Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, Opus 20

Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin was born in Moscow on January 6, 1872, and died there on April 27, 1915. He began his Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, Opus 20, in late 1896, completing it on April 7, 1897. The first performance took place in Odessa on October 23, 1897, under the direction of Vasily Safonov, with the composer as soloist. 

The scoring is for piano solo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

It has never been easy to categorize the music of Alexander Scriabin. Unlike the members of the aggressively nationalistic Russian school (“The Mighty Handful”), he was neither a nationalist nor a joiner, and remained confidently aloof from the ideological struggles that swirled through Russian musical life at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Unlike Tchaikovsky, he produced nothing for the theater — not a single opera or ballet. Instead, Scriabin, a celebrated piano virtuoso/composer in the style of Chopin, focused in his relatively small but highly original output primarily on music for piano solo. His ten piano sonatas form one of the most amazing cycles ever written, and have found champions in many of the greatest masters of the keyboard, from Vladimir Horowitz to Vladimir Ashkenazy. For the orchestra, Scriabin completed only seven works, which include a single piano concerto and five symphonies — the last three of which burst the bounds of the genre and sail into groundbreaking realms of harmony and philosophy.

So avant-garde and “spaced-out” were the late ideas and music of Scriabin, in fact, that Soviet radio (despite lingering official mistrust over Scriabin’s “decadent” aesthetic) chose to broadcast his Fourth Symphony—his 1908 Poem of Ecstasy—as an accompaniment to the first manned spaceflight by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. (Reportedly, it was simultaneously transmitted to Gagarin in the spacecraft and to dazed earthlings by their radios below.) The choice was surely appropriate, since the music of this enormous, orgiastic symphony is not entirely of this planet. As a literary accompaniment to The Poem of Ecstasy, Scriabin wrote a 369-line poem, a dense egomaniacal text that treats (among other things) the close relationship between pain, death, and sexual desire, culminating in orgasmic release.

But what else should one expect from a composer who considered himself more mystic than musician, a wild Russian with a fondness for Satanism and altered states of consciousness, a self-centered visionary who likened himself to the sun? For Scriabin, composing eventually became much more than putting notes together; it was a means to transform his audience, to transport them to realms far beyond the concert hall.

Born into a wealthy and accomplished family, Scriabin lost his mother to consumption at the age of one. Since his father’s diplomatic career took him to Turkey for an extended period, Scriabin was raised primarily by his doting aunt, grandmother, and great-aunt, and turned into what the author of the entry on Scriabin in the massive six-volume Soviet Musical Encyclopedia (published 1981) apologetically describes as an “effeminate, sensitive and sickly” child with remarkable musical gifts.

After some years in the cadet corps, he entered Moscow Conservatory at sixteen, where he studied piano and composition. Scriabin then embarked on a successful career as a concert pianist, and eventually inspired something like a cult following in Russia and abroad. In 1894, the Russian timber baron and arts patron Mitrofan Belyayev became Scriabin’s sponsor and publisher, leading to a rapid increase in his rate of composition, although at first he wrote exclusively for piano solo.

The Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor was in fact Scriabin’s first work for orchestra, completed when the composer was 24 years old. Scriabin wrote to Belyayev about the piece on October 24, 1896, and a month later indicated that it was completed in piano score. But the orchestration took several months, and Belyayev received the manuscript only in April 1897. For evaluation of new pieces he planned to publish, Belyayev relied on the fastidious and not infrequently envious Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who on this and subsequent occasions found Scriabin’s music hard to take. Rimsky wrote a highly critical and almost insulting letter to Scriabin about numerous flaws in the concerto, which sent Scriabin into a depression. Even after Scriabin made some changes in the orchestration, Rimsky remained intransigent, which led Scriabin to vent his feelings of frustration to another composer friend, Konstantin Lyadov:

Yesterday I received a letter from Nikolai Andreevich which grieved me. I am very grateful to him for his kind help, but has he wasted all this time on the Concerto only to say the orchestration is weak? Since he is so kind couldn’t he have noted those places which seem to him most weak and explain why?

To orchestrate a concerto, you don’t have to have written several symphonies or preliminary exercises. Nikolai Andreevich says that a concerto is very difficult to orchestrate and that it is easier to write for orchestra alone.

Let us suppose that all this is true. But that is for an ideal orchestration. What / want for my first try is a decent orchestration. This goal can be reached through advice and a little help from people who know. It is easy to say “study orchestration,” but there is only one way, and that is to hear one’s own composition performed. Trial and error is the best teacher. ... 

Forgive me for prattling on. But all this is rather painful for me. I had counted Nikolai Andreevich as good, good, and now I see he is only kind. At any rate, / am ashamed to have bothered him and I will not repeat that mistake in the future. I will manage on my own.

Scriabin even considered asking for assistance in revising the orchestration from another pedagogue, Sergei Taneyev, but it appears he never did so, for the score published by Belayev in 1898 “contains no significant alterations” from the original manuscript, according to Jeremy Norris in his excellent study The Russian Piano Concerto. Norris adds that uncontrollable emotions of envy, and not aesthetic indignation, must be the only explanation for Rimsky’s objections (“Look at this filth”) to Scriabin’s concerto, for the work treads so lightly that no new ground is broken, and stylistically it stays well within the comfortable Chopinesque idiom typical of Scriabin’s early style.”

Yes, those anticipating the extravagant mystic and harmonic innovator found in scores like The Divine Poem and The Poem of Fire might well be surprised by the transparency, delicacy, restraint, and coziness of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto. Although Scriabin’s intimate performing knowledge of the piano is everywhere evident, the solo part is never flashy or athletic, as in the case of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (1875), or restlessly dynamic, as in the case of Rachmaninoff’s Second and Third piano concertos. (Of diminutive height, Scriabin also had a very small hand that could only spread to an octave, unlike the gargantuan reach of Rachmaninoff.) The soloist does not even get a real cadenza. The mood is elegiac, elegant, and lyrical, without the open-ended and disturbing modulations (full of unresolved fourths) so typical of Scriabin’s later pieces for piano solo.

In the first movement, the solo part opens with a series of descending three-note figures (indicated in the score with accents) in the first subject that are used as a kind of thematic melodic-harmonic nucleus throughout the movement. In his later works, Scriabin would develop this technique of “nuclei” much more extensively. The second movement is a lovely Theme and Variations, its four variations based on a theme with vaguely nostalgic echoes of Russian folk music that was supposedly composed in the composer’s childhood. For the third movement, Scriabin chose a rondo form built around what is the concerto’s most muscular theme, with its military dotted rhythms.

The Scriabin we hear in the Piano Concerto is not yet the modernist who would turn the Russian musical establishment upside down in the early years of the 20th century. Here, he looks backward as much as forward, but when the result is so replete with charm and freshness, who can complain?

Harlow Robinson

Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of Scriabin’s Piano Concerto was given by Serge Koussevitzky on January 25, 1 932, with soloist Lilias Mackinnon.