{"id":59838,"date":"2015-06-22T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=59838"},"modified":"2015-06-22T12:34:25","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T11:34:25","slug":"alexander-scriabin-7-jan-1872-27-apr-1915-ecstasy-and-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/alexander-scriabin-7-jan-1872-27-apr-1915-ecstasy-and-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexander Scriabin (7 Jan 1872 – 27 Apr 1915): Ecstasy and Light"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"Alexander<\/a>27 April 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin who believed that music had the power to elevate the consciousness of people and therefore to transform social conditions. Scriabin is often described as a \u201cmystic\u201d, but there is no direct evidence that he personally had mystic experiences. Rather he drew upon the works of theosophical writers and conversations with people in\u00a0 the theosophical milieu in London and Bruxelles.<\/p>\n

[Watch on TMS Music Video of the Week Scriabin\u2019s <\/a>Mysterium<\/a>]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Alexander Scriabin was a key figure of what is commonly called the Silver Age in Russian history from the 1890s to 1914 . The start of the First World War followed by the Russian Revolution dispersed many of the groups which had been active in Moscow and St. Petersburg.\u00a0 The Silver Age had seen a surge of interest in various forms of mysticism, the occult and the philosophical teachings of India and China along with influences from Germany: the thought of Nietzsche and the Christianized version of theosophy developed By Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner’s second wife, Marie von Sivers was a Baltic Russian who also helped spread Steiner’s views in Helsinki and Warsaw, cities in close contact with Russian intellectual circles.<\/p>\n

\"Alexander<\/a>An element of theosophical thought, especially in Madame Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine <\/em>which Scriabin read closely was the idea of esoterism \u2212 or hidden or secret knowledge which passes from age to age and from country to country.\u00a0 This hidden knowledge is taught in small inner circles or can be discovered through a careful study of the literature and the development within an individual of his higher consciousness by meditation.\u00a0 For Scriabin, music of certain sorts had the power to open the door to this hidden and trans formative knowledge.<\/p>\n

Scriabin came from an aristocratic Russian family.\u00a0 His father was a Russian diplomat usually posted abroad and who had little contact with his son.\u00a0 Scriabin’s mother was a well-known concert pianist but who died when Scriabin was only one year old.\u00a0 Thus he was raised by his father’s sister and mother, both of whom were musicians. As Scriabin showed that he had an interest and a talent for music, he started to learn the piano at an early age with a teacher who was also teaching Sergei Rachmaninoff.\u00a0 The two students became life-long friends, Rachmaninoff doing much to introduce Scriabin’s piano work after Scriabin’s early death at the age of 43.<\/p>\n

Scriabin had followed the classic Russian path for musicians going to the Moscow conservatory, and at an early age, he married another young pianist, Vera Ivanova Isakovich.\u00a0 As many Russians of that time and social class, they decided to travel abroad, and so from 1904 to 1909, they lived in Paris, and spent time in London, Bruxelles, and the USA.\u00a0 In 1907 in Paris, Scriabin collaborated with the producer Sergei Diaghilev\u00a0 to introduce Russian music, dance and art to the French artistic milieu.<\/p>\n

\"Alexander<\/a><\/p>\n

Scriabin found time to produce four children with his wife, as well as taking a second \u201cwife\u201d Tatyana Schloezer.\u00a0 Finally Vera agreed to a divorce\u00a0 and Tatyana became a legal wife.\u00a0 They had three children.\u00a0 In addition to music, Scriabin believed that sex was an avenue to secret knowledge.\u00a0 At the time in theosophical circles there was a good deal of interest in the awakened kundalini,<\/em>the serpent fire, said to be coiled at the base of the spine.\u00a0 With proper breathing exercises and meditation, the serpent can rise up to the \u201cThird Eye\u201d between the brows and then to the crown of the head producing enlightenment and liberation from matter.\u00a0 Scriabin took yoga breathing exercises to work with the kundalini .<\/em>\u00a0 One problem, and not only with Scriabin, is that the fire rises from the base of the spine only as far as the sex organs and stays there.\u00a0 Later, in the 1930-1940 period when Scriabin’s music was considered not to be in line with \u201cSocialist Realism\u201d it was attacked for \u201cits unhealthy eroticism\u201d and Scriabin’s life was given as proof that his music stimulated sex and took the workers minds off\u00a0 production goals.\u00a0 With the fast declining birth rate in Russia, there seems to be a strong revival of interest in Scriabin’s music.<\/p>\n

One of Scriabin’s most explicit theosophical-spiritual compositions, following the concepts put forward in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine <\/em>is Prometheus: Poem of Fire.<\/em> In the usual account of the Prometheus myth, Zeus has Prometheus make humans out of mud. Prometheus takes pity on the conditions of the creatures he created and steals fire from heaven and gives it to them.\u00a0 Zeus punishes Prometheus by having him bound to a rock, but eventually he is freed by Hercules.\u00a0 In the theosophical retelling which Scriabin uses, Prometheus does not steal the fire but is given it consciously by Zeus to produce \u201cthe ray of light\u201d in humans.\u00a0 Thus Prometheus is like Lucifer, the \u201clight bringer\u201d who brings to the mind the capacity to understand the causes of progress and regression.\u00a0 Zeus does not \u201cpunish\u201d Prometheus; rather being bound to a rock is a symbol of the difficulties on the spiritual path, the progression of Spirit through Matter to return liberated as Spirit but at a higher degree of evolution at the end of the cycle than at the beginning.(1)<\/p>\n

In the Soviet Union and even in today’s Russia, Scriabin’s music has been treated as music largely separate from his philosophical ideas.\u00a0 In 1922 at the end of the Civil War when the Soviet government could start thinking about culture, the Moscow apartment of Scriabin was created as a state museum and kept in the condition in which he lived, with the esoteric knowledge books visible in the library.\u00a0 Except for the 1930-1940 period of the hardest moments of Stalin’s cultural repression, Scriabin’s music has been played.\u00a0 When Gagarin was in his spacecraft, the Russian Radio sent up the music of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy <\/em>which became the \u201ctheme song\u201d when Gagarin landed.<\/p>\n

As is often the case, esoteric knowledge remains esoteric.\u00a0 The spiritual foundation of Scriabin’s music is no longer unknown in Russia but is not stressed either.\u00a0 With a knowledge of the spiritual quest, one can hear his music with different ears.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n

1) For a theosophical assessment of Scriabin’s music, see Cyril Scott. Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages <\/em>(New York: Samuel Weiser Inc, 1958)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

_________________________________<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens and <\/em>editor of Transnational Perspectives. He is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 April 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin who believed that music had the power to elevate the consciousness of people and therefore to transform social conditions. Scriabin is often described as a \u201cmystic\u201d, but there is no direct evidence that he personally had mystic experiences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biographies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59838\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}