CHAPTER 12

Scriabin and the Superhuman: A Millennial Essay

PUTTING SCRIABIN TOGETHER

Ostanovís’, prokhózhiy! V sikh stenákh

Zhil Skryábin i pochíl. Vsyo kámen’ strógiy

Tebé skazál v nemnógikh pis’menákh.

Poséyan sev. V rodímïkh glubinákh

Zvezdá zazhglás’. Idí zh svoyéy dorógoy.¹

Stop, passerby! Within these walls

Scriabin lived and found his resting place.

Stern stone in letters few has told you all.

The seed is sown. In our primeval depths

A star is lit. Now go your way.

The poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949), one of Alexander Scriabin’s closest late associates and the man who may have understood him best of all his contemporaries, wrote these lines a year after the composer’s untimely and bathetic death in 1915. In letters very few indeed they tell us all. For Ivanov and the other poets and thinkers of the Russian avant garde (if not for Russia’s musicians, who had no avant garde), this musician had been a prophet, his art a revelation. More than a prophet even, he had been for them a demiurge, a virtual divinity, cast after death by Ivanov, his chief mythologizer, as a light to illuminate our interior firmament as the lyre of slain Orpheus shines in the sky above us, placed there in mythic times by the god Apollo. It was an inevitable outcome. Scriabin was the sole musician of his time and place to cast himself in the Orphic image, to invest his art with the attributes of ecstatic and redemptive religion, and to channel through it intimations not merely of phenomenal appearance but of ultimate noumenal truth. His art, more explicitly than that of any other composer, was (or became) a gnosis, a way of attaining and imparting occult knowledge.

His brother-in-(common)law and close confidant, the émigré musical philosopher Boris de Schloezer (1881-1967), characterized Scriabin’s uniqueness in terms that, though paradoxical from the standpoint of conventional aesthetics, will resonate powerfully—and corroborate, as it were, from the other side—the terms employed in characterizing Chaikovsky in the preceding chapter. For Schloezer, Scriabin was the only truly romantic musician Russia ever produced, precisely because his artistic vision was, in “classical” terms, art-transcending, hence inartistic. “An artist of genius,” he wrote, Scriabin nevertheless was determined

to cease to be an artist, to become a prophet, a votary, a predicant. Yet such appellations would have been unacceptable to Scriabin, for he refused to admit that his design reached beyond art, that he violated the frontiers of art and thus ceased to be an artist. On the contrary, he argued that the commonly accepted view of art was too narrow, its true meaning lost, and its significance obscured. It was his destiny to restore art to its original role; consequently he was much more an artist than any other, because to him art was the religion of which he was the sacristan.²

As in our discussion of Chaikovsky, Schloezer explicitly casts the difference between the “classic” and “romantic” temperaments as the difference between the impulse of world enhancement and that of world transformation. Although he develops the distinction from the standpoint of a partisan, which is to say invidiously, it is enormously productive. Subtract the animus and it is incandescent:

Generally speaking, for a classicist, art is only an interlude, a celebration of some sort; it interrupts the course of time and serves as a break in the routine of life. It is an intermission, after which life resumes its course and returns to “serious business” as if nothing had changed. The goal of a romantic, on the other hand, is to erase such a distinction. A romantic definitely desires that everything be changed, with art not merely an entr’acte but a celebration that goes on, that overflows into everyday existence and integrates with it in order to illuminate and, in effect, transform it. For a romantic, the main purpose is to convert a work of art into a means of action, not only on the aesthetic plane but also on the plane of reality. The two worlds coalesce in this conception; the intention is to impart to artificial products of the creative imagination the status of real events (or likewise, to impart to real events the status of the imaginary). This is the clue to the importance of Parsifal. (Pp. 311-12)

Even Chaikovsky, or especially Chaikovsky, precisely because his name had become synonymous with the self-absorbed and self-exhibiting confessional mode associated in the popular imagination with romantic artists, was for Schloezer a prototypical classic—that is, a composer in the Italianate mold who saw his art above all as decorative (and who, of course, detested Parsifal). His expressive side, from the truly romantic (religious and philosophical) perspective, was little more than a manifestation of what is condemned by our contemporary religious romantics as “secular humanism,” the blasphemous installation of humanity, and its celebration, in place of the divine. Schloezer is contemptuous: “The sentimentality, the pathos that permeate [Chaikovsky’s] music are but the excesses of his Italianism. He abandons himself all too willingly to his emotions, and he is complacent in his emotional flights” (p. 313).

As for the remaining composers of nineteenth-century Russia, they were, many of them, committed to a positivistic nationalism (Balakirev), or an equally positivistic realism (Dargomïzhsky, Musorgsky), that was just as barren from Schloezer’s (and, we may assume, Scriabin’s) perspective as Chaikovsky’s decorative emotionalism. By century’s end, Russian music was largely committed to a quite hidebound and more obviously “classical” academicism (Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Taneyev). Above all, every Russian composer except Scriabin explicitly rejected Wagner as an artistic role model, while Scriabin not only embraced him but attempted to surpass him.

The culture of romanticism, then—the culture of which Scriabin was the prophet, the votary, and the predicant—was a “dynamic and revolutionary” culture that proceeded “from culture to life” in the sense that it was endowed with “fluidity, mutability, and mobility,” and its mission was to change the world (p. 280). The culture of “classicism,” its dialectical antipode, was thus for Schloezer neither the culture of Greece and Rome nor that of the eighteenth century, but the cultural attitudes of the world around him, which is still to say, the world around us. Its course is “from life to culture.” Schloezer’s description is terrifying:

Classical culture is fundamentally materialistic and static; herein lies the ever-present danger of its degeneration into fetishism and formalism. . . . For the classical mind the world of culture, though manufactured by man, possesses an objective reality equivalent to the world of nature’s. ... Its system of values comprises a conglomeration of manufactured objects that tend to assume an autonomous existence, forming a rigid world often hostile to man’s emotional life. Products of man’s creative labor are separated from their makers and embark on an independent development outside the sphere of human action. ... In classical cultures, in which workers and masters labor together, the future is conceived as an accumulation of cultural values, a development and reinforcement of the system whose ultimate aim is perfection in isolation. But such an absolute ideal is manifestly unattainable, for the road leading to it must be infinite. This notion is the crux of the idea of infinite progress. (Pp. 280, 284, 287)

This is a devastatingly accurate portrait of what is still a major strain in contemporary high culture, the culture of modernism. The best proof of its accuracy is the reception Scriabin’s music has met with since Vyacheslav Ivanov made his roseate prediction in verse. Alas, the seed did not take root. The light went out. We no longer know this man. Only fifteen years after Ivanov penned his stanza, the young white hope of a new Russia’s music told a foreign correspondent that “we regard Scriabine as our bitterest musical enemy, . . . because Scriabine’s music tends to an unhealthy eroticism. Also to mysticism and passivity and escape from the realities of life.”³ The great ban on all artistic pathos and pretense that came in reaction to the cataclysmic events Scriabin (and a host of other artistic maximalists) could with hindsight be said to have foretold killed interest in him except on the part of a few fossilized votaries and predicants, cranks and dilettantes.⁴ He became just another screwball “decadent” for whose gangrenous grandiosity an antidote could be found in die neue Sachlichkeit; or else a charlatan, perpetrating musical hypnosis, as Boris Asafyev put it in his Book about Stravinsky, which celebrated the figure regarded by the 1920s as Scriabin’s great musical antipode, whose music possessed a “sharpness and iron discipline” that promoted “robust social health.”⁵ Stravinsky himself, though in his early period a somewhat abashed admirer of Scriabin, later declared the older composer to be “without a passport,” adding rootless cosmopolitanism to the list of Scriabin’s sins.⁶

Since his centennial in 1972—quite grandly observed in the USSR, where Scriabin the visionary tone poet was eventually rehabilitated, along with many other turn-of-the-century artists of an apocalyptical bent, as an incognizant harbinger of the revolution, but elsewhere hardly at all—scholarly interest in Scriabin has somewhat unexpectedly begun to revive, albeit on a new and somewhat contradictory footing. A few German and Anglophone music theorists and composers, with one significant Soviet forerunner, have been conducting serious and systematic investigations into Scriabin’s evolving musical style and techniques, demonstrating not only its “iron discipline” but its surprisingly rationalistic—or, at least, easily rationalized—theoretical basis.⁷ Another scholarly cohort, including historical musicologists, art historians, and literary critics, has endeavored to insert Scriabin into his cultural surroundings, seeking parallels that might explain his idiosyncrasies even as they aid comprehension of the so-called Russian Silver Age, of which Scriabin now appears to be a particularly concentrated representative.⁸

While the insularly musical project and the broadly cultural one have each made considerable headway, the two camps have yet to recognize a common cause, let alone find a suitably interdisciplinary method for approaching one of the most “interdisciplinary” composers who ever lived. Indeed, in keeping with the “classical” assumptions long regnant in the academy, the two projects have been operating in deliberate isolation and mutual suspicion, and this has inevitably hampered them both.

The musicians, heir to deeply entrenched traditions of positivistic style criticism and aesthetic formalism such as Schloezer presciently described, have insisted on viewing Scriabin “in an atmosphere free of the incense that clouded the minds of his earliest admirers,” as one representative writer puts it, remarking further that “it would be a pity if appreciation of the music required us to follow Scriabin into this world of cosmic ‘hocus-pocus.’ “⁹ So hostile have musicologists become to the cultural environment in which Scriabin’s music arose, and to the purposes it originally addressed, and so ready have they become to diagnose such purposes as symptoms (at best) of “mild megalomania,” that one highly visible review of Schloezer’s study in Slonimsky’s translation amounted to little more than a howl of protest at its very appearance, beginning with the remark that “the publication of this book now ... is as silly as the book itself, and no more comprehensible,” and granting only that “as a historical document, Schloezer’s work has a certain deplorable importance.” The sole question the book managed to provoke in the reviewer’s supremely closed mind was, “What can have possessed the Oxford University Press?”¹⁰

But this question prompts another: in the face of such a rejection of its cultural meaning, reflecting (again, as Schloezer predicted) a general narrowing of purview that excludes hermeneutic inquiry in the name of a debased “classical” notion of “absolute music” that disgusted and enraged its composer, ¹¹ what has attracted so much scholarly attention to this music? James M. Baker has given an answer that may be taken, within the domain of academic music theory, as authoritative. Having launched his sustained, indeed relentless technical inquiry into what academic analysts call the “structure” of the music by observing that “Alexander Scriabin would have resented being remembered merely as a composer,” Baker concludes what must thus be counted a three hundred-page insult to Scriabin’s self-image by salting the wound: “Although his visions were the primary motivation for his experimentation and innovation, what remains today is his music. Scriabin’s art survives because he was a master of the craft of musical composition. Much as he might have been disappointed, it is through the study of his musical structures that we can best know him today.”¹²

Yet this answer has to be regarded, finally, as an evasion, since the phrase I have put in italics obviously ought to read “we wish to know him.” It is Baker who has decided that Scriabin can and ought to be assimilated to “classical” culture, with its attendant formalism and its fetishizing of material sound objects. It is Baker who has decided that autonomous existence may be ascribed to these products of the composer’s creative labor. What is the purpose of the assimilation? Is it merely an epicurean proposition? Is its goal the enjoyment of a sensuously alluring artifact without any cultural strings attached? Is it the rationalization of a solipsistic bond (a bond perceived as “intersubjective”) with a somewhat disreputable object to which one has nevertheless grown emotionally attached?

These would indeed be good “classical” objectives, but there is something else, something more compelling—and something that was also clairvoyantly foreseen by Schloezer. The subtitle to Baker’s doctoral dissertation (Yale University, 1977), on which his book is based, accurately reflecting both the eventual book’s narrative strategy and its thesis, reads, “The Transition from Tonality to Atonality.” This phrase neatly summarizes the significance Scriabin’s music has assumed for contemporary music theorists, who see its progressive and remarkably trackable stylistic evolution as embodying in microcosm the essential musical progress myth of the twentieth century. Scriabin’s musical legacy seems a providential validation of that fashionable teleology, embodying Schloezer’s “classical” values of “infinite progress” and autonomous “perfection in isolation.”

Baker’s “techno-essentialist” survey is the most comprehensive analytical treatment Scriabin’s music has yet received. His book is a mine of information. Yet by confining its purview to the “accrual of technical innovations along a smooth, linear course,” such an account of the music must leave out what is most interesting and (I would argue) most significant about it.¹³ The case of Manfred Kelkel is also symptomatic. While researching his doctoral dissertation (for the advent of techno-essentialist historiography has made Scriabin a capital dissertation composer), Kelkel was the first to study in analytical detail the numerous sketches Scriabin made in the last two years of his life for the Predvaritel’ noye deystviye, the “Preparatory Act” to the great Misteriya that was to have brought not only Scriabin’s creative career but the history of the world to a cataclysmic close.¹⁴ Having made a preliminary survey of the sketches, Kelkel rushed into print to announce that it was Scriabin, not Alfredo Casella and not Alban Berg, who had been the first to write “aggregate simultaneities,” that is, chords containing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale.¹⁵

This race-to-the-patent-office mentality is characteristic of techno-essentialist historiography and its values.¹⁶ All conventional music history, whatever the period, is now written in this way; that is precisely what makes it conventional. And in the wake of what is often termed the second wave of modernism—the scientistic one that took shape during the cold war, and in response to it—techno-essentialist values have been a guiding stimulus on musical composition as well.

