Envisioning and Reconstructing the Prefatory Act of Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium
Envisioning and Reconstructing the Prefatory Act of Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium

Summary/Abstract: A full century ahead of his time, Scriabin was history’s first major multimedia artist. His milieu was mystical, symbolic, abstract, and philo– theosophical. In the decade leading up to his death in 1915, Scriabin was consumed with the creation of his Mysterium, an apocalyptical spectacle of gargantuan proportions that embraced the cosmos. Set in the Himalayas, it involved literally a cast of millions, and was to embrace all the senses; it was to go beyond the aural, to engage the ear but also the eye, the olfactory, the tactile and the gestural, in a word, to be fully experiential. Unfortunately, at the time of his untimely death at age 43, Scriabin had completed only the text and a few dense musical sonorities for its Prefatory Act. With so little extant material, could a reconstruction even be possible? To begin, the most authentic surviving part of Scriabin’s Mysterium is its core, his collection of remarkable poetry penned in the spirit of Russia’s Silver Age. As the point of departure, to find the corresponding embodiment of his musical ideas and the maturation of his own musical language we must look to his last completed orchestral composition, the Op. 60, Prometheus – The Poem of Fire. Then to fully realize a production only those compositions from the same period as Mysterium’s inception, i.e., the Opuses 57 to 74, works that embrace the same stylistic and philosophical aesthetic, would be selected. These late works embody every word, intonation, breath and emotion conveyed by Scriabin’s text. The following paper explores the musical path to a realization of the Mysterium through an assembly and examination of these late works.

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