Scriabin Masterpieces for Solo Piano

by Alexander Scriabin

In 1905, at age 33, Alexander Scriabin was already a star in the firmament of Russian music. Behind him were three symphonies and well over a hundred piano works. A gifted pianist (at the Moscow Conservatory, only fellow student Serge Rachmaninoff scored higher at graduation), Scriabin played recitals of his own music to full houses. As a composer, performances of his works attracted audiences from Russia, Europe, and America.
This superb compilation of 29 works includes many that are considered masterpieces of 20th-century pianism. Primarily short pieces, they reflect the highly atmospheric and exotic style of the composer's maturity — a period when Scriabin was most deeply affected by his mystical vision of a "new" music. Included are Poème satanique, Danse languide, Enigme, Désir, Caresse dansée, Guirlander, and Flammes sombres, among others. The collection also features the complete Fifth Sonata along with four of Scriabin's most popular and frequently recorded the poetic Etude in C-sharp minor, the brilliant Etude in D-sharp minor (a Horowitz favorite), the Nocturne in D-flat for Left Hand Alone, and the world-famous Vers la flamme.
Now brought together in a single, authoritative, inexpensive edition, this fine collection of masterly compositions will be a significant addition to the score libraries of all pianists and devotees of Scriabin's music.

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Alexander Nikolayevich Skrjabin (Russian: Александр Николаевич Скрябин) was a Russian composer and pianist. In his early years he was greatly influenced by the music of Frédéric Chopin and wrote works in a relatively tonal, late Romantic idiom. Later, and independently of his highly influential contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed a substantially atonal and much more dissonant musical language, which accorded with his personal brand of metaphysics. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia, and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale, while his colour-coded circle of fifths was also influenced by theosophy. He is considered by some to be the main Russian Symbolist composer. His son, Julian Scriabin, a child prodigy, was a composer and pianist in his own right, but he died by drowning at the age of eleven in Ukraine.

Scriabin was one of the most innovative and controversial of early modern composers. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia said of Scriabin that "no composer has had more scorn heaped on him or greater love bestowed." Leo Tolstoy described Scriabin's music as "a sincere expression of genius." Scriabin's oeuvre exerted a salient influence on the music world over time, and influenced composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Karol Szymanowski. However, Scriabin's importance in the Russian and then Soviet musical scene, and internationally, drastically declined after his death. According to his biographer Faubion Bowers, "No one was more famous during their lifetime, and few were more quickly ignored after death." Nevertheless, his musical aesthetics have been reevaluated since the 1970s, and his ten published sonatas for piano and other works have been increasingly championed, garnering significant acclaim in recent years.