Scriabin... Poem of Ecstasy

[ardcarp]

Yesterday's Afternoon Concert..... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001q79d....

caught my ear almost by accident halfway through Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, whose revolutionary harmony (especially that progression) has always been an ear-worm. But it was followed by Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy which had me transfixed. He seemed to push Tristan-esque harmony beyond its limits. I wonder if T & I had been in his mind as he wrote this piece? I didn't listen to any of the speech part of the programme. so don't know if any connection was deliberately made, but to me there seemed almost direct thematic quotations from time to time.

Anyone know more about this than I do?

[Pulcinella]

Yesterday's Afternoon Concert..... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001q79d....

caught my ear almost by accident halfway through Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, whose revolutionary harmony (especially that progression) has always been an ear-worm. But it was followed by Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy which had me transfixed. He seemed to push Tristan-esque harmony beyond its limits. I wonder if T & I had been in his mind as he wrote this piece? I didn't listen to any of the speech part of the programme. so don't know if any connection was deliberately made, but to me there seemed almost direct thematic quotations from time to time.

Anyone know more about this than I do?

The wiki article might help.
No mention of T&I but there is of Scriabin's 'mystic chord' and the whole-tone scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poem_of_Ecstasy

(It was the Evening concert btw. )

[Mandryka]

From the relevant chapter in the Oxford history of Western Music -- I can send you a pdf of the whole thing if you PM me

This description of the potential behavior of the six-tone extended dominant chord has been no mere theoretical exercise. It is a description of the actual behavior of Scriabin’s Symphony no. 4, op. 54, subtitled Le poème de l’extase (“The poem of ecstasy”), his most famous composition. It is very much a sequel to the Divine Poem, again casting the solo trumpet as “Nietzschean” superhuman protagonist, to the point where the symphony becomes a virtual concerto, requiring a credit to the performer. Its surface Tristanisms are too conspicuous to be missed by anyone who knows Wagner.

But the main Tristan affinity is profoundly structural and all-encompassing. Like Wagner’s opera, Scriabin’s symphony consists in the most general terms of a single fundamental gesture, an agonizingly prolonged “structural upbeat” that at the very last moment achieves cataclysmic consummatory resolution. That colossal consummatory gesture is the ultimate reality, the “noumenon” that underlies all sensory and cognitive experience, for which sexual union (as in Tristan), the creative act, childbirth or death as subjectively perceived, even the subjective notion of the beginning or the end of time, can be conceptual or “phenomenal” metaphors.

The music is thus laden with a profusion of powerful but apparently contradictory meanings—triumph and annihilation; procreation and spontaneous cosmic genesis; birth and death—that can best be clarified from the perspective of mystical symbolism, as in Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “threefold vision” of Scriabin’s accomplishment (quoted above), which encompasses both the transcendence of the individual person and the breakthrough to a new plane of being. The extinction or dissolution of the individual ego—the “petty ‘I’”—is ideally prefigured in the six-tone dominant chord, for its component tones constitute a symmetrical scale whose intervals are all equal and whose degrees, therefore, are all equidistant, structurally undifferentiated, and hence not subject to functional classification. If one cannot differentiate degrees or identify their functions, one can no longer identify with the fluctuations of harmonic tension or respond to them emotionally. One’s ego is stilled.


Blah Blah Blah

[Mandryka]

By the way, the great Chitose Okashiro made a nice piano transcription

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6qOmYPwhvA&ab_channel=ProPianoRecordsOffi cialChannel

[ardcarp]

Thanks for those replies Pulcs and Mandryka. BTW, I quite enjoyed reading the 'blah'! I wasn't wrong about the Wagner affinity anyway.

[Joseph K]

For some reason Scriabin's orchestral works don't have so much the effect on me as do the piano works - in general, but particularly with the late works, though if I'm not mistaken most the last five piano sonatas were written some time after the later orchestral works. What are people's favourite recordings of his orchestral music? I have a triple-CD complete symphonic works under Ashkenazy knocking around somewhere...

[RichardB]

Scriabin didn't write enough orchestral music to develop originality and subtlety in orchestration to match what he could do with harmony and texture on the piano, and, indeed, his last completed orchestral piece Prometheus predates the last five sonatas. I think his 3rd Symphony wears its Wagner influence much more on its sleeve than the Poem where it's been more thoroughly assimilated.

[Serial_Apologist]

For some reason Scriabin's orchestral works don't have so much the effect on me as do the piano works - in general, but particularly with the late works, though if I'm not mistaken most the last five piano sonatas were written some time after the later orchestral works. What are people's favourite recordings of his orchestral music? I have a triple-CD complete symphonic works under Ashkenazy knocking around somewhere...