But as scholars and composers alike have grown increasingly aware, it can be a trivializing standard of value, and it has certainly trivialized Scriabin even as it has rescued his academic prestige and promoted investigation of his technical routines. Most of the recent work on him has concentrated on the highly patterned sound surface (even where the authors have professed to be describing or explicating “structure”), with the result that we are more inclined than ever to regard an ornately crafted Scriabin composition as “some imperial Fabergé jewel,” in the words of Robert Craft, fixated as we now are on the level of “the flammiferous ornaments, the trills, tremolos, arpeggios, glissandos, appoggiaturas and other musical sequins.”¹⁷ It is Scriabin, in other words, who now reaps the “culinary” laurels to which Chaikovsky, despised as a confessionalist but in fact a closet “classic,” actually aspired.

GIVEN THAT the meaning of music remains one of the cursed questions of aesthetics, it is not surprising that empirical musical studies have retreated from it, even when a music so formidably coded and laden as Scriabin’s has been the object in view, instead focusing doggedly on descriptive categories (“structure” and “style”), and insisting that any other dimension (but particularly every interpretive dimension) is “subjective” or “extramusical,” and therefore beneath professional notice.¹⁸ Nor is it hard to understand why studies concerned with cultural backgrounds so often fail to do justice to musical particulars. Professional discourse on music having become so forbiddingly technocratic, it is no wonder that cultural historians, and even music historians, have steered clear of the analytical literature on Scriabin. As a result, their studies have been biographical in the main, rarely venturing any critical comment on the work beyond occasional, nervously dismissive obiter dicta to the effect (to quote the author of one such study) that “it is hardly likely that [Scriabin’s] grandiose vision could be communicated musically.”¹⁹

The only cultural study of Scriabin to attempt any interpretation of the work in light of the uncovered background is that of Martin Cooper, who, ignorant of the analytical literature, had to content himself with gestural parallels, such as Scriabin’s frequent use of motifs that could be compared with quasi-shamanistic zovï (summons) and prigovori (spells) such as one finds in much Russian poetry of the period, especially Balmont’s. But Scriabin was not the only composer at the time to write fanfares. Many, even Baker, have noted Scriabin’s sonic analogies to various qualities of light (not to mention his notoriously rigorous but apparently nontransmissible pitch-color synesthesia), and nocturnal hallucinations, as if only Scriabin used trills and tremolos.

Most cultural interpreters of Scriabin’s work have not ventured even this far. They have mainly confined themselves to the amassing of quotations testifying to a general kinship of ideals between the composer and some of the poets and thinkers who were his contemporaries. This can be valuable only as the prelude to a musical discussion that so far has not been forthcoming. To allege that ideals professed in common are in some sense latent in the artworks regardless of medium is merely to propound a truism.

Worse, those who have explored Scriabin’s relationship to theosophy or to theurgic symbolism have tended to assimilate the composer to the poets. This has actually meant at times examining or analyzing Scriabin’s amateurish poems in preference to his music. Since as a poet Scriabin produced mainly cheap imitations of his friends Balmont, Baltrushaitis, and Ivanov, it is not difficult to construct tautological correspondences connecting their work (and Bryusov’s) with Scriabin’s. In an age when “Gesamtkunstwerk” remained a rallying cry in Russia as nowhere else, when poets such as Balmont proclaimed themselves makers of “inner music,” and when composers like Scriabin tried their hand at poetry, one can all too easily assume that Russia’s radical poets, artists, and composers traveled one path, arms happily linked, all fully conscious of one another’s activity and joyously abetting it—and that discussion of one medium (invariably the literary) can subrogate them all. The music, inevitably, gets lost in the tautology.

Nor does the surmise stand up to any empirical or documentary test. Consider Andrey Belïy, who alone among the theurgic symbolists possessed some technical knowledge of music, and who was the one most inclined self-consciously to preach (and even, as in his verbal “Symphonies,” to practice) formal correspondences between poetry and the art of tones. Belïy, it turns out, had no interest at all in the poet-musician whom Vyacheslav Ivanov called “the ultimate artistic genius of our time.” Indeed, he despised Scriabin, whom he met only once, at the home of Margarita Morozova, Scriabin’s patron. In a funny memoir of the occasion, after mocking Scriabin’s over-fastidious appearance and deportment, Belïy described his conversation: “All the while the little white fingers of his pale little hand kept jabbing out chords of some kind in the air: his pinkies took the ‘Kant’ note, his middle finger would trace the ‘Culture’ theme, and all at once—whoops!—a leap of the index finger over a whole row of keys to the one marked ‘Blavatsky.’“²⁰ So much for the notion that Zeitgeist automatically crosscuts media, or that kindred theurgic spirits inevitably recognize one another.

And yet when Belïy wrote his programmatic essay ‘On Theurgy,’ published in 1903 in Filosofov’s and Merezhkovsky’s religious-philosophical journal Novïy put’, he inevitably focused the discussion on music.²¹ If it astonishes us that he chose as paradigm an innocent, early, and innocuous set of character pieces (Stimmungsbilder, Op. 1) by Nikolai Medtner, the poor man’s Rachmaninoff, that only goes to show that for a theurgic symbolist even a tepid piece of music was warmer than a hot poem. Tendentiously (and perhaps unconsciously) echoing a famous remark of Felix Mendelssohn, Vyacheslav Ivanov summed up the potent advantage of music over poetry, and the futility of attempting to paraphrase it: “Where we monotonously blab the meager word ‘sadness’ (pechal’), music overflows with thousands of particular shades of sadness, each so ineffably novel that no two of them can be called the same feeling.” Music, “the unmediated pilot of our spiritual depths,” is thus at once the most sensitive of the arts and the most inherently prophetic, “the womb in which the Spirit of the Age is incubated.”²²

But of course this encomium is as applicable to Medtner’s music as it is to Scriabin’s, as it would be to any music that aspires in romantic fashion to ineffability (that is, to the “condition of music”). Betty’s choice of Medtner as exemplar was dictated by their close personal friendship, which also explains why the only piece of music ever published in a symbolist journal was again a work of Medtner’s: a setting of a Belïy poem (Epitafiya, Op. 13, no. 2) that appeared in Nikolai Ryabushinsky’s Zolotoye runo (The Golden Fleece) in 1908.

Scriabin also saw music as superseding poetry, his own as much as anyone’s. Once he had composed the music for it, he suppressed his verbal “Poèma ekstaza,” never allowing it to appear in concert programs.²³ (Of course it does regularly so appear nowadays, and is much analyzed in the “cultural” literature about the composer.²⁴) If there is to be assimilation, then maybe it should be poetry that is assimilated to music. Nobody has yet figured out a way of doing this.²⁵

And yet perhaps the relationship between music and poetry is not quite the issue. Perhaps that intractable, distracting question may be finessed, and a more direct path sought to an integrated perspective on Scriabin, one that will at last put together the fragmentary insights that the musical analysts and the cultural historians have severally vouchsafed. Schloezer’s writings on the composer, and, even more, a trio of incandescent essays by Vyacheslav Ivanov that have only just come belatedly to light, offer the best clues to how such an integration might be accomplished.²⁶

What they suggest, in necessary conjunction with the musical-technical observations that Dernova, Kelkel, Reise, and Baker have more recently contributed, are answers to such basic questions as what motivated Scriabin’s stylistic development and guided it along the specific path it took; what meanings Scriabin’s compositions embody (and how, specifically, they are embodied); and why it is important, after all, that Scriabin was a Russian composer.

The rest of this chapter is a first attempt, an Acte préalable, toward constructing that integrated perspective. Proceeding from a striking formulation by Ivanov—whom I have come to trust as an interpreter of Scriabin (if not, as once assumed, an “influence” on him)—and relying in part on some of the recent analytical disclosures, the argument will pursue the ramifications of Ivanov’s rather abstract conceptual thought into the world of concrete musical particulars where Scriabin lived his creative life, but where Ivanov never trod. So as to maintain an interdisciplinary reach, limits will be set on the use of technical language; but so as not to sacrifice the desired specificity of musical reference, discussion will have to begin at a very basic level.²⁷

CONSTRUCTING THE DESIRING SUBJECT

On 25 February 1919, Vyacheslav Ivanov made a short speech to introduce a Scriabin recital by the great pianist and teacher Alexander Goldenveyzer (1875-1961). Taking as his point of departure the dicta, redolent of the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s precepts, that “communality [sobor-nost’] must be realized in art, and the artwork must become a life experience [sobïtiye zhizni;, cf. the German Erlebnis]” and correlating them implicitly with the recent political revolution, he proclaimed that “Scriabin has expressed in music the most profound idea of the present day,” which he then promised to define. Practically the whole speech thereafter is devoted to a divagation of a familiar kind on the virtual impossibility of putting a musical message into words; but, just as one is about to give up hope, Ivanov suddenly squeezes the promised definition out in blindingly succinct form. Here it is:

The content of Scriabin’s work may be defined, it seems to me, as a threefold idea, a threefold emotion, a threefold vision:

1)The vision of surmounting the boundaries of the personal, individual, petty “I”—a musical transcendentalism.

2)The vision of universal, communal mingling of all humanity in a single “I”—or the macrocosmic universalism of musical consciousness.

3)The vision of a violent breakthrough into the expanse of a free new plane of being—universal transformation.²⁸

The first of these propositions is the one that is probably most difficult to conceive on the simple gestural level, but it is also the one for which we have the firmest corroboration from the composer, who once remarked to his disciple Sabaneyeff that in his late sonatas he had at last managed to transcend the realm of human emotion.²⁹ It is on the transcendence of the petty “I” (the malïy ‘ya’) that most of the musical observations that follow will be predicated, rather than on notions of macrocosmic commingling (easily understood, at least preliminarily, in terms of the wordless chorus in Prometheus or the plan for the Misteriya, in which there were to be no spectators, only participants), or transformatory breakthroughs (for a preliminary idea of that, just listen to the end of Poème de l’extase or, a bit less straightforwardly, that of Prometheus). Examples will be drawn mainly from Scriabin’s symphonies, presumably his best-known works, and the sketches for the Acte préalable.

For a fully adequate demonstration, a line of critical investigation such as I wish to initiate with the present discussion would have to begin with the exposition of the most elementary musical and aesthetic premises. To save a bit of time, let us begin instead with Wagner. It was their common response to Wagner, together with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (usually supplemented if not replaced altogether by trots and by oral dissemination),³⁰ that underlay the spiritual and aesthetic kinship between Scriabin and the theurgic symbolists. But what was a common, eventually commonplace response among Russian thinkers and poets was a very rare response among Russian musicians, and this is what so distinguished Scriabin as a composer. What distinguished him as a Russian Wagnerian, of course, was that he could inherit from Wagner not only a philosophical attitude but also a musical technique. And, finally, what distinguished Scriabin from Wagner himself was his instrumental orientation, stemming from his activity as a piano virtuoso.

Yet he did not write conventional program music; possibly excepting the Third Symphony, known as the “Divine Poem,” his music rarely embodied a parallel verbal scenario or a paraphrasable narrative content. As time went on he increasingly shunned such adulteration, eventually protecting his art from debasing paraphrase, as we have seen, by actively suppressing the verbal analogue to his own “Poem of Ecstasy.” In this he remained true to the older, original concept of “absolute music,” which, far from implying formalism, envisioned an instrumental music capable of directly incorporating and transmitting all the ineffable—which is to say, nonparaphrasable—expressive and metaphysical content at which the nature-imitating arts could only hint.

This immanent, inchoate expressivity was multifariously embodied and transmitted, and, it goes without saying, an expressive critique of music must be correspondingly multivalent. But we shall focus this discussion on what most nineteenth-century artists considered the chief means of its realization: harmony, or, more precisely, fluctuations in harmonic tension. Tension, to define it tautologically, is that which demands resolution. There are two main criteria by which tension achieves resolution in the musical tradition Scriabin inherited. One, which we may call the contrapuntal criterion, and which has a thousand-year history in Western musical practice, involves the resolution of dissonance into consonance (example 12.1).

The other, which we may call the functional criterion, and which has a much shorter history (becoming fully elaborated only in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, depending on one’s criterion of fullness), involves syntactical relationships among the degrees of (what we call) the diatonic scale. To account for these relationships theoretically is a complicated task, though any explanation of functional differentiation would have to emphasize the fact that the diatonic scale is structurally asymmetrical. To illustrate the criterion, however, is simple, for to the extent that we have learned by exposure to identify scale degrees (even if we have not been taught to name them), we all respond to music in accordance with the functional criterion. The two criteria, contrapuntal and functional, though synergistic and almost never unmixed in practice, are nonetheless conceptually independent, as one may illustrate by demonstrating the functional criterion without using any dissonances (example 12.2).

