Alexander Scriabin: Aesthetic Development through Selected Piano Works By Nuno Cernadas Master Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Music Hochschule für Musik Freiburg March 2013 2 I give full flowering to each feeling, each search, each thirst. I raise you up, legions of feelings, pure activity, my children. I raise you, my complicated, unified feelings, and embrace all of you as my one activity, my one ecstasy, bliss, my last moment. I am God. I raise you up, and I am resurrected, and then I kiss you and lacerate you. I am spent and weary, and then I take you. In this divine act I know you to be one with me. I give you to know this bliss, too. You will be resurrected in me, the more I am incomprehensible to you. I will ignite your imagination with the delight of my promise. I will bedeck you in the excellence of my dreams. I will veil the sky of your wishes with the sparkling stars of my creation. I bring not truth, but freedom.1 Alexander Scriabin 1 Scriabin’s Notebooks, quoted in: Bowers, Faubion. The New Scriabin: Enigma and Answers. Newton Abbot London: David & Charles, 1974, p.115-116. 3 4 5 Acknowledgements I would like to express my profound gratitude to the Coordinator of the present Thesis, Prof. Dr. Ludwig Holtmeier, for all his support and scientific advice. I would also like to convey my appreciation to Prof. Hans Fuhlbom and Prof. Gilead Mishory of the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and to Prof. Dina Yoffe, for bringing me to a closer and better comprehension of Scriabin’s music. I also thank Prof. Fátima Travanca, with whom I first studied Scriabin’s piano music, for sparking my interest in music in general and for introducing me to the music of this wonderful composer. Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to my parents Josefina and Eduardo. I am deeply thankful for their love and trust and their belief in my work and character, and for always having encouraged my wish to pursue a career in music. Without their efforts, it would not have been possible to materialize this thesis. 6 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 7 BIOGRAPHY OF THE COMPOSER .......................................................... 10 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EARLY PERIOD .............................. 23 Sonata No.3 in F sharp minor, op.23 ..................................................... 25 I – Drammatico ...................................................................................... 27 II – Allegretto ......................................................................................... 35 III – Andante .......................................................................................... 39 IV – Presto con fuoco ............................................................................. 45 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD ........................... 55 Quatre Morceaux op.51 ......................................................................... 57 Fragilité ................................................................................................. 59 Prélude .................................................................................................. 63 Poème ailé ............................................................................................. 66 Danse Languide ..................................................................................... 71 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LATE PERIOD ................................ 76 Vers la Flamme, Poème op.72 ............................................................... 78 FINAL REMARKS .................................................................................... 91 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................... 93 7 Introduction The music of Alexander Scriabin has a magical quality that has captivated the imagination of the public for generations. The first piano pieces have inherent a certain freshness (almost naiveté) and a simplicity of musical expression that fascinates every listener, through their beauty and ingenuity. Although these works are tremendously inspired by Chopin, Scriabin does not copy the polish master but rather takes inspiration from his sound world in order to create his own poetic voice. As one dwells over Scriabin’s work, going progressively deeper into his middle and late periods, it becomes apparent an ever-growing crystallization and sophistication of the composer’s ideas and principles. Hence, the middle period serves as a transitional étage for the clarification of Scriabin’s musical thought and is the critical moment of his musical development. It is a period of self-searching, deepening of concepts, progressive construction of a musical formula in which he would later swim freely. The final period is the consolidation of his art. It corresponds to the production of a self-confident master, finally achieving the tightly bond structure that allows for unique and effortless musical expression. This is his most original period, for it is during this phase that Scriabin claims the right to be inscribed in Music History books, as one of the most visionary and imaginative composers of all time. This noticeable evolution of Scriabin’s aesthetics and musical thought brings about two very important questions: • What caused it? • In which ways is this development recognizable in his music? The present thesis attempts to answer these problems in a manner that mixes both concrete analytical terminology and the subjective opinions of its author. It tries, however, not to fall into hermetical analytical concepts but rather provide them as a support for the conclusions that the author hopes to be musically clarifying. 8 It is the author’s opinion that there is much more to Scriabin’s music than just the explanation of the Mystic chord or the harmonic developments that his music brought about. This thesis does not intend to explain in detail the development of either the harmonic, melodic, rhythmical or philosophical dimensions of Scriabin’s music, but uses each one of these perspectives as means to enlighten the evolution of the musical thought. In order to provide answers for the above-mentioned first question, the author decided to present a biography of the composer, hoping that the insight on Scriabin’s private, social and spiritual life may bring forth a better contextualization of the internal and external conditions in which Scriabin’s oeuvre was brought to life. To answer the second question, the author elected three significant works of Scriabin’s piano production, each one belonging to a different period of his musical creation. These will serve as musical examples to prove Scriabin’s creative evolution, since each of these compositions is a superlative representative of the qualities that are idiomatic to the corresponding period, while simultaneously containing features that are transversal to the composer’s whole production. The selected piano works are: • Piano Sonata No.3 in F sharp minor, op.23 - Early Period • Quatre Morceaux (Four Pieces), op.51 - Middle Period • Poème “Vers la Flamme”, op.72 - Late Period The author will focus on the analysis of each of these works, considering their different dimensions. He will try to show each piece’s inspiration and compositional procedures as well as their philosophical content in an attempt to faithfully portray the similarities and differences between them. This comparison will, hopefully, allow for a clearer recognition of the aesthetical development of Scriabin’s music. 9 By recognizing the new musical possibilities opened up by Scriabin, the author must adapt his analytical techniques for a better understanding of each of these very different works. In this sense, and although the analysis of the Third Sonata op.23 focuses itself entirely in tonal principles (however filled with a characteristic fin de siècle chromaticism), the author’s approach to Quatre Morceaux and especially to Vers la Flamme had to mix different analytical components, in order to portray a more accurate and clarified perspective. These consist of the traditional musical analysis rooted on tonality as well as the so called “pitch-class set theory”, which the author considered very useful to classify some of the atonal structures present in Scriabin’s later music, and also as a labeling device with which Scriabin’s harmonies could be more immediately distinguishable. 10 Biography of the Composer As he liked to say, Scriabin came from a “(…) noble and military family. Indeed, his was an aristocratic family, with roots going as deep as the thirteen century.” 2 All of his male relatives on his father’s side had careers in the military. His father, Nikolai Alexandrovich Scriabin (1849-1914), avoided this tradition and studied Law instead at the Moscow University as well as Oriental Languages in Petersburg, granting him the possibility of being sent as an official interpreter to the Russian Embassy in Constantinople.3 Alexander Scriabin’s mother, Lyubov Petrovna Shchetinina (1849-1873), was a concert pianist and one of the first Russian female professional musicians. She took her diploma with honors in the Petersburg Conservatory (she was awarded the Great Gold Medal) in 1867. Her teacher was Theodor Leschetizky,4 Europe’s most notable piano pedagogue at the time, a man who taught Ignaz Friedman, Arthur Schnabel and Benno Moiseiwitsch, among other great pianists. She was a frequent