Alexander Scriabin

If you look up “Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin” in the New Groves, you are unceremoniously told “See SKRYABIN, ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH”: it is a perverse English transliteration of his name which I've seen used precisely nowhere else! If you look at [https://imslp.org/wiki/File:ScriabinA_sign.jpg his signature], the 'k' would seem plausible -except that Russian has no other way of writing a hard 'k' sound, where English does (“Colour” needs no 'k' to make a hard k-sound, for example). The 'ya' in New Groves's rendition of his surname is also at least vaguely justified in that the Russian uses the Я character, which is indeed pronounced 'ya'. But again: English can do that sound with 'ia' letters perfectly well, as you would probably be familiar with! Thus the New Groves spelling of his name is pedantic in the extreme, and when cataloguing his music, you'd be in much more numerous company by sticking to 'Alexander Scriabin', without the patronymic.

Born the same year as Vaughan Williams (1872), in Moscow, Scriabin was born into an aristocratic family, but his mother died when he was 1 and his father was always away on diplomatic business. He was thus bought up by an assortment of aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. They spoiled him rotten, pampered him endlessly and set him on the path to excessive fastidiousness and egocentricity that was to mark him out as an adult. New Groves repeatedly mentions 'egomania' in the context of Scriabin! He was apparently diminutive in stature and always had a problem stretching more than an octave on the piano -which was perhaps a bit of an issue for someone whose first move into professional music-making was as a concert pianist. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory (Rachmaninov was a good friend there) from 1888 to 1892. He married in 1897 but abandoned her (and his children) in 1903 for a six-year tour of Europe in the company of a young admirer: not the nicest of people, you might reasonably think!

His first published compositions appeared in 1893, principally piano pieces. Only later did he branch out into orchestral works, producing three symphonies, a piano concerto and, the piece he is probably most well-known for, the Poème de l'extase. These latter works in particular are powerfully progressive, whilst being wrapped up in an all-embracing mysticism and excessive philosophising: Scriabin allegedly believed that the world would be regenerated by a cataclysmic event and thus welcomed the outbreak of World War One as the initial step in this great cosmic regeneration. The egomaniac also believed his own compositional efforts would help bring about this new Nirvana, with its synaesthetic appeal to the senses and its combination of all the arts. It's fair to say, then, that he was probably a bit bonkers, in the mould of Berlioz or Wagner!

Scriabin died early, in 1915, when a boil on his lip became infected and sepsis overwhelmed his system.

---