EXAMPLE 12.1. The contrapuntal criterion

Another name for the functional criterion is “tonality.” Music is tonal if we are able to identify the notes we hear as degrees, and if the degrees are syntactically related according to certain model progressions. The two most important syntactical relations are those involving scalar half steps, known as leading tones, and those involving the basses of close-spaced chords, known as roots. We expect the half steps to sound as direct successions, and we expect the chord roots to follow in a sequence known as the circle of fifths. (Both criteria were met in example 12.2, which is why the final resolution was so ineluctably anticipated.) Any deviation from this model is interpreted as a deviation from a norm, which creates tension. And tension, to repeat, demands eventual resolution.

By the nineteenth century, composers knew and frequently employed elaborate strategies for delaying resolution and, concomitantly, increasing tension. That is one of the things that makes music sound “expressive.” These strategies often involved the inflection, rather than the direct progression, of scale degrees. This technique is called “chromaticism,” from the Greek for color, which suggests analogy between a spectrum of minutely altered harmonies and the spectrum of visible shades. There is also the transformation of degrees, which implies a change in the background scale according to which they are identified. This technique is called “modulation” and produces a widened range of navigational possibilities among chords and functions. (The “navigation” metaphor is prompted by Wagner, who likened his range of potential functional relationships to a “sea of harmony.”)

EXAMPLE 12.2. The functional criterion

When dissonance is added to harmony, it enhances the tendency toward resolution, illustrating the synergy between the contrapuntal and functional criteria of harmonic tension. A chord like the one shown in example 12.3, which implies—and thus demands—a specific resolution to a preenvisioned point of repose, exemplifies what is known as the dominant function. At a minimum, it consists of three tones: a root, which must eventually progress along the circle of fifths to what is called the tonic; a leading tone, which must progress through a half step to the same tonic; and a tone that is dissonant both with respect to the root (from which it lies seven scale-steps apart) and with respect to the leading tone (from which it differs by the interval known as the tritone), which produces the tension in need of immediate resolution. (An additional tone may be added to “complete” the so-called dominant seventh chord without altering its quality either as to dissonance or as to function (example 12.4). The contrapuntal criterion creates the need to resolve; the functional criterion specifies the resolution that will satisfy the need.

We have gone back to basics after all, but only to the extent needed in order to understand Wagnerian and Scriabinesque harmony as expressive media. Such harmony arises in, embellishes, and prolongs the tense dominant function. Both Wagner’s harmonic innovations and Scriabin’s were specifically geared toward producing more elaborate embellishments and more extensive prolongations of that function (or, to put it another way, more elaborate and extended ways of delaying resolution), relying on the learned behavior of listeners to identify with the harmonic tension thus increased and thus to experience it as intensified affect, or emotion. As there are any number of ways in which a resourceful composer can embellish and prolong harmonic functions, so there is an endless range of potential emotional interpretations of these devices, all falling under the general rubric of tension and resolution. The greater the accrued tension, the greater the emotional release or payoff on resolution.

EXAMPLE 12.3. Minimal dominant seventh

EXAMPLE 12.4. “Complete” dominant seventh

The locus classicus, of course, is the prelude to Tristan und Isolde—the prelude, not the opera, for as an instrumental piece the prelude qualifies as absolute music, in which the expressive and metaphysical content is immanent, not applied. Of course the title prejudices our reception, and I doubt whether there are many guinea pigs available, among those following this discussion, who have never heard the opera. But I believe it may be shown nevertheless that (given the conventions of composing and listening on which both the composer and his intended audience relied, and on which we rely to this day for interpreting tonal music) the expressive content is indeed immanent, not applied.

The opening of the prelude will also illustrate two points of great importance for understanding Scriabin’s creative evolution. The first is that individual chords increasingly came to be regarded in nineteenth-century harmonic practice as objects, compositional premises in their own right; and second, that this became possible because, owing to the vastly enhanced range of chromatic inflection and tonal modulation that Wagnerian practice admitted, the functional interpretation of harmony became increasingly contextual—or, in other words, that harmonic tensions became subject to an increasingly wide range of potential resolutions.

The tendency of chords to become objectified entities is best illustrated by the propensity of individual chords, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to acquire nicknames by which musicians, and not only musicians, informally refer to them. And the first such chord, as everybody knows, was the one given in example 12.5, from the second measure of the prelude to Tristan and Isolde. It has become something of a sport among musicologists to sight the “Tristan chord” in music by earlier composers, all the way back, if I am not forgetting anybody earlier, to the German opera composer Reinhard Keiser, an older contemporary of Handel. It is a mug’s game, because the chord, while dissonant, has a place in perfectly ordinary diatonic usage (example 12.6).

EXAMPLE 12.5. Tristan chord

EXAMPLE 12.6. Diatonic occurrence of its enharmonic equivalent

In this progression the Tristan chord deserves no special nickname—in fact it is not even the Tristan chord. Its context, and especially the nature of its resolution, are what create its special quality (example 12.7). What makes the chord startling (and name-worthy) in Wagner’s usage is the fact that its constituent pitches cannot all be referred to the scale implied by its three-note introduction: in other words, some degree has been inflected (making the chord “chromatic”); or in still other words, not all the notes in the chord can be identified as degrees, which makes the chord tonally ambiguous. Vast rivers of ink have been spilled in debating its tonal status. The most economical explanation is one that identifies its “alto” pitch as inflected; when that pitch is “corrected” to a diatonic degree, the chord becomes a so-called diminished seventh on the leading tone of the background scale invoked at the outset—a chord that, by dint of an ordinary diatonic progression, may be further “corrected” to an ordinary dominant seventh (example 12.8).³¹

EXAMPLE 12.7. Prelude to Tristan und Isolde

EXAMPLE 12.8. “Normalization” of the Tristan chord

EXAMPLE 12.9. First resolution of the Tristan chord (cf. example 12.7, end of m. 2)

That explanation has become popular, but in my opinion it is inadequate. It is not (or not just) that the interpretation is too “normalizing,” but that by identifying the chord with the harmony to which in context it appears to resolve, it denies the listener’s perceptual experience (an experience on which, as I am arguing, the music’s celebrated conceptual significance depends). Better take things, at first, as they are presented. The first note to move away from the enigmatic harmony is the top note, the behavior of which mimics that of the unaccompanied note on the downbeat of the previous measure, which moves by half step from a less stable putative degree (the sixth) to a more stable one (the fifth). If the soprano motion away from the Tristan chord is interpreted as a leading tone resolution, then we are left with a chord that is still dissonant but unambiguously functional.

The remaining dissonance is called an augmented sixth (example 12.9). (Chords containing augmented sixths for some forgotten historical reason sport pseudonational denominations in conventional theory parlance. The one created by the first resolution of the Tristan chord happens to be called the French sixth.) Being the product of a resolution, it is palpably less tense than the Tristan chord itself, though it is still a long way from repose. But to say that it is unambiguously functional is to say—recalling the definition of the functional criterion—that its regular resolution is foreseen. That resolution is to the dominant function—still one step from repose (example 12.10). And the way Wagner actually directs that resolution confirms our analysis of the first resolution, for it proceeds through a chromatically inflected dissonant note on the downbeat that resolves, like the one creating the French sixth, only after the rest of the chord is struck (example 12.11).

The beauty of harmonic functions is that, with training, we can learn precisely to measure the distance of functional chords from the tonic; and even without training, we may perceive and respond to that changing distance in vaguer relative terms—which is precisely what is meant by attending to the myriad fluctuations in harmonic tension that enable music to evoke for us the “thousands of particular shades” of emotion to which Vyacheslav Ivanov referred, our response to them being the mechanism through which the music becomes the “pilot of our spiritual depths.” We may roughly discriminate four levels of tension in the opening phrase of the prelude to Tristan und Isolde: the dissonant, chromatic, functionally ambiguous Tristan chord, impinging in startling fashion on its preparation, represents the maximum; its first resolution, to a French sixth, produces a chord that is still chromatic, still dissonant, but no longer functionally ambiguous—and therefore one degree less tense, as we may put it for the sake of argument; the next resolution produces a “complete” dominant seventh chord—still dissonant but neither chromatic nor ambiguous, hence less tense by another noticeable degree; the implied resolution of that chord will produce ultimate repose. And since we know what it will be (we all hear it in our mind’s ear, but it is given anyhow in example 12.12), Wagner in fact leaves it for our inner ear to supply, so that the actual sounding music retains a restless harmonic tension at all times, virtually until the end of the opera, when all the accumulated pressure is at last discharged in Isolde’s cataclysmic Verklärung (“Transfiguration”), popularly known as the Liebestod, the death-by-love or, in plainer language, the orgasm.³²

EXAMPLE 12.10. Conventional resolution of the French sixth

EXAMPLE 12.11. Parallelism in “Tristan” progression

EXAMPLE 12.12. Implied resolution of “Tristan” progression

In this way Wagner was able to transmit through the sound of the music the underlying idea that motivated the action of the opera. As he put it himself in a famous program note, it is this: “yearning, yearning, unquenchable, ever-regenerated longing—languishing, thirsting; the only redemption—death, extinction, eternal sleep!”³³ Notice how Wagner’s redundant use of synonyms aspires to the effects of his musical nuances; but whereas we cannot measure and therefore cannot experience the exact difference between yearning and longing, we can measure and experience the difference between a Tristan chord and a French sixth, and between a French sixth and a diminished or a dominant seventh. That is the advantage in precision that Ivanov sensed in music, and envied.

As a child of my time, I have proposed a behavioral model for the workings of musical expression; as a child of his, Wagner believed with Schopenhauer that the palpable and measurable nuances of music were the ultimate, autochthonous reality of feeling, realer than the world of appearances. We may now be inclined to view musical events as metaphors for emotional ones, but for Wagner it was just the opposite: not only the action of his operas but the emotions portrayed or conveyed therein were the metaphors in his view, the music the palpable reality. Tristan’s desire for Isolde and hers for him symbolized and gave a phenomenal context for the desire of the dominant for the tonic, not the other way around. (Hence from now on, in keeping with this extreme musical idealism, I shall describe musical phenomena not in terms of the listener’s reaction to them but in terms of the tendencies and propensities—i.e., the “wishes” or the “will”—of the tones themselves.) Wagner’s own definition of his music dramas was “deeds of music which have been made visible.” To penetrate, as we have attempted here, from the visible dramatic surface to a contemplation of the hidden musical depths was literally—shifting now into Vyacheslav Ivanov’s terms—to proceed a realibus ad realiora, “from the real to the more real.”³⁴ It was left to Scriabin to strip away the vestiges of realia—and also to strip away the egoistic tyranny of desire, what Ivanov called the extinguishing of the maliy ‘ya” the “little ‘I.’ ”

EXTINGUISHING THE DESIRING SUBJECT

We have made a closer examination of the Tristan prelude than we shall have the time to make of any one Scriabin composition. But now we have a model— Scriabin’s own model—by which to measure his achievement, and a vocabulary with which to describe it. From his practice we may discern his concept of what it was that made the Wagnerian harmonic mechanism tick, and how it could be adapted to serve changing expressive or representational purposes.

From the beginning there were differences as well as affinities. What is a true but not necessarily a pertinent observation about the Tristan progression from the Wagnerian standpoint becomes absolutely essential from Scriabin’s: all the chords that have figured in our discussion of it—the Tristan chord itself, the dominant seventh, the diminished seventh, and the French sixth—contain at least one tritone. That interval, which eventually became the prime or even sole active ingredient in Scriabinesque harmony, fascinated Scriabin by virtue of its functional ambiguity. In common practice the tritone is considered dissonant, but unlike the other dissonances it has not a single common-practice resolution but a dual one: its two tones resolve like leading tones in contrary motion, either by moving inward to a major third or outward to a minor sixth (example 12.13). This ambivalence arises from the fact that the tritone exactly bisects the octave and consequently shares two properties with the octave itself. First, it is inherently symmetrical, which means it cannot be “inverted”; when mirrored (i.e., turned upside-down) it simply replicates itself. And second, when transposed by its own intervallic distance it again replicates itself (example 12.14). These two properties, which in the case of the tritone or octave are really two ways of describing the same phenomenon, are now often called inversional and transpositional invariance, and harmonic invariance is the key to Scriabin’s special musical universe.

Its inversional and transpositional invariance is what makes the tritone such a curiously passive interval. The way in which it will seek its resolution depends on external stimuli—that is, the notes that accompany it. We have already seen that it is a part of the minimally expressed dominant function: a defining root, and a tritone consisting of the leading tone and a tone creating a dissonant seventh against the root. The leading tone will seek its resolution by ascent, the seventh by descent. Yet because of the tritone’s symmetrical properties, by changing the defining root we can cause an exchange of the two functions; what had been the leading tone tending upward will become the seventh tending downward, and vice versa (example 12.15).

