Alexander Scriabin – Symphony No. 3 « The Divine Poem » (1902)
Painting Info – « Dracula’s Castle » by Gaius31duke on deviantart.
I. Lento – 00:00
II. Luttes – Allegro – 1:04
III. Voluptes – Lento – 24:36
IV. Jeu Divin – Allegro – 37:03
« The only true romantic musician produced by Russia, » in the words of his friend Boris de Schloezer in 1919, Scriabin, a contemporary of Rasputin, was a loner, emotionally, temperamentally and stylistically removed from the last Tsarists to whose number he belonged historically. In the Mahlerian sense, his philosophy, spiritual and physical, was an embracement of the world. He spent his hours in mystic contemplation, in psychic transcendence. He spent his days looking for ecstasy, the « highest rising of activity …the summit ». He spent his years loving womankind. He spent a whole life worshipping the private mysterium of an astral neosphere only he knew anything about.. « I will ignite your imagination with the delight of my promise. I will bedeck you in the excellence of my dreams. I will veil the sky of your wishes with the sparkling stars of my creation. I bring not truth, but freedom ».
One of the legendary cosmic soul journeys of the twentieth century – massively imagined, massively realised, massively risky – the cyclic Third Symphony in C minor, the Divine Poem (1902-04), dates from a time of significant change in Scriabin’s life, during which period he left his teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory, read Nietzsche and Marx, seduced pubescent girls, abandoned his wife Vera and four children for a new young mistress, Tatyana, and went to live in lake-land Switzerland in the hope that such a refuge might release new ideas within him. Years later, the early writing of the symphony, at a country dacha near Maloyaroslavets during the spring of 1903, was vividly remembered by Pasternak: « Just as sun and shade alternated in the forest and birds sang and flew from one branch, bits and pieces from the Divine Poem, which was being composed at the piano in the next-door dacha, were flying and rolling in the air. Oh God, what a music it was!
The symphony was crashing and collapsing again and again, like a town under artillery fire, and then building and growing again out of the wreckage and ruins. It was brimming with an essence chiselled out to the point of insanity, and as new as the forest was new, full of life and breathing freshness ». In November 1903 Scriabin played through the piano draft « for the crowd of St. Petersburg composers, and what a surprise! Glazunov was delighted and Rimsky-Korsakov was also very favourable ». Announced as « a grandiose creation which transports the listener fantastically into another world », the first « manifestation » took place in Paris on 29th May 1905, under Nikisch for a fee of $750. The Russian premiere in St Petersburg, on 8th March 1906, with Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev at the rehearsals, was directed by Felix Blumenfeld.
The French language « programme » of the work -not so much Scriabin’s (lost) poem as a condensed explanation, by Tatyana and de Schloezer, her brother -centres on the Ego, divided into Man-God and Slave-Man. These forces struggle with each other, experience the discord and concord of human experience, and finally through unity and blissful ecstasy attain freedom « in the sky of other worlds ». There are three principal (sonata-form) chapters: « Struggles » (Allegro, « mysterious, tragic », « red » C minor); « Sensuous Delights » (Lento, « sublime », « whitish-blue » E major -the distinguishing key contrast of not only Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Second but also Liszt’s Faust Symphony); and « Divine Play » (Allegro, « with radiant joy », « red » C major). A short germinal Prologue (Lento, C minor) encloses a trinity of leitmotifs: « Divine Grandeur » (a unisonal bass idea derived from the opening of the unfinished D minor Symphonic Poem [Allegro] of 1896-97; « Summons to Man »; and « Fear to approach, suggestive of Flight ». These are combined with, or are the source of, the many various ideas running through the work, reaching a climax in the so-called Ego theme (second subject) of the finale.
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