Scriabin and the Mysterium, the Music Meant to Transfigure the World
Theosophy, the mystic chord and coloured light: Alexander Scriabin's dream of a total work to be performed in India, left unfinished at his death in 1915.
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin gave music a more grandiose task than any other composer. Born in Moscow in 1872, a refined pianist and author of sonatas and symphonic poems, in his last years he worked on a project he called the Mysterium: a work intended not for an audience but for all of humanity, capable, in his view, of bringing about a spiritual transformation of the world. He died in Moscow on 27 April 1915, aged forty-three, of an infection, leaving only sketches and notes of the Mysterium.
The Encounter with Theosophy
In the early years of the twentieth century Scriabin drew close to Theosophy, the movement founded in 1875 in New York by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. He read Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine in French translation, frequented Theosophical circles during his stay in Brussels and absorbed the idea of a cosmic evolution through great cycles, called races, destined to culminate in a return of spirit to its original unity.
To these readings Scriabin added ideas from Nietzsche and from idealist philosophy. In his notebooks he presented himself as a creator who, through art, would hasten that process. His orchestral works of these years bear eloquent titles: The Divine Poem, his third symphony completed in 1904, and The Poem of Ecstasy, first performed in 1908.
Prometheus, the Mystic Chord and Light
The decisive step was Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, Op. 60, completed in 1910. The piece is founded on a chord built from superimposed fourths, which critics have called the mystic chord or Prometheus chord. From this sound cluster derive almost all the melodies and harmonies of the work, which thus gives up traditional tonality without abandoning a centre.
The score also contains a line headed Luce, light, intended for a keyboard that would project colours into the hall. Scriabin associated each key with a precise colour, according to a personal correspondence between sounds and hues. At the first performance, in Moscow in March 1911 under Serge Koussevitzky, the light instrument was not available; a version with lights was attempted in New York in 1915.
The Mysterium Project
The Mysterium was to be performed at the foot of the Himalayas, in India, in a hemispherical temple reflected in a pool of water. Its planned duration was seven days. Music, dance, light, perfumes, processions and words would have engaged all the senses, and the participants would not have been spectators but celebrants. Scriabin spoke of this event as a universal festival at the end of which humanity would be transfigured.
Aware of the enormity of the project, the composer began work on a preliminary piece, the Prefatory Action, which was meant to prepare minds for the great event. He left only fragments of it. From the 1970s onwards the Russian composer Alexander Nemtin proposed a reconstruction, which nonetheless remains a personal hypothesis. We do not know for certain what form the work would have taken in the composer's mind.
The last piano sonatas, among them the Seventh, called the White Mass, and the Ninth, called the Black Mass, retain something of that ambition. The Mysterium never existed, but its plan remains one of the most radical attempts to make music an instrument of spiritual transformation. Its influence can be felt in early twentieth-century Russian music and in later experiments in multisensory art.