EXAMPLE 12.13. Resolutions of tritone/diminished fifth

EXAMPLE 12.14. Inversional and transpositional invariance of tritone

It will take no more than a moment’s thought to realize that the two roots that accomplish this transformation must themselves lie a tritone apart. The direct progression formed by these two chords—chords sharing a tritone in common, their roots lying a tritone apart—has been recognized, beginning with the Soviet theorist Varvara Dernova, who christened it the tritone link (tritonovoye zveno), as the essential Scriabin progression (example 12.16). Notice that the resolution tendencies in the harmonic tritone are continually contradicted and recontradicted by the bass progression. This easy reciprocity of function attenuates the harmony’s “functionality,” turning it qualitatively from an active tendency into a latent or passive one. Although there is continual root activity, there is no functional progression.

We seem to examine or experience a single “floating” harmony (as Schoenberg might have said) from a dual perspective, something the Russian theorist Boleslav Yavorsky analogized to moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional musical space—which in turn is something Scriabin himself adumbrated in a remark reported to Dernova by the composer Georgiy Mikhai-lovich Rimsky-Korsakov (grandson of the famous composer): “You have to be able to walk around a chord” (nado, chtobï akkord mozhno bïlo oboyti krugom).³⁵

Until one of the root notes leaves the tritone treadmill and proceeds along the circle of fifths (or, in a pinch, by a semitone), the eventual destination of the tritone is in doubt, and one can even forget that the tritone has a destination. A quality of hovering, of time-forgetful stasis, altered consciousness, or trance, can be induced. At a minimum, suspended harmonic animation of this kind is one extremely potent means of prolonging and embellishing the dominant function. It is a more radical means than Wagner ever resorted to, or needed—and a more subversive one, for it contains the seeds of the eventual neutralization of that function, indeed of “function” itself, and its veritable extinguishing.

EXAMPLE 12.15. Alternative cadential harmonizations of tritone

To illustrate all these points, we may examine the motto beginning of Scriabin’s Symphony no. 3, the “Divine Poem” (example 12.17). It seems to have gone unremarked until now that, despite the vastly differing affect, this passage seems to have been modeled quite directly on the opening of the Tristan prelude. In both cases an unaccompanied preparatory melody lasting one measure leads into a startlingly dissonant chromatic chord containing a tritone, urgently demanding an unspecified resolution. Scriabin’s chord is the more radical of the two, since it is an ad hoc harmonic structure with no common-practice standing at all. Where Wagner’s chord could be described taxonomically as a half-diminished seventh chord, or functionally as a “French” augmented sixth with one of its intervals unconventionally altered by contraction, adding to its dissonance and intensifying the affect of egoistic desire, Scriabin’s chord may be viewed as a “German” augmented sixth (homologous to the dominant seventh) with one of its intervals unconventionally altered by expansion, adding to its dissonance and intensifying the affect of egoistic self-assertion (example 12.18).

EXAMPLE 12.16. Scriabin’s “tritone link”

EXAMPLE 12.17. Scriabin, Divine Poem, first movement, mm. 1-4 (figuration and arpeggiation omitted in mm. 3-4)

The most striking parallel between the two openings is the specific way in which the first chord is prepared. Wagner leaps up from the tonic note to the sixth degree, which in the minor mode is a half step above the fifth, passes through the fifth to a complementary half step below—that is, to the chromatically inflected fourth degree, the “altered” note that gives the Tristan chord its name-worthy color. Scriabin’s opening exactly inverts Wagner’s procedure, in a fashion (one can’t help speculating) prompted by the magniloquent exordium to Chopin’s B-minor sonata (example 12.19). The melody leaps down to the chromatically inflected fourth degree, proceeds through the fifth to a complementary half step above—that is, to the sixth degree, which, the mode being major, must also be chromatically inflected to preserve the half-step relationship.

The first resolution of Scriabin’s “ad hoc” chord is to an unsullied consonant triad (the trumpet, meanwhile, performing a characteristic Scriabinesque zov or “summons” motif), enhancing the promise of what the symphony’s program note calls “joyous and intoxicated affirmation,” to be wholly attained only in the last movement, when the Nietzschean hero—the trumpet—at last comes fully into his, or its, own. Before citing the music, I quote once more from the program, which though actually penned by Boris de Schloezer’s sister, Tatyana, Scriabin’s mistress (much as Liszt’s writings, including programs, were often the work of Liszt’s mistress, the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein), transmits the composer’s intentions well enough to have had his endorsement: “The free, powerful man-god,” the program relates, “appears to triumph; but it is only the intellect which affirms the divine Ego, while the individual will, still too weak, is tempted to sink into Pantheism.”

EXAMPLE 12.18. The “Scriabin sixth” and its common-practice source

EXAMPLE 12.19. Chopin, Sonata Op. 35, opening

And now the music. Just as in the Tristan prelude, the first phrase is seconded by a sequential repetition. But unlike the second phrase of the Tristan prelude, the repetition is no mere intensifying iteration. It terminates not in another affirmative cadence, as it might well have done, but dissolves in a tritone link that palpably weakens its thrust (example 12.20). It is followed, in all-too-craftsmanly a fashion, by a second tritone link calculated to prepare the main key of the first movement, thus to launch a conventional sonata form that is interrupted, in a manner reminiscent of Franck’s Symphony in D minor, by periodic recollections of the opening motto. These reminiscences must surely have been written, or at least improvised, before the actual opening passage, for they demonstrate the genesis of the ad hoc chord—a chord that the composer continued to exploit to the point of mannerism, and that has earned the sobriquet “Scriabin sixth.”³⁶

The first reminiscence takes place in E major, the classically mandated key of the second theme in a C-minor sonata movement. The local tonic is held out in the treble instruments while the bass instruments proclaim the motto in the new key. At the moment when the theme reaches the fifth note, the inflected lower neighbor tone or appoggiatura to the fifth degree, the trumpet-hero joins in to sound the complementary inflection above. The two voices, trumpet and bass, proceed in contrary motion through the fifth and on to the opposite or reciprocal inflection, thus producing the “Scriabin sixth” (example 12.21). It is a symmetrical, simultaneous exchange of functions (known technically as a chiasmus, from the Greek for cross), comparable to that involving the two tendency tones over the tritone link. It gave Scriabin a big idea, for in the music following the “Divine Poem,” simultaneously sounding (rather than successive or progressive) symmetrical relations become the primary means for embellishing or prolonging the dominant function.

EXAMPLE 12.20. Scriabin, Divine Poem, first movement, from m. 5 (figuration and arpeggiation omitted as in example 12.17)

The obvious next step was simply to combine the two members of the tritone link into an aggregate, producing nothing else but a French sixth, one of only two chords in common practice (the other being the diminished-seventh chord) to contain two tritones, the one corresponding to the sustained tendency tones in the tritone link, the other to the complementary roots. Chords consisting of two tritones have exactly the same invariance properties as a single tritone, but twice as many of them (that is, they are inversionally invariant on two axes and transpositionally invariant at two intervals), and hence could further enhance Scriabin’s developing methods of dominant embellishment and prolongation. Of the two possible chords, only the French sixth suited his present purpose, not only because of its Wagnerian associations but because it was generically related to the “Scriabin sixth,” and could even be combined with it. The two chords had three tones out of four in common. Put together, their total of five tones would immediately have suggested to Scriabin, heir to a special Russian tradition of “fantastic” harmony, that with the addition of a single remaining tone he would have a chord that expressed the dominant function by encompassing all the members of what was known in Russia (where it had a history extending all the way back to Glinka) as the “scale by whole tones” (gamma tselimi tonami) (example 12.22).

EXAMPLE 12.21. Scriabin, Divine Poem, first movement, figure 11

This was a momentous discovery. The whole-tone aggregate contained three tritones, thus absolutely maximizing the potential for harmonic (that is, inversional and transpositional) invariance. Simply put, every possible position of the chord was intervallically, hence functionally, identical to every other one. No matter which of its members was in the bass, no matter by which of its constituent intervals it was transposed, the pitch and interval content of the chord never varied. It was a chord, in other words, that could be endlessly “walked around,” that could be mined for a great variety of symmetrical constituents (the tritone itself, the augmented triad, the French sixth, the “incomplete” dominant ninth, plus a number of ad hoc unclassified combinations), that offered a veritable infinity of possibilities for motion without functional harmonic progression or resolution, but that could be resolved at will to a functional tonic merely by allowing any of its constituent tones to proceed by half step (i.e., as a leading tone) or by fifth (i.e., as a root). And all these possibilities are in effect doubled by the fact that there are two whole-tone scales—that is, two complementary samplings of the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, one corresponding to the even-numbered tones counted from any given starting point (“zero pitch”), the other to the odd—between which progressions could freely take place without resolving tension.

EXAMPLE 12.22. Accumulation of whole-tone scale with dominant function

In giving this description of the potential behavior of the six-tone extended dominant chord—that is, its invariance and resolution properties—I have in fact given a description of the actual behavior of the Poème de l’extase (Symphony no. 4), Op. 54, Scriabin’s most famous composition. It is very much a sequel to the “Divine Poem,” again casting the solo trumpet as Nietzschean protagonist to the point where symphony becomes a virtual concerto, requiring a credit to the performer. Its Tristanesque affinities are too conspicuous to be missed. There are, to be sure, a few actual quotations from the prelude to Wagner’s opera of a kind that surfaced like a reflex in the output of many composers of mystical-erotic bent (cf. just about any work by César Franck). But the main affinity is all-encompassing: like Wagner’s opera, Scriabin’s symphony consists in most general terms of a single fundamental gesture, an agonizingly prolonged structural anacrusis that at the very last moment achieves cataclysmic resolution/consummation. That consummatory gesture is the ultimate reality, the noumenon, for which sexual union, the creative act, the birth of the world—that is to say, the imagery of Scriabin’s superseded verbal composition of the same name—had been the conceptual or phenomenal metaphors.

The music is thus laden with a profusion of apparently contradictory meanings (triumph and annihilation; procreation and cosmic parthenogenesis; birth and death), meanings that can be best clarified from the perspective of Ivanov’s “threefold vision,” 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 malïy “ya”—is ideally adumbrated in the six-tone dominant chord, for its component tones actually 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. As we have seen, it is on the possibility of scale-degree identification that fully conscious identification of the ego with harmonic fluctuations, and their translation into emotional response, depends.

The functional relationships in the Poème de l’extase are thus reduced to a single essential dualism: an almost infinitely extended, graded, and variegated dominant that in its ceaseless flux and nuance is almost palpably sensuous, and a crushingly asserted tonic, tantalizingly glimpsed and tasted in advance, but for the most part withheld. Indeed the dualism is more than just a harmonic functional relationship; it is the interaction between two planes of consciousness. The one, represented by the whole-tone scale, begins inchoate, undifferentiated, selfless, but—as the trumpet’s increasing prominence and the ever longer and more insistent dominant pedals announce—coalesces and concentrates itself into an overwhelming manifestation of desire; the other, represented by the diatonic scale, suggests Ivanov’s breakthrough to universal consciousness. Since we are constantly reminded that the whole-tone, functionally undifferentiated harmonies are in fact elaborations and prolongations of a single primal function—the dominant function, the most directed harmonic tension of all—the reconstitution of the ego at the same time presages the transcendence of desire. The triumphant—even triumphalist—climax at the end of the symphony is in fact the dawn of satiety and quiescence, as Scriabin’s later compositions will disclose.

But in this case a musical illustration will be worth at least ten thousand words. The opening of the Poème de l’extase (example 12.23) recapitulates some of the cadential gestures encountered at the beginning of the “Divine Poem.” A series of unusual chromatic chords, each a subset of a whole-tone scale, are quietly resolved by semitone to the C-major triad, thus establishing C major as tonic, thereby foreshadowing and planting expectation of the ultimate breakthrough. Actually, only the first chord is unproblematically resolved (mm. 1-6). Its four tones (five, counting the central pitch of the melodic motive, which comes from the same whole-tone collection) all move by contrary motion “inward,” resolving by half step (i.e., as leading tones) to tones of the C-major chord, except for the note G, which is common to both chords and remains stationary. The whole gesture, exactly as in the “Divine Poem,” is then repeated at the transposition of a perfect fourth higher, reinforcing the impression of resolution of dominant to tonic.

EXAMPLE 12.23. Scriabin, Poème de l’Extase, Op. 54, abstract of beginning

The whole-tone chord thus arrived at is drawn from the complementary whole-tone collection, but it is resolved to the same C-major harmony as before by a complementary “outward” contrary motion (with C now the stationary common tone), thus as it were announcing the functional equivalence of the two whole-tone collections (mm. 7-10). The C-major harmony now contains a dissonant seventh, however; tension is not fully discharged, and it will continue to accumulate until the final shattering gesture.

A third cadential approach now supervenes, its tension augmented by the full simultaneous presentation of the whole-tone collection in m. 12, to which notes from the complementary collection are then added, creating a real sense of clash. The first of these clashing tones is A (in the flute), immediately taken up by the trumpet, making its bow as protagonist. It is sustained through a crescendo, which is another way of reinforcing tension, while the bass instruments force the issue by sounding G, the traditional dominant of C major. Under this pressure, the notes of the one whole-tone scale give way to the other in a fashion that approximates a traditional dominant preparation (musicians will call it a II-V progression). At the height of the crescendo, the trumpet, after a pair of attention-grabbing leaps that amount to a zov, makes the final approach to the dominant, dramatically resolving E to D#, which functions in context as the augmented fifth of a dominant ninth chord on G, another chord that consists of five of the six notes of a whole-tone scale. The pressure toward resolution has by now grown intolerable.

