On Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 9, by Michael Peck

Before the outbreak of World War I, Russian composer Alexander Scriabin sketched out a monolithic orchestral piece to usher in the end of the world. Enigmatically called The Mysterium, the composition would feature flaming clouds and perfumes to enhance the catastrophic mood of the work, in addition to a massive light show. His welcoming in of the apocalypse, which would last seven days, was to be performed at the base of the Himalayas in a specially built amphitheater. Together, a great war and his music, he believed, would purify mankind and usher in a new age of wonderment. Scriabin’s initial compositions—preludes, nocturnes, mazurkas, his first piano sonatas—were greatly influenced by Chopin, albeit with snippets of the weird sonorities to come. Scriabin was drawn early into the superman philosophy of Nietzsche before turning to his own whipped-up version of eschatological aesthetics. While most composers have sought to represent ideas or soundscapes, Scriabin was convinced that his music would not only destroy the world, but also—once that was accomplished—go on to influence a bona fide utopia.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeXJgjq-kbQ]

These chords of a dissolving world are rife in Scriabin’s tangle of Romanticism and the occult, and nowhere more tangibly than in his 9th Piano Sonata, the so-called “Black Mass” sonata (it wasn’t dubbed this by the composer, but he approved the subtitle nonetheless). Scriabin’s diabolism was already apparent—he refused to play his 6^th Sonata publicly because he believed it to be “nightmarish, murky, unclean, and mischievous”—yet the 9th most clearly spells out his adherence to the occult. The sonata unwinds with a slow recursive theme in minor ninth intervals. Very soon it morphs into jarring arpeggios which quickly sublimate the ethereal quiet of the opening bars. Undulating between lyrical and combustible, the 9th is like a topsy-turvy gondola ride to the underworld. Tumbles of crazed trills dominate as the piece rushes to an orgiastic eruption of chromatic chords, leading to one of the darkest outbursts in classical music. Only then does the preluding theme return to wrap-up the sonata, quietly bringing the listener to Scriabin’s foreshadowing of some pre-post-prelapsarian cosmic order.

In the 9th Sonata and elsewhere the struggle between inner tranquility and outer turmoil is prevalent. Completed in 1913, the 9th shares with Scriabin’s other sonatas the absence of a key signature and his use of the “mystic chord”(C-Fsharp-Bflat-E-A-D) to augment his terra incognita musical landscape. Never explicitly atonal, Scriabin’s chromaticism toys with atonality, inverting classical music’s traditional progressions into a maelstrom of circular harmonics. Scriabin composed experiences rather than motivic ideas, ecstatic or corrosive moods rather than the usual variations-on-a-theme. He color-coordinated the moods of his orchestral pieces and sonatas with...