There's something about the physical power involved in performing these and other transcriptions successfully, I think, that makes for this impact on the recipient. And one is astonished that such power can be expressed through a piano. I feel this way about the piano transcription of parts of Petruschka, almost finding it more fulfilling than the brilliant orchestration of the original. Somebody once wrote that it was a shame that Liszt never managed to produce orchestral music to equal his piano works and arrangements for impactfulness, though admittedly I have not heard the Dante - and maybe neither had he!

[Joseph K]

There's something about the physical power involved in performing these and other transcriptions successfully, I think, that makes for this impact on the recipient. And one is astonished that such power can be expressed through a piano. I feel this way about the piano transcription of parts of Petruschka, almost finding it more fulfilling than the brilliant orchestration of the original. Somebody once wrote that it was a shame that Liszt never managed to produce orchestral music to equal his piano works and arrangements for impactfulness, though admittedly I have not heard the Dante - and maybe neither had he!

Other transcriptions? As for Liszt, I enjoy his Faust and Dante symphonies and some of the symphonic poems are good, e.g. Hamlet.

[Serial_Apologist]

Other transcriptions? As for Liszt, I enjoy his Faust and Dante symphonies and some of the symphonic poems are good, e.g. Hamlet.

Well the other transcriptions would be ones such as Stravinsky's piano version of three scenes (I think) from Petruschka, and one could mention many more, not least Liszt's own of Beethoven, Wagner etc. The writer, I now remember, was saying that Liszt had never managed to produce orchestral music of equal power to that of Wagner. I dare say he, like myself, hadn't heard all of Liszt's orchestral works.

[RichardB]

What are people's favourite recordings of his orchestral music?

The one I listen to most often is with the CSO and Boulez, which you certainly have! - Poème de l'extase, Prometheus and the earlier Piano Concerto. Of the symphonies, only the 3rd has made much of an impression on me.

[Joseph K]

Well the other transcriptions would be ones such as Stravinsky's piano version of three scenes (I think) from Petruschka, and one could mention many more, not least Liszt's own of Beethoven, Wagner etc. The writer, I now remember, was saying that Liszt had never managed to produce orchestral music of equal power to that of Wagner. I dare say he, like myself, hadn't heard all of Liszt's orchestral works.

No, I meant you saying 'these and other transcriptions' originally made it seem as though you were referring to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy, which I wasn't aware was a transcription?

[Joseph K]

The one I listen to most often is with the CSO and Boulez, which you certainly have! - Poème de l'extase, Prometheus and the earlier Piano Concerto. Of the symphonies, only the 3rd has made much of an impression on me.

Thanks and yes - that's tonight's listening sorted. In fact, as it's CD 55 in the Boulez The Conductor boxed set, there was only one work (Moses Und Aron) between it and the last CD from that box that I last listened to (Pierrot Lunaire) - weird eh?

[Pulcinella]

Thanks and yes - that's tonight's listening sorted. In fact, as it's CD 55 in the Boulez The Conductor boxed set, there was only one work (Moses Und Aron) between it and the last CD from that box that I last listened to (Pierrot Lunaire) - weird eh?

A potential (next Summer) BaL subject I wonder (though RichardB has already stated his preference)?

Like me, you'll have the Sony Boulez version:

https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8794839--scriabin-le-poeme-de-lextase-op-54-bartok-4-orchestral-pieces-3-village-scenes-stravinsky-suites-nos

I also found I have three others (though not the Boulez DG version):

RSO Berlin/Ashkenazy
RSO Frankfurt/Inbal
and a BBC MM one with the BBCPO under Vassily Sinaisky (a 2000 Bridgewater Hall performance).

I listened to the BBC recording last night, and what it brought to mind for me most was bits of the orchestral writing in Gurrelieder.

[Mandryka]

For some reason Scriabin's orchestral works don't have so much the effect on me as do the piano works - in general, but particularly with the late works, though if I'm not mistaken most the last five piano sonatas were written some time after the later orchestral works. What are people's favourite recordings of his orchestral music? I have a triple-CD complete symphonic works under Ashkenazy knocking around somewhere...

Don’t forget Preparation for the Final Mystery - from Wikipedia


At the time of his death, Scriabin had sketched 72 pages of a prelude to the Mysterium, entitled Prefatory Action. Alexander Nemtin spent 28 years reforming this sketch into a three-hour-long work, "Preparation for the Final Mystery" in 3 parts: Part 1 "Universe", Part 2 "Mankind", and Part 3 "Transfiguration". Part 1 was recorded in 1973, conducted by Kiril Kondrashin, released LP 1973; in 1996 Vladimir Ashkenazy recorded all 3 parts with Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.[1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujulnH91t4k&ab_channel=KirillKondrashin

^{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4YSysUn-Bk&ab_channel=hu}