It is relieved, however, in only one voice, albeit the most important one. The bass resolves dominant (G) to tonic (C) along the circle of fifths, but the tones of the augmented dominant ninth (including G, which is picked up by the violas) remain suspended over the tonic. The trumpet’s D#, it is true, is silenced for a while but returns in the cellos at the downbeat of m. 22, having been introduced by a full whole-tone scale, sounded by the harp, glissando. The clarinet, at the same time, makes a dramatic leap to a high A, the ninth of the ninth chord. So we have, in effect, a mixed color—augmented dominant ninth over tonic pedal—arising out of a mixed function, one of those ineffably graded sensuous nuances for which the Poème de l’extase is so famous. The mixture produces a sense of disorientation in the listener, and will be exploited for that purpose throughout the composition, becoming one of its most characteristic harmonies. It could even be called the “Extase chord,” as indeed Scriabin seems to have recognized when he used it, a short time later, to end a piano piece called “Désir” (Op. 57, no. 1) (example 12.24).

EXAMPLE 12.24. Scriabin, “Désir,” Op. 57, no. 1, final chord

Let us take a walk around this chord. Like so many Scriabin harmonies, it contains a French sixth (the top four notes if the dominant ninth component of the chord is laid out in close spacing), which, as we know, is distinguished for its properties of invariance when inverted or transposed. Let us, then, invert the chord and transpose its members. The obvious axis for such an inversion is the top note, A, the note strategically spotlit by the clarinet leap. This is what happens when we perform the operation:

EXAMPLE 12.25. Manipulations of Extase chord

Scriabin never used the chord thus arrived at in the Poème de l’extase, but he must have performed the operations shown here at some point, for the chord formed by inverting the “Extase chord” is the most famous Scriabin chord of all, the one christened the “Chord of Prometheus” by Sabaneyeff in a famous article published in 1912 in Wassily Kandinsky’s almanac Der blaue Reiter and known in the English-speaking world since at least 1916 as the “mystic chord.”³⁷ The chord is traditionally represented in the Scriabin literature with C as its bass note, but the pitch level derived above is in fact the one with which Promethée begins and on which it dwells for the whole of its thematic exposition (example 12.26). This coincidence enhances the likelihood that Scriabin derived the chord experimentally, as we have done, by taking a walk around the characteristic extase harmony. His surviving sketches—particularly those for the Acte préalable—do give concrete evidence of such procedures.

But while he must have found its color as strikingly evocative as we do, and therefore filed it away for future use, there could be no question of incorporating the new harmony into the Poème de l’extase, because it cannot interact structurally with diatonic tonality—even as a “mixed function”—and hence had nothing to contribute to that work’s poetic design. It implies no resolution; it generates no harmonic tension. It can be endlessly walked around, but it implies no forward motion, creates no desire. Though mildly dissonant, it is wholly static and quiescent, and there can be no ego identification with it.

And precisely this is implied by the name Scriabin himself gave this most quintessentially Scriabinesque of harmonies. At an early rehearsal of Prométhée, Rachmaninoff, stunned at the sound of it, asked Scriabin, “What are you using here?” Scriabin answered, “The chord of the pleroma.”³⁸ The pleroma, a Christian Gnostic term derived from the Greek for “plenitude,” was the all-encompassing hierarchy of the divine realm, located entirely outside the physical universe, at immeasurable distance from man’s terrestrial abode, totally alien and essentially “other” to the phenomenal world and whatever belongs to it.³⁹ What we know as the mystic chord, then, was designed to afford instant apprehension of—that is, to reveal—what was in essence beyond the mind of man to conceptualize. Its preternatural stillness was a gnostic intimation of a hidden otherness, a world and its fullness wholly above and beyond rational or emotional cognition.

EXAMPLE 12.26. Prométhée, abstract of beginning (note transpositions by minor thirds [t3] and multiples)

But what produced this uncanny stasis? Though not so named by Scriabin, his “chord of the pleroma” was indeed a mystic chord; as to structure and expression alike it has long remained an enigma. Many ad hoc theoretical explanations of its structure have been proposed. Its note spelling (also, as here, very likely the fortuitous product of the walk-around) has given rise to the persistent notion that it is a construction of fourths, such as Schoenberg was experimenting with (and describing in his Harmonielehre) around the same time that Scriabin was at work on Promethée. But that is chimerical: two of the “fourths” in the Prometheus chord are augmented (i.e., tritones), another is diminished (hence, in the absence of functional degree identification, ineluctably a third in perceptual terms), and the chord’s harmonic basis is clearly the French sixth formed by its four lowest members, the most basic Scriabin harmony of all. It has also been described (again by Sabaneyeff in the Blaue Reiter article) as originating in the higher partials of the harmonic series; but that curiously persistent notion merely begs the question, as any complex or dissonant harmony could be so described.

Adequate explanation of the chord’s esoteric structure had to await the detection and theoretical investigation of the so-called octatonic scale, now recognized as a prime structural resource in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian music, first extensively employed by Rimsky-Korsakov and thereafter by his pupils, conspicuously including Stravinsky (example 12.27). It consists of alternating half steps and whole steps, for a total of eight tones to the octave, hence its English name;⁴⁰ in Russia it was known as the gamma ton-poluton, the “tone-semitone scale.”⁴¹ Scriabin almost certainly discovered it upon returning to Russia—and particularly to St. Petersburg, where the “Rimsky-Korsakov school” was flourishing—for the première of the Poème de Vextase in 1909, ending a long sojourn abroad, during which time he was quite out of touch with musical developments in his homeland. Upon discovering the scale—informally known as the “Rimsky-Korsakov scale” (korsakovskaya gamma) in St. Petersburg—Scriabin quickly realized its ideal suitability to his own poetic needs.

EXAMPLE 12.27. The three octatonic collections, represented as scales derived from intercalated minor-third cycles (diminished seventh chords), following Scriabin’s favored orthography

What made it so was its tremendous invariance potential—a potential pretty much unplumbed by its earliest explorers, beginning with Liszt, but one that greatly enriched Scriabin’s musical and poetic resources, making his art even more “suprapersonal and superreal”⁴² than ever. Where the asymmetrical diatonic scale has one and the symmetrical whole-tone scale has three, the octatonic scale has four self-reversible tritones. The scale is not symmetrical but periodic; that is, it reproduces itself at every second degree. Like the whole-tone scale, the octatonic scale harbors two French sixths; and they do not overlap in pitch content, which means that the octatonic scale can afford an even greater sense of nonprogressive, “hovering” harmonic movement—movement-within-stasis—than the whole-tone. That special symmetrical harmony known as the French sixth, consisting in essence of a double tritone, continues as before to be Scriabin’s prime avenue of commerce between scales. But now, in Promethée, commerce is between two static, nonprogressive pitch collections—the symmetrical whole-tone and the periodic octatonic. The diatonic scale, with its functionally differentiated degrees and its strong drive to resolution, has by now been virtually eliminated from the mix. It remains present at times behind the scenes, as it were, directing some vestigial local harmonic progressions along the old circle of fifths. But for the most part we are entirely in the world of realiora, represented by a unique musical idiom in which there is a strong sense of harmonic fluctuation and root movement—walking, indeed darting, around and between chords and scales—but in which any sense of harmonic direction and potential closure has been weakened to the point of virtual extinction. The chief harmonic sonority remains recognizably a modified dominant chord in intervallic structure, but there is virtually no dominant function to perform. Where there is no dominant function, of course, there can be no complementary tonic function either. Hence the widespread notion that Scriabin’s visionary late music is “atonal.”

Yet Scriabin’s actual practice explicitly contradicts such a notion. Our final technical observations will attempt to resolve the seeming paradox.

The “chord of the pleroma” contains six tones, of which four, as we know, form a modified dominant (French sixth) chord. Of the two remaining tones, one is referable along with the French sixth to the whole-tone scale, while the other may be referred, together with the same French sixth, to the octatonic scale. Hence the uncanny stasis of the chord, balanced as it is on a sort of cusp between two nonfunctional pitch collections. Because ego identification with musical process conventionally depends on functionally directed harmony, we are on the verge of not merely the intimation, or the representation, but the actual experience of ego transcendence. We are on the threshold of the sublime: a mode of feeling that can be said to have begun in music with the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which famously caused Nietzsche to imagine himself “floating above the earth in an astral dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart.”⁴³

What holds us back is Scriabin himself, and what is holding Scriabin back is an evident lingering need to impose a sense of dynamic unfolding, of tele-ological form on the composition—perhaps, too, a wish to repeat the grandiose success of the Poème de l’extase, even though his evolving musical means and aesthetic aims had rendered such a rhetoric of hyperbole superfluous. The built-in dynamic of functional tonality having been transcended, harmonic tension can only be generated factitiously, contextually. In order, therefore, to give Promethée a shape comparable to that of the Poème de l’extase, the composer devises countless means both great and small to establish a sense of conflict between the whole-tone and tone-semitone scales, to situate the former as auxiliary to the latter, so to prepare and finally consummate a factitious resolution of the pleroma chord.

At the highest, most “structural” level, Scriabin fashions his modulatory scheme (more simply, his scheme of transpositions) in conformity with the invariance properties of the octatonic rather than the whole-tone scale. The first “moving” harmonization of the opening zov motif, with the chord roots transposed along a circle of minor thirds (= tone + semitone), is a case in point (example 12.28). (This is the transposition under which the octatonic scale, but not the whole-tone scale, is invariant.) Certain seemingly local devices, however, turn out to be far more telling on the long-range structure of the composition, for they show how the seemingly contradictory end of the piece is in fact implicit in the beginning.

EXAMPLE 12.28. Scriabin, Prométhée, m. 131 (arpeggiated figures reduced to block harmony)

There is no a priori reason to regard either of the non-French sixth tones of the pleroma chord—either the one exclusively referable to the whole-tone scale or the one exclusively referable to the octatonic scale—as less stable than the other. Neither, in this context, demands or presages any particular functional resolution. Yet either might be factitiously resolved by half step (i.e., leading tone) to achieve a chord wholly referable to the one scale or the other. If the F were so resolved, either up to G or down to F, the chord would be an unalloyed whole-tone chord. The downward resolution would be presumably the resolution of choice, for it would lead to a full representation of the whole-tone scale; but the matter is moot, because no such resolution is ever made. Similarly, the B (top note as initially voiced) might be resolved either up to C or down to B/A# so as to achieve a fully (though not exhaustively) octatonic harmony. Again the downward resolution seems the preferable one, since the chord so achieved would be one that has an independent distinction in Scriabin’s late work. It is the chord that furnishes much of the harmonic substance of the Seventh Sonata, one of Scriabin’s most pervasively octatonic compositions. But the Seventh Sonata is a later composition than Promthée, and so the observation might seem anachronistic.

Yet the Seventh Sonata harmony originated somewhere, after all; and if we look back at the zov motif in example 12.26, we can witness its birth. Played against the pleroma chord, the zov already suggests the priority of the octatonic scale over the whole-tone, because it starts on the F#, the one non-whole-tone component of the chord, and returns to it through a quasi-cadential descending half step from G. There is no question, then, that the F# is being treated, and can only be interpreted, as a harmonically stable tone. The zov reaches its apogee on the note B, the non-octatonic note. And behold: the B is resolved by the same cadential descending half step to B before proceeding down to G. Because the B is the only note in the zov motif that is not a constituent of the pleroma chord itself, we have strong evidence, it seems, that Scriabin regarded and therefore treated the melodic B as harmonically unstable. The pleroma chord, we are thus led to assume, is an octatonic harmony with an appoggiatura. Let us note further that when the appoggiatura is resolved, the top three notes of the resulting chord now comprehend an ordinary major triad rooted on F#, the specifically non-whole-tone member of the original pleroma chord.

Now as anyone who knows Promethée will have just recalled, that triad is the harmony to which the last, exhaustively walked-around pleroma chord gives way at the blazing if disconcertingly arbitrary conclusion of the piece. It is arbitrary because there is not enough of traditional harmonic function left in the Promethée idiom to give it a necessity at all comparable with its cataclysmic prototype in the Poème de Vextase. It is not a functional cadence at all. And yet, as we now see, it is by no means unprepared; it is “planted” at the very outset, in fact, exactly the way the concluding C-major harmony had been planted in the opening cadential gesture of the earlier composition.

