About this Piece

Like his good friend Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin won a Gold Medal for his piano playing upon graduation from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892 and embarked on the career of a young virtuoso, performing throughout Europe. His own early music was much in the manner of his idol, Chopin. But in the first years of the new century, Scriabin transformed his life. He left his wife and children and ran off with a young music student. And—under the spell of Nietzsche, Madame Blavatsky, and theosophism—he came to believe that his music had the power to bring mystical unity to a fragmented world. Scriabin’s extraordinary egocentrism (he had been raised by adoring aunts and a grandmother) and the fact that on the old-style calendar his birthday fell on Christmas Day contributed to his sense of messianic mission. He began to create a visionary music suited to this mission, one based on single-movement forms, chromatic harmonies, and daring ideas about its presentation.

Scriabin laid out a sequence of four symphonic works that he believed would lead to the transformation of human consciousness: The Divine Poem (1905); The Poem of Ecstasy (1908); Prometheus, The Poem of Fire (1909–10); and Mysterium, the culmination of the sequence, which was to bring about the actual transformation. (It was left incomplete when Scriabin died at 43 of a massive infection.) Scriabin envisioned a performance in India in which the audience and performers would be garbed in white and a fusion of the arts—including “the art of perfume”—would elevate humankind to a state of ecstatic consciousness.

Prometheus, first performed in Moscow on March 2, 1911, with Scriabin as piano soloist and Serge Koussevitsky conducting, forms a distinct chapter in this progression. Across its 20-minute span, Scriabin attempts to depict nothing less than the development of human consciousness, from primordial formlessness through the emergence of self-awareness to a final ecstatic union with the cosmos. In Greek mythology (and in Aeschylus and Shelley), Prometheus had been a rebel who battled the gods on behalf of man, but Scriabin saw in Prometheus’ fire the symbol of human consciousness and creative energy. He attempted to depict this musically in his “Poem of Fire,” and he envisioned not simply a “symphony of sound” but a “symphony of color rays.” Toward this end he conceived a new instrument—the tastiera per luce or “color keyboard”—that would project light of different colors on a screen behind the orchestra, reproducing visually what the orchestra was dramatizing in sound.

Scriabin never saw a performance with light (the premiere simply presented the orchestral piece), nor did there exist an instrument that could produce the light display he envisioned. In fact, Scriabin never developed his ideas about the correspondences between particular colors and tones (or ideas) in a systematic way, and those who create a light display at performances of Prometheus must formulate their own theory of light and its relation to this music.

Scriabin scores Prometheus for a huge orchestra with an important part for solo piano, but this is not a concerto—the piano is simply one of the characters in the unfolding drama of enlightenment. The music itself begins ambiguously with what Scriabin called “the mystical chord,” a slightly discordant assemblage of fourths. Out of this soft tonal smear, marked “hazy” in the score, distinct musical forces begin to emerge. French horns intone a phrase depicting what one Scriabin scholar has called the “crepuscular, invertebrate state of Karma-less humanity,” a trumpet call represents the creative will, the piano symbolizes man, and a gentle flute melody is the dawn of human consciousness; later the solo violin will be associated with human love. Many of the themes are built on an upward sweep, symbolic of man’s aspiring, yearning grasp for consciousness.

Musically, Prometheus may be described as a gradual crescendo and accelerando that moves from a quiet lento beginning to a thunderous prestissimo close. Scriabin covers the score with subjective instructions for the performers: voluptuous, almost with pain, with delight, with intense desire, with emotion and rapture, with restrained terror, defiantly, stormy, with radiant brilliance, piercing like a scream, suddenly very sweet, victorious, with blinding brilliance, in a whirl.

Such a progression evokes an erotic component, and that was very much a part of Scriabin’s ecstatic vision. At the climax (that word is used advisedly), an optional chorus enters singing only vowel sounds, the color organ generates an overpowering radiance, and the orchestra rushes Prometheus to its orgiastic fulfillment on a harmonically unambiguous (and very loud) F-sharp-major chord.

—Eric Bromberger