David Fanning once asked, ‘How do you solve a problem like Scriabin?’ Good question. Perhaps the answer is that while we can't exactly solve the problem, we can still play a collective role in demystifying him. More than any other composer in the Western tradition, Scriabin sought to shroud himself in mystery; perhaps he did not want us to get to the bottom of him, or his music. At the very least we find a man who was as desperate to be misunderstood as he was to be understood. Time and again, his philosophical and musical pronouncements that are supposed to elucidate each other create only obfuscation and confusion. And the mystery of Scriabin is not one that we have been keen to solve over the last hundred years. Time has shown that consumers of his music – be they performers, critics, academics, or concert-goers – want to keep the mystery alive. Any attempt to get to the heart of him only pushes him further and further away. And as we can see from the many contradictions that arise in his philosophical notebooks – through his elaborately constructed worldview, despite all his self-assurance, pomposity, and braggadocio, despite all his grandiose pronouncements and megalomaniacal prophesying – Scriabin did not understand himself particularly well. If we wish to do justice to him, we must endeavour to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable facets of the man – his music, his philosophy, his mysticism, his performance, his religion, his synaesthesia, his cultural legacy. And although the constant peeling back of interpretative layers may not reveal a central truth at the core, the process offers us startling new perspectives that constantly bring into question the nature of his many elusive mysteries. Demystification does not necessarily mean that we must dispense altogether with the mystery that we have come to love; we can rather contextualise it anew in different ways, thereby depriving it of some of its power to misdirect us. Demystifying Scriabin is a grand synthetic enterprise, almost as great a synthesis as that of his beloved H. P. Blavatsky in her Secret Doctrine, subtitled ‘Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy’. Add ‘Music’ to this list, and we come closer to Scriabin. Our synthesis requires a dialogue between a wide range of scholars, each with different expertise, different methodological tools, and different hermeneutic strategies.

When Scriabin published his first opus, and despite the daring experimentations of pioneering Romantic composers such as Liszt, Wagner, and Rimskiĭ-Korsakov, tonality was still the unequivocal governing musical language in Europe and America. At the moment of his untimely death, the landscape of art music was radically transformed. The dernier cri of art music had already embraced Schoenberg's daring experimentations with atonality, as well as Stravinsky’s, Bartók’s, and Debussy's experimentations with non-diatonic modality and novel rhythmical effects.

But Scriabin was not a mere observer of these advancements. He assumed a leading role as well, and the specifics of his transformation from a Romantic composer to a radical avant-gardist are outstanding, to say the least. Scriabin's well-known infatuation with Chopin and Liszt offered a wide perspective on some of the most novel techniques of the late Romantic period. Their discovery by the young Russian composer provided a study in musical process. Apart from the various innovative means to suppress tonal determinacy (i.e., tritone progressions, emphasis on the cycle of equal thirds), Scriabin internalised Liszt's unique approach to motivic transformation. And despite his well-known distaste for Russian nationalistic music, Scriabin was not entirely immune to Russian influence. From his own cultural legacy, he inherited the skill of creating meaning from pure or varied motivic repetitions.

Regarding the reception of the composer and his music, his image as a mystic and the symbolic power of his music assume centre stage. Nonetheless, the symbolic is projected onto an organisational backdrop that strongly suggests the presence of systematic structure and process – the music becomes the prism for a magnificent scalar ‘counterpoint’. This chapter seeks to uncover the organisational principles that govern Scriabin's post-tonal music and the possible prefiguration of his late system in his transitional period.

Scriabin scholarship has made substantial efforts to uncover the compositional principles in his late music. This analytical discourse (which focuses as much on pitch material as its organisation) includes such diverse perspectives as set-theory, semiotic theory, neo-Riemannian (transformational) theory, and psychoanalytic theory.

Typical Scriabin. When Aleksandr Gol’denveĭzer registered this account in his memoirs, he could not at the time comprehend the full import of the described events; the composer's ‘method’ would become the Holy Grail to the music theoretical community. For the following decades, pitch construction would be the focus of those engaging with the theoretical and analytical aspects of Scriabin's music with issues of form and rhythm barely getting a look-in. Even more remarkable is the fact that, despite the numerous – and on several occasions rather illuminating – articles and books on the matter, there is still an ongoing debate about the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ that characterise the composer's late style.

This chapter appraises the history and historiography of the theoretical literature that refers to Scriabin's late (post-tonal) style as well as the transitional period since, in some respects, it prefigures aspects of compositional practice found in the post Op. 58 repertory. Scriabin's ‘post-tonal’ period lasted for no more than six years, a timeframe scarcely proportional to the amount of attention it has received. Scriabin himself was notoriously parsimonious about his method of pitch organization, even to close friends such as Sabaneev. Interestingly, it took more than six decades after the composer's death to unearth his primary pitch resources, and the debates continue. To understand why, one needs to tell the story from its beginning. In actual fact, from the beginnings, since Scriabin's historiographical chronicle comprises multiple narratives largely unfolded on at least two continents. The search of this origin takes us back to a group of Russian/Soviet musicologists, namely Boleslav Iavorskiĭ, Leonid Sabaneev, and, much later, Varvara Dernova, as well as interested parties in Britain such as Arthur Eaglefield Hull.