Scriabin as Pianist

Several contemporaries of Scriabin have left us their accounts of his playing, but the most vivid and informative of these is Leonid Sabaneev's memoir. In close contact with Scriabin over a period of five years, Sabaneev recorded his impressions of the composer in detail and even reproduced conversations at length. The memoir displays the deep admiration needed to motivate such an enterprise, but the author was also capable of standing back to take a cooler critical view, yielding a source that is both rich and persuasive. Scriabin enchants him almost against his will, and Sabaneev often exposes the tension between the pianist as heard by his coterie and the pianist as he actually played.

Sabaneev first heard Scriabin play at his famous concert of 21 February 1909 at the Moscow Conservatoire Grand Hall. Scriabin performed his Fifth Sonata between two huge symphonic works, his Third Symphony (The Divine Poem) and his Poem of Ecstasy. The size of the hall and the contrast with the powerful orchestral sound worked against the pianist: his ‘nervously-refined’ tone failed to carry or communicate. The sonata ‘caused only perplexity’, and the audience was uncertain whether the piece had ended or if the performer was overcome by some unknown problem. This is corroborated Anatoly Drozdov's memoir, where the performance was ‘confused and unconvincing’.

Sabaneev also gives us his first impressions of Scriabin playing in a private setting, which is again a mixture of enthusiasm and critical detachment. At first, he was sceptical: Scriabin's eyes, he tells us, were half-closed, and he seemed to be directing his gaze at some distant space. Sabaneev could not help but think that this was just a sentimental, effeminate pose. The music that evening was a series of extracts from the as-yet-unfinished orchestral work, Prometheus. At one point, he realised his playing lacked sufficient power for the bold orchestral sound he wanted, and to convey his intentions, he suddenly rose a few inches from the piano stool. But Sabaneev was soon won over. The music, he explains, was wildly new, and the performance mannerisms seemed to enhance these ‘convulsions of sound’.

Sabaneev describes another concert, in an unidentified large hall, where Scriabin's playing was ultimately enchanting. But there were many obstacles placed in the listener's way. Before he had even begun to play, there was Scriabin's lack of stage presence and his nervous demeanour.

Mr Scogan, a character from Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, doubted that people could ever get away from themselves entirely, as if they were to embark forever on a ‘complete holiday’, claiming that they ‘never succeed in getting farther than Southend’. Gombaud, his interlocutor, disagreed:

For the Russians, ‘the war’ – World War I – was only the beginning. After two revolutions, they withdrew from that war, only to be faced with invasion from fourteen hostile nations together with a civil war much protracted by funding from the same nations. An enforced holiday from normal life turned into a protracted voyage that took them ever further from their pre-Revolutionary selves. To use an expression from the poet Osip Mandelshtam, people were ‘knocked out of their biographies like billiard balls out of pockets’. For some, a metaphoric holiday trip turned into real exile: abroad, as émigrés, they often sought to reconstitute the past, with little success.

The first stirrings of modernism

The twentieth century began with Rimsky-Korsakov firmly established as the grand old man of Russian opera, with a catalogue of 11 operas to his credit, many of them regularly performed in St Petersburg and Moscow and throughout the provinces as well. His Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh (completed in 1904 and premiered in 1907) acts as a summation of the nationalist operatic tradition of Glinka and The Five; aside from the characteristically Russian mixture of history and legend, realism and the supernatural, Russian and Oriental, Rimsky-Korsakov alo introduced Wagnerian elements – to the extent that the opera became known as ‘the Russian Parsifal». But in two other operas from these last years of his life, Rimsky-Korsakov was laying the foundation for modernist opera in Russia and beyond. In Kashchei the Immortal (completed and premiered in 1902) and especially The Golden Cockerel (completed in 1907 and premiered in 1909 – after Rimsky-Korsakov's death) the fairy-tale characters are presented as dehumanized, puppet-like figures, while the elements of The Five's nationalist idiom are presented in an exaggerated, parodic manner. Chromatic harmony is pervasive, but this is used by Rimsky-Korsakov in a most un-Wagnerian way, since the music is designed to leave the audience's emotions unengaged.