SCRIABIN PIANOFORTE MUSIC
Played by IRENE MARIK
SCRIABIN, born and brought up in the Russia of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was in many ways unlike his contemporaries in what we call ' the Russian school.' Making his name first as a brilliant pianist, playing much of his own music, he retired from the concert and teaching world at the age of thirty-two and gave himself up to composition. His first pieces for the pianoforte are delicate and fanciful, with something of the restless striving, as well as much of the poetry, which made its way into all the art of that era. So far, he was quite a typical Russian of his own age.
It was a time when the air was full of religious and philosophical aspirations, vague and rather dreamy, though utterly sincere.
Scriabin was very soon the archpriest, in music, of the new ideals; until his untimely death at the age of only forty-four, he consecrated all his zeal and energy to one high purpose, a great ' Mystery,' so he called it, in which all art would bo united in the service of religion. His later work was all devoted to that end, and though he himself would no doubt have thought of his big orchestral symphonies and poems as coming nearest to a realization of his ideal, it is gradually becoming clearer to the present generation that he moved more confidently, with a more assured certainty, in his pianoforte pieces-the later sonatas, the ' Satanic Poem,' many of the Studies, and ' Vers la flamme.'
Himself a consummate master of all the resources of the pianoforte, he did a great deal to extend the scope of its technique, and in that way, too, his pianoforte pieces have an importance which musicians of today are beginning to deny to his orchestral work.