So what is its status if it is not a cadence? Minus the sense of resolution, of tension relieved, we are left with a sense of sudden elevation—or, in the language of the Russian theurgic symbolists, of a porïv, a transporting burst. That is something of which Scriabin’s music was always full. Rapid ascents and a predilection for high registers are conspicuous in his music from the moment he became interested in explicitly sublime moods and occult revelation. They assumed the role of ersatz cadential function from the moment Scriabin dispensed with conventional tonal resolutions. This happened for the first time in the Fifth Sonata, the companion piece to the Poème de l’extase (example 12.29); almost the identical gesture is repeated at the piano soloist’s first entrance in Promethée (example 12.30), thus forging a link between Scriabin’s first piece to cast off conventional trappings of tonal closure and his last piece to retain them. It is a gesture to which Ivanov makes explicit reference, relating it on the one hand to the Sursum corda, the heart-lift at the Elevation (Anaphora) of the Latin Mass,⁴⁴ and on the other to Scriabin’s constant striving to transcend the human.⁴⁵

The result of the final breakthrough to the realiora—at any rate the last one Scriabin lived to accomplish—may be glimpsed in the sketches for the Acte préalable, and in particular in the twelve-tone chords Kelkel was the first to discover and report. Kelkel reported them as a technical breakthrough. We can see them now as a spiritual breakthrough as well. A twelve-tone chord is literally vselenskoye, universal, and in its literal plenitude, exhausting the pitch-class vocabulary of the tempered tuning system, it is, more literally than the so-called mystic chord could ever be, a representation of the pleroma. There can be no question of progression; the universe has nowhere else to go. A twelve-note harmony is the ultimate invariant harmony. It can be neither transposed nor inverted. It is everywhere, and everything, at once.

EXAMPLE 12.29. Scriabin, Sonata no. 5, Op. 53 (1907), beginning

Thus it is significant that Scriabin came to his twelve-note chords by extending the harmonic explorations we have already traced. The eight distinct twelve-note chords tabulated by Kelkel are not undifferentiated clusters of semitones but are laid out registrally in ways that emphasize and combine older invariant structures. One, for example, in a sketch dated 29 December 1914, places two French sixth chords, equivalent to the content of an octatonic scale, in distinct registers that would no doubt have been further distinguished in timbre when orchestrated. The four remaining tones of the chromatic scale, equivalent to a diminished seventh chord, are placed atop the French sixths, in a third contrasting register (example 12.31). The twelve notes have been in effect partitioned into three separate inversionally and transpositionally invariant harmonies, each containing two inversionally and transpositionally invariant tritones for a “universal,” all-encompassing total of six.

EXAMPLE 12.30. Scriabin, Prométhée, m. 31, piano part only

Since it is harmonic progression that had always articulated the structural rhythm of music, which is to say its sense of directed unfolding in time, a music based on universal invariant harmonies becomes quite literally timeless, as well as emotionally quiescent. The two qualities, invariance and timelessness, insofar as we are equipped to interpret musical messages, are in fact aspects of a single quality of quiescence, expressed respectively in two musical dimensions, the “vertical” and the “horizontal.” We seem to experience an eschatological revelation, a gnosis that only music may impart: the full collapse of time and space and the dissolution of the ego. It was a dissolution at which the composer deliberately aimed, as we learn from Schloezer. Far from the solipsist of the Poème de l’extase, the author of the Mysterium “no longer dwelt on his own role; what was uniquely important to him was the act itself, and he was willing to be dissolved in it” (p. 269). This transcendence of the human, as authors from Swedenborg to Balzac to Blavatsky had foretold, amounted to the final transcendence of the world.

EXAMPLE 12.31. Universal chord from Scriabin’s Acte préalable

ESCHATOLOGICAL TORSOS

After such an experience of world transcendence there is not much that one can do for an encore. Beyond “universal” chromaticism musical maximalism could hardly proceed, and it is small wonder that modernism’s next step forward should have been a (classicizing) retreat. Yet it is worth noting that the other great “transition to atonality,” the one made around the same time as Scriabin’s by the Viennese, was not just a parallel musical exploration but had a parallel spiritual dimension as well. Schoenberg also felt himself to be Wagner’s Orphic heir. He even had a tenuous connection with Russian symbolism (and, more tenuously yet, with Scriabin) through his friend Kandinsky. And he too, at the outset at least, felt the breakthrough to atonality as a transcendence of the human plane, a direct experience of the sublime. With Schoenberg, too, there was a literary parallel intimating the essence and the purpose of his music, though it was only music (in its “absoluteness”) that was capable of fully realizing the expression.

To Schoenberg the vision came from Emmanuel Swedenborg via Balzac’s philosophical novel Séraphîta (1835), “perhaps the most glorious work in existence,” as the composer put it to Kandinsky.⁴⁶ The long central chapter of this book is given over to a purported exposition of Swedenborg’s life and teachings, as related to Wilfrid, a man of thirty, and Minna, a girl of seventeen, by an androgynous ethereal being with whom both are in love and who in the last chapter ascends to an angelic estate. The two lovers, who are left to share the love they bore for the angel, are privileged to witness the assumption and are vouchsafed a vision of heaven:

Wilfrid and Minna now understood some of the mysterious words of the being who on earth had appeared to them under the form which was intelligible to each—Séraphîtus to one, Séraphîta to the other—seeing that here all was homogeneous. Light gave birth to melody, and melody to light; colors were both light and melody; motion was number endowed by the Word; in short, everything was at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that, everything existing in everything else, extension knew no limits, and the angels could traverse it everywhere to the utmost depths of the infinite.⁴⁷

This is the vision that inspired Schoenberg, the experience that he tried to capture with his radical new style. Partly it is a familiar matter of synesthesia and fusion of media, such as Schoenberg attempted to realize with his famous “tone-color melodies” and with the coordination of lighting and music in his tiny expressionist opera Die glückliche Hand (1913), the composition most directly stimulated by his friendship with Kandinsky. But in one composition, begun slightly later, Schoenberg tried to find an explicit musical analogue to the e very thing-in-e very thing, directionless, limitlessly traversable heavenly space so provocatively described by Balzac. His ideal, set forth in italics, was a unity of musical space [that] demands an absolute and unitary perception. In elaborating this vision, he referred directly to the source of his inspiration, comparing the “musical space” he envisioned, and that he sought through atonality to realize, with “Swedenborg’s heaven (described in Balzac’s Séraphîta)” where “there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward.” In such a musical space, Schoenberg went on,

Every musical configuration, every movement of tones has to be comprehended primarily as a mutual relation of sounds, of oscillatory vibrations, appearing at different places and times. To the imaginative and creative faculty, relations in the material sphere are as independent from directions or planes as material objects are, in their sphere, to our perceptive faculties. Just as our mind always recognizes, for instance, a knife, a bottle, or a watch, regardless of its position, and can reproduce it in the imagination in every possible position, even so a musical creator’s mind can operate subconsciously with a row of tones, regardless of their direction, regardless of the way in which a mirror might show the mutual relations, which remain a given quality.⁴⁸

What was sought, then, was an infinitely collapsible, unitary, or (as we might say now) invariant space corresponding in its way to Scriabin’s collapsed and suspended time. Schoenberg was at pains to note that this unity of musical space was something that the composer of genius achieves without conscious effort (as a “gift from the Supreme Commander”), pointing to an arcane structural relationship—by inversion, significantly enough, “the way in which a mirror might show” it—between the main themes of his own early Chamber Symphony, Op. 9 (1906), which only presented itself to his conscious understanding “about twenty years later.”⁴⁹ In one work, however, Schoenberg strove consciously to effect an actual occult disclosure through the consummate unification of musical space, and this was the work (or so Schoenberg recollected it) that midwifed if not the birth then at least the conception of the twelve-tone technique.

According to a letter he sent Alexander von Zemlinsky late in 1913, Schoenberg intended for a while to follow up Die glückliche Hand with a grandiose operatic trilogy on the subject of Séraphîta, for which Marie Pappenheim, the librettist of Erwartung, had agreed to prepare a libretto.⁵⁰ Alternatively and concurrently, he planned a vast choral symphony, emulative of Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” for which the earliest surviving sketch, dated 27 December 1912, is a recitative labeled “Séraphîta.”⁵¹ The culminating movement, for which the text was finished in January 1915, was a counterpart to the mystical final chapters (“Le Chemin pour aller au ciel” and “L’Assomption”) in Séraphîta, and (as Webern, to whom Schoenberg may have disclosed his plan, was quick to discern) it contained several plain or covert textual references to Balzac’s novel, of which one—the Archangel Gabriel’s opening speech, “Whether right, left, forward or backwards, up or down—one has to go on without asking what lies before or behind one”—resonates as well with Schoenberg’s later description of his Balzac-inspired “absolute and unitary” musical space.⁵²

We know these words as the opening lines of the text of the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter, with Moses und Aron one of the great Schoenbergian torsos. Long before its first fragmentary performance (Vienna, 16 June 1961) or publication (Los Angeles: Belmont Music Publishers, 1974), as reconstructed from Schoenberg’s sketches by his pupil Winfried Zillig, the work had achieved a legendary status not (to put it as Schoenberg might have done) so much for “what it was” as for “how it was made.”⁵³ In a letter to Nicolas Slonimsky (3 June 1937), which Slonimsky published that very year in the first edition of his compendium Music since 1900 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), having called special attention to it in the preface, Schoenberg wrote that the first of many Vorversuche, or preliminary gropings, toward his “method of composing with twelve tones happened about December 1914 or at the beginning of 1915 when I sketched a symphony, the last part of which became later the ‘Jakobsleiter,’ but which never has been continued. The Scherzo of this symphony was based on a theme consisting of the twelve tones. But this was only one of the themes.”⁵⁴

In a sketch for an essay that was set down around 1948 and published two years later, Schoenberg gave some more details, and showed how the twelve-tone theme actually survived into the oratorio, which he began to compose in its final if unfinished form in 1917:

I had contrived the plan to provide for unity—which was always my main motive: to build all the main themes of the whole oratorio from a row of six tones— C, D, E, F, G, A These were probably [?] the six notes with which the composition began, in the following order: C, D, F, E, A, G. When after my retirement from the University of California I wanted to finish Die Jakobsleiter, I discovered to my greatest pleasure that this beginning was a real twelve-tone composition. To an ostinato (which I changed a little) the remaining six tones entered gradually, one in every measure. When I built the main themes from these six tones I did not bind myself to the order of their first appearance. I was still at this time far away from the methodical application of a set. Still I believe that also this idea offered the promise of unity to a certain degree.⁵⁵

Was it merely a coincidence that the fateful hexachord, or six-tone row (“C, D, E, F, G, A”) on which the beginning of Die Jakobsleiter was built (example 12.32) should have been an octatonic scale segment? Yes and no. It is unlikely that Schoenberg had the specific awareness of the octatonic scale as a compositional resource that the Russian composers of Scriabin’s and Stravinsky’s generations possessed—but it is not out of the question, for many of Schoenberg’s writings, beginning with the Harmonielehre of 1911, show a detailed technical acquaintance with the works of Liszt, and it is altogether possible that Schoenberg had deduced the nature and the properties of the scale from Liszt’s usages the way Rimsky-Korsakov had previously deduced them.⁵⁶ What is certain is that, given the goal of a unified musical space, Schoenberg actively sought a group of tones with an intervallic structure that would be invariant under inversion, and that criterion is satisfied by the six-tone octatonic segment.

The crucial move that made the opening of Die Jakobsleiter a Vorversuch for the twelve-tone technique was the immediate combination of the ostinato drawn from the octatonic fragment with the complementary hexachord (F, A, B, B, C, E)—that is, the remaining six tones necessary to complete the full chromatic gamut. This hexachord, too, is (inevitably) inversionally symmetrical—which is to say that its intervallic structure, being (unavoidably) identical to that of its counterpart, is also invariant when inverted. And Schoenberg actually demonstrated this property, by displaying the second hexachord as a pair of three-note chords, the one quite conspicuously the inversion of the other, that are sounded piecemeal but then sustained in the winds while the strings continue to sound the first hexachord as an ostinato running beneath (example 12.33).

EXAMPLE 12.32. Schoenberg, Die Jakobsleiter, opening ostinato

This situation—the partitioning of the complete chromatic aggregate into mutually exclusive, harmonically symmetrical (or inversionally invariant) registral segments, one of them octatonic—is already highly reminiscent of the twelve-note constructions in the almost contemporaneous sketches for Scriabin’s Acte préalable, which—one hastens to point out—not only could Schoenberg not have known at the time, but he could never have learned about during his lifetime.⁵⁷ But the resemblance is striking, and Schoenberg’s next move made it closer yet.

EXAMPLE 12.33. Schoenberg, Die Jakobsleiter, complementary hexachord and derivative harmonies

As soon as the two wind chords have been completed in the higher register, and are being sustained there, the string ostinato running beneath accelerates into a rhythmic diminution, which is then treated as a stretto. That is, different instruments enter in counterpoint with different orderings of the six tones of the hexachord that are so calculated that after six such entries all six constituent tones are continuously present in the texture (example 12.34). Chalk up another aggregate simultaneity, another musically represented pleroma! Just as in the Acte préalable, we now have a completely saturated and completely symmetrical—which is to say a completely unitary, completely invariant and functionally quiescent—musical space. And just as in the Acte préalable, this construction exists and was motivated not simply as a technical feat—though that is how it has been touted in most conventional historiographical and analytical accounts⁵⁸—but as a metaphor for a spiritual condition, or (to put it more bravely, and more truly in terms of its conception) as a medium for occult revelation. It is a foretaste of Swedenborgian heaven.⁵⁹

That heaven is reapproached in the wordless interlude preceding the second part of Die Jakobsleiter, the part that Schoenberg never wrote. As with Scriabin, the ultimate revelation was never accomplished. But the interlude begins (mm. 563f.) with a return of the opening hexachord, now laid out as an actual octatonic scalar segment introducing the vocalise of the liberated soul, which begins with a fresh permutation of the same hexachord and extends it into the full chromatic ether. The principle on which the dodecaphonic principle chiefly depended, that of perpetual chromatic circulation equally encompassing the horizontal (melodic) and the vertical (harmonic) dimensions (so that there is “no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward”) was born.

