The great eccentric?

Scriabin appears today a perfect example as to why listeners should not confuse a composer’s work with his biography. Once revered, then subsequently reviled both in his own country and abroad, his late Piano Sonatas – concise, intense and eerily atmospheric – are now recognised as extraordinary masterpieces ahead of their time. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, the man himself is regularly regarded today, even by several Scriabin aficionados, as an embarrassment. This is, above all, for his apparent delusion that he was the Messiah – a concept seemingly the more ludicrous given his effete, bourgeois appearance and the fact he stood little more than five foot tall.

It does not help that by Russia’s pre-Revolutionary Julian calendar (which, by the 20th century, ran 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in the rest of Europe), Scriabin was born on Christmas Day. His one-time close friend and biographer Leonid Sabaneyev added to the mythology by carelessly (or mischievously) claiming he died on Easter Day – Scriabin ‘which could replace the old outdated Gospel’. Scriabin, recalled Engel, elaborated: ‘“A special temple has to be built for it, maybe here,” – and without looking he took in the panorama of mountains with an undefined gesture – “but maybe far from here, in India”.’ This, it appears, was his first confession of his ambition to write his notorious and never fulfilled final magnum opus.