– Composer: Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (6 January 1872 — 27 April 1915)
– Orchestra: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
– Conductor: Vladimir Ashkenazy
– Year of recording: 1991
Sculpture: detail of “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini 1647-1652)
Le Poème de l’extase Poem of Ecstasy, Op. 54, written in 1905-1908.
During the decade immediately preceding the First World War, the European musical scene was developing at an astonishing pace. Schoenberg moved from the massive, two-hour-long Gurrelieder, with its epic Romantic text and equally lush score, to the concise and stringent Piano Pieces, Op. 11 in a matter of just eight years, while by 1913 Stravinsky was ready to unveil his Rite of Spring. Although Scriabin stayed apart from these developments, his extraordinary innovations during the first decade of the century are at the very heart of this musical realignment. Although generally regarded as a composer for the piano, Scriabin is the author of five large-scale orchestral works (all composed between about 1900 and 1910) that showcase his revolutionary artistic genius in much the same way that the piano sonatas do.
In Le poème de l’extase of 1908, the journey towards atonality and thematic fragmentation is by no means complete (the real musical goal would not be reached until the final few sonatas), but enough of the composer’s increasingly complex mystical and theosophical views saturate the score to bring to it a density and complexity of expression denied to the three symphonies that precede it. It is a work that stands with great pride beside the massive German orchestral works of the period, both a mesmerizing portrait of those troubled years and, at the same time, a uniquely intimate picture of an artist’s fascinating mind.
The Poem was originally to take the shape of a fourth symphony, but Scriabin decided to cast it instead as a 20-minute orchestral poem based on his own Poem of Ecstasy, a 369-line poem celebrating and glorifying his own creative powers (which would, according to his vision of reality, play a crucial role in the approaching transformation of the world). The orchestra is large — twice the classical contingent of winds and brass are required — and, unlike Mahler or Schoenberg, who used even greater forces than this, by no means sparingly used.
Although Scriabin’s orchestral experience was limited, he was one of the early twentieth century’s masters of orchestration, and throughout the Poem of Ecstasy his orchestral writing is brilliant. Themes are used to delineate mental and emotional states (in this way the late orchestral works are quite unlike the late piano works, which employ an almost exclusively textural and harmonic narrative structure). At the opening, the flute gesture searches longingly, the clarinet dreams, and the trumpet foretells a still-distant victory. An equestrian stride commences, only to be abruptly halted to make room for an ardent violin solo. As the many levels of expression unfold the music is highly chromatic, but not particularly dissonant. A glorious climax draws the music to an appropriately ecstatic finish in C major — a key that had, for Scriabin, a cleansing and focusing quality.
Modest Altschuler, who helped Scriabin revise the score in Switzerland in 1907, and who conducted the premiere with the Russian Symphony Society of New York on 10 December 1908, reported that Scriabin’s implied program (which does not appear in the score) is based on three main ideas: his soul in the orgy of love, the realization of a fantastical dream, and the glory of his own art.
Henry Miller made a reference to this symphony in Nexus, the third volume of The Rosy Crucifixion:
“That Poème de l’extase? Put it on loud. His music sounds like I think – sometimes. Has that far-off cosmic itch. Divinely fouled up. All fire and air. The first time I heard it I played it over and over. (…) It was like a bath of ice, cocaine and rainbows. For weeks I went about in a trance. Something had happened to me. (…) Every time a thought seized me a little door would open inside my chest, and there, in this comfy little nest sat a bird, the sweetest, gentlest bird imaginable. ‘Think it out!’ he would chirp. ‘Think it out to the end!’ And I would, by God. Never any effort involved. Like an étude gliding off a glacier.”