EXAMPLE 12.34. Schoenberg, Die Jakobsleiter mm. 1-8

EXAMPLE 12.35. Ives, “Universe” Symphony, harmonic sketch (see n. 59)

So it is not enough, never enough, to attribute early twentieth-century maximalism—of which the grandiose unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable, eschatological torsos of Schoenberg, Scriabin, and Ives stand as preeminent musical mementos—simply or solely to a “pressure within the art.”⁶⁰ The arts are not detached from the rest of existence or experience; they receive and react to pressures from many sources. Not only their contents, but also their forms and procedures—including the procedure of detaching them from the worldly—arise in response to worldly pressures. “What form will religious sentiment assume? What will be its new expression?” asked Balzac in the preface to Le Livre Mystique, of which Séraphîta was a part. “The answer is a secret of the future.”⁶¹ That future is now past to us, and the religious sentiment has again become a secret. But it is as a vision of human perfectibility, at the very least, a vision of “ascent to a higher and better order,”⁶² that we may look upon, and take inspiration from, the early atonal vision.

The quoted phrase formed the conclusion of Schoenberg’s letter to Slonimsky, describing what Schoenberg saw as the victory of the twelve-tone technique. It could just as well have been a citation from Séraphîta. As Webern revealed, Schoenberg justified his explorations on a specifically Balzacian, occult basis. The surmounting of the major-minor dichotomy was for Schoenberg no mere technical breakthrough but a spiritual ascent—a porïv—to a superhuman condition: “Double gender,” he proclaimed, “has given rise to a higher race!”⁶³ No less than Scriabin, then, Schoenberg spoke in the voice of the vatic androgyne, as the text of Die Jakobsleiter and the mesmerizing title page of Prométhée (by the Belgian theosophical artist Jean Delville) jointly declare (figure 12.1). (“The fire that blazed in his eyes,” wrote Balzac of his angelic messenger, “rivalled the rays of the sun; he seemed not to receive but to give out light.”)⁶⁴

FIGURE 12.1. Jean Delville’s title page for Scriabin’s Promethée (1912): “The fire that blazed in his eyes rivaled the rays of the sun” (Balzac, Séraphîta)

The cold war rationalization and academization of dodecaphony caused that voice to grow cold and that face to grow dim. “As you read,” said one of Balzac’s characters of Swedenborg, “you must either lose your wits or become a seer.”⁶⁵ By now we have long since consigned Scriabin to the former estate, that of lost wits, but we have been unwilling to consign Schoenberg to either category. Instead he sulks in positivistic limbo, his methods venerated but his deeds ignored. But it is precisely the academic despiritualization of dodecaphony—more broadly, of atonality—that has led to its widespread, and justified, rejection.

Indeed, it is precisely the rationalization and refinement of dodecaphonic technique to the point where it has become a kind of abstract numerical logic that has brought attack from those who question the cognitive relevance of its logical concepts. Twelve-tone music has come to seem a conceptual game to which listeners can never gain perceptual access. Those who attempt to finesse the problem by placing the blame on the inexperience of listeners (their “incompetence,” to speak cognitively), invariably come across as special pleaders.⁶⁶

It is only when the original conception of atonality as a transrational, uncanny discourse is recognized, and its nature as a medium of revealed—which is to say undemonstrable—truth is grasped, that aesthetic apprehension can begin. It bears the aura of the sublime (Séraphîta: “Why, if you believe in number, should you deny God?”),⁶⁷ and the sublime purges and terrifies. It is important, therefore, to refresh our memory of atonality’s motivating liminal impulses. Renewed contact with the early atonalists, with Scriabin, and with the sources of their inspiration, can help restore perspective, but only if they are “put together again.” At the very least it should be apparent that musicians who dismiss Scriabin’s spiritual vision as “cosmic hocus-pocus,” and literary investigators who assume it impossible that a spiritual vision could be “communicated musically,” are cut off equally from the vision and from the music. It is only the music that can communicate the vision, but only if we have vision enough to receive the communication.

¹ Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, “Ko dnyu otkritiya pamyatnoy doski na dome Skryabina” (Lines written to commemorate the unveiling of a memorial plaque on Scriabin’s former domicile), Muzïka, no. 254 (11 March 1916).

² Boris de Schloezer, Scriabin: Artist and Mystic, trans. Nicolas Slonimsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 234. (Originally published as Skryabin: Lich-nost’, Misteriya [Berlin: Grani, 1922]). Further page references will be given in the text.

³ Rose Lee, “Dmitri Szostakovitch: Young Russian Composer Tells of Linking Politics With Creative Work,” New York Times, 20 December 1931 ; reproduced in facsimile in Eric Roseberry, Shostakovich: His Life and Times (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1982), p. 79; reprinted in David Ewen, ed., The Book of Modern Composers, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1956), p. 380.

⁴ The main keeper of the flame in Russia was the composer’s son-in-law, the pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky (1902-63); and yet the spiritual aspects of the music, even in Sofronitsky’s vivid performances, were written off in the Soviet milieu as the products of material hallucinogens. In a memoir by the Soviet émigré pianist Mark Zeltser, Sofronitsky “would walk to the piano with a slow, distracted gait, then, before playing, apply a black handkerchief to his nose. In musical circles, there were rumors about what was on Sofronitsky’s handkerchiefs, or in them.” (Quoted by Joseph Horowitz, “Disks: 26 Scriabin Pieces,” New York Times, 11 November 1986.) Faubion Bowers, aide-de-camp to General Douglas Macarthur during the occupation of Japan and later a prolific arts journalist, was for a long time a devoted proponent of the composer, with two major publications to his credit: Scriabin (2 vols.; Tokyo and Palo Alto: Kodansha International, 1969); and The New Scriabin: Enigma and Answers (New York: St. Martins Press, 1973). His work, too, while that of an enthusiast, has tended to (as Schloezer would say) “fetishize” the sounds of the music (“the music itself,” as we are now inclined to say) while relegating the occult aspect of Scriabin’s creativity to the status of pathology or, in any case, something “extramusical.”

⁵ A Book About Stravinsky, trans. Richard F. French (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 158, 22.

⁶ The remark, made in an interview with Scriabin’s former amanuensis, Leonid Sabaneyeff, was reported by Boris de Schloezer in his Igor Stravinsky (Paris, 1929), of which an abridged translation by Ezra Pound first appeared in The Dial 85, no. 6 (1929), and then in Edwin Corle, ed., Igor Stravinsky (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), pp. 33-91. The quoted remark is at the very beginning, “whereupon,” as S. A. Evreinow, an old Scriabin hand, drolly observed, Schloezer “started a discussion about the sources of Stravinsky’s musical inspiration”; see the notes to “A Collection of Compositions for the Piano by Alexander Scriabin” (Paraclete Music Disc no. 101 [East Haven, Conn., 1958]).

⁷ This new analytical literature begins with Varvara Dernova, Garmoniya Skryabina (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1968), a revision of the author’s 1948 thesis, of which a translation has been published by Roy J. Guenther as “Varvara Dernova’s Garmoniia Skriabina: A Translation and Critical Commentary” (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University of America, 1979). (Dernova published a preliminary report of her findings as “Nekotorïye zakonomernosti garmonii Skryabina,” in Yu. Tyulin, ed., Teoreticheskiye problemï’ muzïki XX veka, vol.1 [Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1967], and a summary of them as “Garmoniya Skryabina,” in S. Pavchinsky and V. Tsukkerman, ed., A. N. Skryabin: Sbornik statei [Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1973], pp. 344-83; for an English summary see Roy J. Guenther, “Varvara Dernova’s System of Analysis of the Music of Skryabin,” in Gordon D. McQuere, ed., Russian Theoretical Thought in Music [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983], pp. 165-216.) Highlights post-Dernova include Gottfried Eberle, Zwischen Tonalität und Atonalität: Studien zur Harmonik Alexander Skrjabins (Munich: Katzbichler, 1978); Hanns Steger, Der Weg der Klaviersonate bei Alexander Skrjabin (Munich: Wollenweber, 1979); Jay Reise, “Late Skriabin: Some Principles behind the Style,” 19th-century Music 6 (1982-83): 220-31; George Perle, “Scriabin’s Self-Analyses,” Music Analysis 3 (1984): 101-24; and James M. Baker, The Music of Alexander Scriabin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986).

⁸ This literature includes Martin Cooper, “Aleksandr Skryabin and the Russian Renaissance,” Studi musicali 1 (1972), condensed in M. H. Brown and R.J. Wiley, ed., Slavonic and Romantic Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), pp. 219-40; Ralph Matlaw, “Scriabin and Russian Symbolism,” Comparative Literature 31 (1979): 1-23; Malcolm H. Brown, “Skriabin and Russian ‘Mystic’ Symbolism,” 19th-century Music 3 (1979-80): 42-51; and I. L. Vanechkina and B. M. Galeyev, Poema ognya: Kontseptsiya svetomuzïkal’ nogo sinteza A. N. Skryabina (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo Kazanskogo Universiteta, 1981). There have also been some important Soviet documentary publications, including a large book of letters (A. N. Scriabin, Pis’ma, ed. A. V. Kashperov [Moscow: Muzïka, 1965]); and a documentary chronicle: M. P. Pryashnikova and O. M. Tompakova, Letopis zhizni i tvorchestva A. N. Skryabina (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1985).

⁹ Hugh Macdonald, Skryabin (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 14, 10. In a centennial “tribute” to the composer, Macdonald took off from the following premise: “Nothing is easier than to pour ridicule upon Skryabin’s gradual and finally total self-delusion. Ever since the bubble of his persona was so rudely pricked in the 1920s ... his quasi-religious convictions have been under relentless fire from the few critics who have paid him any attention at all, and must be eliminated from any possibility of serious consideration, now or even in the future.” (“‘Words and Music by A. Skryabin,’“ Musical Times 113 [1972]: 22.)

¹⁰ David Murray, “Distorted Vision,” Musical Times 128 (1987). The diagnosis of “mild megalomania” also comes from this article. (Schloezer’s book appeared in England under the Oxford University Press imprint, by arrangement with California.)

¹¹ “I cannot understand how to write just music now,” Scriabin exclaimed to Sabaneyeff. “How boring! . . . People who just write music are like performers who just play an instrument. They become valuable only when they connect with a general idea. The purpose of music is revelation. What a powerful way of knowing it is!” (quoted in Bowers, The New Scriabin, p. 108).

¹² The Music of Alexander Scriabin, pp. vii, 270.

¹³ I borrow the term “techno-essentialist,” as well as its capsule definition, from Christopher Williams, who coined it in a penetrating review-essay, “Of Canons and Context: Toward a Historiography of Twentieth-Century Music,” Repercussions 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 31-74 (the full definition is on p. 42).

¹⁴ The dissertation was published as Alexandre Scriabine: sa vie, l’esoterisme et le langage musical dans son oeuvre (Paris: Champion, 1978).

¹⁵ Manfred Kelkel, “Les esquisses musicales de l’Acte préalable de Scriabine,” Revue de Musicologie 17 (1971): 40-48.

¹⁶ Compare the conclusion of Macdonald’s article on Scriabin in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, where the composer is praised for having “initiated a new musical language, as Schoenberg and Debussy were doing at much the same time, no less radical and advanced than theirs, and like them breaking decisively with tonality. His sketches for the Acte préalable (1914-15) reveal him experimenting with 12-note chords, which is just one reason for supposing that, but for his early death, his standing as a major figure in 20th-century music would be all the more conspicuous” (vol. 17, p. 373).

¹⁷ Craft, “Scriabin Centenary,” in Prejudices in Disguise (New York: Knopf, 1974), p. 187.

¹⁸ Once again Macdonald is at the phobic extreme. His remarks on the Poeme de l’extase are typical: “The task of elucidating the metaphysical significance of poem and music (if any) 1 gladly leave to others. The poem leaves a taste of wordy mystical nonsense that can hardly enhance the value of the two compositions. The only common notions which can be traced with any clarity are those basic emotive and pictorial states on which all programme music has thrived: melancholy, joy, struggle, longing, and so on, leaving Skryabin’s more personal ideas of creativity and mystical divination to the merely subjective interpretation of both composer and listener.” And, “The Poem of Ecstasy is a masterly work because Skryabin was still governed by the surviving rigours of symphonic structure; if it had been composed a year or two later, it would have been a less concise and less compelling reflection of that far from masterly poem, or even—and this is the more forbidding thought when we recall the weakness of the First Symphony’s finale—a setting of it. As if he was somehow conscious of his commitment to instrumental music, words were left out of his scheme of things. When he tried to impose them on his music the results were inescapably subjective” (“‘Words and Music by A. Skryabin,’“ p. 25, italics added).

