Moscow-born Alexander Scriabin achieved early, great success as a pianist at the turn of the 20th century playing his own Chopin-influenced short pieces—preludes, études, nocturnes, etc. He became notorious as a purveyor of “mystical” creations during the final decade of his short life: his last piano sonatas and two orchestral works, the Poem of Ecstasy and the subsequent Prometheus, Poem of Fire.

Scriabin wrote The Poem of Ecstasy in a villa near Genoa, where he and his companion Tatiana Schlözer were hiding out from a censorious Russian society and Scriabin’s wife. The composer’s self-exile coincided with an invitation to present a series of recitals and perform his Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic. He traveled to New York, but Vassily Safonov, the orchestra’s conductor and a friend of the abandoned Mrs. Scriabin, would not countenance Scriabin’s presence, or his music. He refused to conduct the concerto and what would have been the world premiere of The Poem of Ecstasy.

With warnings from an old friend, the conductor Modest Altschuler—the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and a woman who was not his wife had recently been run out of New York for similar “moral offenses”—Scriabin and Schlözer returned to Europe. The Poem finally made it to New York two years later, when it was presented by Altschuler and the Russian Symphony Orchestra of New York. The reviews were scathing.

A program note for a concert of Scriabin’s music given in Moscow in March of 1909 likely offers the composer’s view of the piece—and a small taste of his theosophy:

“Poem of Ecstasy is the joy of liberated action. The Cosmos, i.e., Spirit, is eternal Creation without External Motivation, a Divine Play with Worlds. The Creative Spirit, i.e., the Universe at Play, is not conscious of the absoluteness of its creativeness, having subordinated itself to a Finality and made creativity a means toward an end. The stronger the pulse-beat of life and the more rapid the precipitation of rhythms, the more clearly the awareness comes to the Spirit that is consubstantial with creativity, immanent within itself, and that its life is a play. When the Spirit has attained the supreme culmination of its activity and has been torn away from the embraces of teleology and relativity, when it has exhausted completely its substance and its liberated active energy, the Time of Ecstasy shall then arrive.”

To go much further in describing this gloriously over-the-top, swooning piece of musical mysticism would be to bring it down to earth, the last thing its composer would have wanted.

—Herbert Glass