It is often said that there is a very thin line between genius and madness. Before you ask, I will volunteer to be on the latter! But, there can be few who believe that their creative work would bring an end to the world. However, that is the case with the Russian music composer, Alexander Scriabin. He was born on Christmas Day (Christian calendar), in the year 1871. He became a pianist and composer and was influenced by Chopin.
He had the same effect on people as Marmite; you love it or hate it. In Scriabin’s case, the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia summed him up as “No composer has had more scorn heaped on him or more love bestowed.” He was one of those people who was more famous during his lifetime than after it. However, there has recently been a greater interest in his music.
But, this is not what this article is about. He died at the young age of 43 on the 14th of April 1915. He had what has been described as a pimple or a boil on his lip for over a year. There is a report that he had cut it during shaving. Whatever the truth, the wound became septic. His temperature reached 41 degrees Celsius or 106 degrees Fahrenheit. This led to septicaemia which is blood poisoning. It can be very serious now but in those days, it could be a death sentence which in his case, it was.
At the time of his death, he was in the process of composing a new piece of music. It was entitled “Mysterium.” In his own words, it was to be something very different to anything that had gone before. He wrote, “There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.”
He had started this work twelve years before but was still unfinished at the time of his death. He intended it to be a musical extravaganza which would assault or at least encompass the senses of hearing, sight and smell. The production would also be amazing in its logistics. It was to be premiered in the mountains of the Indian Himalayas and was timed to last seven days.
But that was not the strangest aspect of the whole thing. Scriabin believed that a the end of the composition, the Earth would come to an end and all who lived there would be no more and instead be replaced by “nobler beings.”
I am not a psychiatrist but I would forward the diagnosis that he was at the very least depressed and disappointed in the world and the people of the time.
John Pullen 