¹⁹ Matlaw, “Scriabin and Russian Symbolism,” p. 22.

²⁰ Andrey Belïy, Mezhdu dvukh revolyutsii (Leningrad, 1934), pp. 348-49. When it came to Scriabin’s piano playing, Belïy professed to find it “more light than profound.”

²¹ Belïy, “O teurgii,” Novïy put’ 1 (1903): 100-123.

²² Ivanov, “Skryabin,” in Pamyatniki kul’turï: Novïye otkrïtiya (Yearbook of the Scientific Council of the History of World Culture, Academy of Sciences of the USSR), 1983 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), p. 114; and Ivanov, “Vzglyad Skryabina na iskusstvo,” ibid., p. 103. The passage about “sadness” is clearly disingenuous; Ivanov knew as well as the next poet that poetry obtains its “thousands of particular shades” by means of imagery, not by mere vocabulary.

²³ Let this be the answer to the odious comments quoted in n. 18.

²⁴ Along with the rest of Scriabin’s creative writings, it is published in Mikhail Gershenzon, ed., “Zapisi A. N. Skryabina” (with a foreword by Schloezer), Russkiye propileyi, vol. 6 (Moscow: Sabashnikov, 1919), pp. 97-247 (the Poèma èkstaza is on pp. 176-91). An English translation appears in Bowers, Scriabin, pp. 131-35.

²⁵ The best try so far has been Lawrence Kramer’s in Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), the first and concluding chapters of which outline a theory of what Kramer calls “structural rhythm,” by which he identifies temporal unfolding as the essential shared property “through which we constitute the expressive process that our concrete reading or listening experience acts out,” and, therefore, as the “level . . . that under certain conditions can form the basis for the tandem interpretation of a poem and a composition” (p. 9). Kramer’s musical and poetic interpretations, however, strike me as being not so much tandem as parallel. They do not really rely upon or complete one another; at best they are demonstrations, by no means unprecedented, of how poets and composers can obtain comparable effects. I also wish Kramer had not given in to old-fashioned new-critical squeamishness about representation, retreating from that academically disreputable (“merely subjective”) and suspiciously “surface” terrain into the more hidden, “deeper,” professionally sanctified, putatively objective and verifiable (but, I persist in thinking, metaphorical and self-constituting) domain of “structure.” My discussion will focus unabashed (except to the extent that this footnote evinces abashment) on simpler dimensions of meaning that academic critics have tended to snub.

²⁶ They are: “Natsional’noye i vselenskoye v tvorchestve Skryabina” (The National and the Universal in Scriabin, 1916), “Vzglyad Skryabina na iskusstvo” (Scriabin’s View of Art, 1915), and “Skryabin” (1919), all published with an introduction and commentary by I. A. Milïnikova in Pamyatniki kul’turï: Novïye otkrïtiya (Yearbook of the Scientific Council of the History of World Culture, Academy of Sciences of the USSR), 1983 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1985), pp. 88-119.

²⁷ For a fuller technical discussion of the analytical issues, and a preliminary outline of the new perspective (made without benefit of Ivanov), see my review of the books by Baker and Schloezer to which reference has been made in preceding footnotes, in Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988): 143-69.

²⁸ Pamyatniki kul’turï 1983, p. 115.

²⁹ Quoted in Bowers, Scriabin, vol. 2, p. 231.

³⁰ In the case of Wagner the chief trots were Edouard Schuré, Le Drame musicale (Paris, 1876; reprinted in 1886), and Henri Lichtenberger, Richard Wagner: Poète et penseur (Paris, 1898), which was partially serialized (as “Vzglyadï Vagnera na iskusstvo”) in Diaghilev’s magazine Mir iskusstvo in 1899.

³¹ The locus classicus for this economical functional interpretation of the Tristan chord is William J. Mitchell, “The Tristan Prelude: Techniques and Structure,” Music Forum 1 (1967): 162-203.

³² The reading presented here of the Tristan chord as an embellished augmented sixth harmony moving through a “Phrygian progression” to the dominant is roughly congruent with that proposed by Donald Francis Tovey in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) and adopted subsequently by many other analysts in the Anglo-American tradition (see, inter alia, Walter Piston, Harmony [New York: Norton, 1941], p. 279). For an absorbing survey of analyses of the opening of the Tristan prelude (including several nonfunctional or “post-tonal” views, and even some that try to accommodate the passage to the key of E minor, where, as shown in example 12.6, the “Tristan chord” has a diatonic function) see Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 222-33. A less formal comparison of viewpoints can be found in Milton Babbitt, Words about Music (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 146-58. The objective in both these discussions is meta-analytic: they aim not to adjudicate the analytical questions at issue but to explore (and in the case of Nattiez to assess as musical representations) a wide range of analytical discourse.

³³ Richard Wagner, Nachgelassene Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1885), trans. Piero Weiss, in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), p. 377.

³⁴ For glosses on Ivanov’s term see B. G. Rosenthal, “The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905,” Slavic Review 36 (1977): 616; also Andrey Belïy, “Realiora,” Vesï 5, no. 5 (May 1908): 59-62.

³⁵ Dernova, “Garmoniya Skryabina,” p. 352.

³⁶ Macdonald, Skryabin, p. 37.

³⁷ Cf. L. Sabanejew, ‘“Prometheus’ von Skrjabin,” Almanack der blaue Reiter, ed. W. Kan-dinsky and F. Marc (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1912), which is a translation by Kandinsky (corrected at Kandinsky’s request by Schoenberg) of Leonid Sabaneyev, “Prometey,” Muzïka, no. 1 (Moscow, 1910); for the probable origin of the English byname see Arthur Eaglefield Hull, Scriabin: A Great Russian Tone-Poet (London: Kegan Paul, 1916; 2d ed., 1927), chapter 9, “The Mystic Chord,” in which the name is attributed to “the composer’s disciples,” probably meaning Sabaneyev (2d ed., p. 106).

³⁸ This anecdote is related by Igor Boelza in “Filosofskiye istoki obraznogo stroya ‘Prometeya,”;^,, in Razlichnïye aspektï tvorchestva A. N. Skryabina, abstracts of papers read at a conference organized at the Scriabin museum, Moscow, 6-7 January 1992 (pp. 18-19). My thanks to John Bell Young for providing a copy.

³⁹ Scriabin would have encountered the term in Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, where it is variously associated with such Promethean concepts as “Spiritual Fire” and “Astral Light,” and with angelic androgyny. (See Helene Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine [London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888], pp. 79, 196.) My thanks to Mitchell Morris for the references.

⁴⁰ It was christened by Arthur Berger in what has proved a seminal article, “Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky,” Perspectives of New Music 2, no. 1 (1963): 11-42; reprinted in B. Boretz and E. T. Cone, ed., Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 123-55.

⁴¹ For the historical background see R. Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei: Harmonic Sorcery; or, Stravinsky’s ‘Angle,’“ Journal of the American Musicological Society 38 (1985): 72-142.

⁴² Cf. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 114.

⁴³ Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches Allzumenschliche (1878), quoted in Leo Treitler, “To Worship That Celestial Sound,’“ Journal of Musicology 1 (1982): 166.

⁴⁴ “Natsional’noye i vselenskoye v tvorchestve Skryabina,” Pamyatniki kul’ituï (1983): 98. It seems altogether likely, in this connection, that Ivanov (and surely Scriabin) recalled Liszt’s “Sursum corda,” the last piece in the collection Années de Pélerinage, which contains one of Liszt’s most radical harmonic effects (and one quite prophetic of Scriabin): a French sixth chord suddenly “composed out” at the climax into a blazing passage of whole-tone scales.

⁴⁵ “Vzglyad Skryabina na iskusstvo,” Pamyatniki kul’turï (1983): 104.

⁴⁶ Letter of 19 August 1912; Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch, trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 54.

⁴⁷ Honoré de Balzac, Séraphîta (Blauvelt, N.Y.: Freedeeds Library, 1986), p. 173.

⁴⁸ “Composition with Twelve Tones (1)” (1941), in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), p. 223.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 222-23.

⁵⁰ Letter of 21 November 1913, quoted in Alan Philip Lessem, Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979), pp. 178, 229n.40, by courtesy of O. W. Neighbour, the owner of the document. According to Neighbour’s article on Schoenberg in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London: Macmillan, 1992), vol. 4, p. 237, Schoenberg first entertained the idea of a Séraphîta opera in 1912, which would place it even closer to the period of his closest involvement with Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter.

⁵¹ Lessem, Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg.

⁵² See H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer Books, 1978), p. 243.

⁵³ See his oft-cited letter of 27 July 1932 to Rudolf Kolisch, in Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), p. 164.

⁵⁴ “Letter from Arnold Schoenberg on the Origin of the Twelve-Tone Method of Composition,” in Nicolas Slonimsky, ed., Music since 1900, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 1315.

⁵⁵ “Composition with Twelve Tones (2),” Style and Idea, pp. 247-48.

⁵⁶ The process of Rimsky-Korsakov’s deduction is traced in Taruskin, “Chernomor to Kashchei.”

⁵⁷ Much later, in 1922, while engaged in polemic with Josef Matthias Hauer over the question of priority in the “discovery” of the twelve-tone technique, Schoenberg claimed to have been “inspired by Scriabin’s procedure as described in Der blaue Reiter” when he expressed the aggregate harmony in the form of two complementary hexachords in Die Jakobsleiter. But if he had indeed been prompted in this way by Scriabin’s example, it was a striking instance of creative misreading, because Sabaneyev’s article (see n. 37), although it does present the mystic chord in the guise of a six-note scale segment or hexachord, describes no technique of complementation or aggregate formation. See Schoenberg’s marginal annotations to Hauer’s article “Sphärenmusik,” transcribed in Bryan R. Simms, “Who First Composed Twelve-Tone Music, Schoenberg or Hauer?” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10 (1987): 124 (English), and 132, n. 15 (German). My thanks to Gregory Dubinsky for this reference.

⁵⁸ E.g., by Babbitt in Words about Music, pp. 10-16, 57-58.

⁵⁹ Another who arrived independently around the same time at aggregate harmonies (or “total harmonies,” as he called them) as a means of representing or inducing transcendent experience was the Russian composer Nikolai Obukhov (1892-1954), often thought of as a Scriabinist, but one who did not know Scriabin personally and could not have known the Acte préalable sketches. See, for example, his song Kolïbel’naya (1918; published as Berceuse d’un bienheureux by Rouarte Lerolle, Paris, in 1921), of which excerpts are reprinted in Peter Deane Roberts, Modernism in Russian Piano Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), vol. 2, pp. 15051. The piece begins with three different widely spaced aggregates, partitioned like Scriabin’s into polychordal layers. Finally, compare Charles Ives’s contemporaneous pleromic torso, the “Universe” Symphony, mainly sketched between 1911 and 1915. A page of sketches, reproduced on p. 295 of Stuart Feder’s “psychoanalytic biography,” Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), shows the building up of a sustained aggregate sonority by means of a quintessentially (if unwittingly) Schoenbergian progression of tritones and perfect fourths (example 12.35).

⁶⁰ Igor Stravinsky, in Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), p. 113. See the next chapter for a gloss.

⁶¹ Balzac, Séraphîta, p. vii.

⁶² Slonimsky, Music since 1900, p. 1316.

⁶³ Anton Webern (quoting Schoenberg), The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Theodore Presser, 1963), p. 37.

⁶⁴ Balzac, Séraphîta, p. 24.

⁶⁵ Séraphîta, p. 61. Anent Scriabin, one may rely on Wilfrid’s defense of Séraphîta (p. 102): “I will not dispute her madness, so long as you do not dispute her superiority.”

⁶⁶ Andrew Mead, for example, argues that in order to listen meaningfully to twelve-tone music “we must be able in some sensible way to perceive aggregates,” that is, to parse and segment individual statements of the full chromatic gamut. “While I shall not deal with that issue here,” he continues, “I think it reasonable to assume that we do so by hearing their boundaries, as signalled by the recurrence of pitch-classes,” and claims that this entails nothing more than “simply ... to reinterpret the significance of certain simple perceptual acts” (“Twelve-Tone Organizational Strategies: An Analytical Sampler,” Intégral 2 [1991]: 93-168, esp. pp. 96-97). Mead ignores the sizable literature of that burgeoning branch of cognitive psychology known as music perception, in which reported experimental results have repeatedly disconfirmed the reasonableness of his working assumption. On the cognitive opacity of serial music see Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 296-301; also Fred Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in John A. Sloboda, ed., Generative Processes in Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 231-59.

⁶⁷ Balzac, Séraphîta, p. 126. One writer who recognizes the sublime, noncognizable nature of atonal music, but who nevertheless attempts a desperate reconciliation with academically more respectable viewpoints (“classical” ones, in Schloezer’s terms) is Michael Hicks, in “Serialism and Comprehensibility: A Guide for the Teacher,” Journal of Aesthetic Appreciation 25, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 77-85.