performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy

Photo by Alexandr Rusnac on Unsplash

I didn’t realize when I resurrected my writing over here and started making lists of things to write about that we were already past the halfway point in Scriabin’s sonatas, although I should have: I distinctly remember listening to the fifth over and over on my way from the gym to work in the morning and some of the thoughts that precipitated on one of those walks, which would certainly have been in preparation for writing the article on that piece. 

But the halfway point is only statistical. The fifth, to me and I’m sure to many others, is where the mature/late sonatas really begin. Everything from the fifth onward is one movement in a synthesized, entirely new world from the Chopin influenced, more Romantic voice of the first four sonatas. So that one was actually the threshold, not this one, but we do have a vastly different emotional and harmonic landscape from that work also. 

First, another example of how reading other people’s reviews or thoughts can be disorienting if you… well, obviously I say that as I write about a piece of music, but if you take what you read (my writing included) as gospel. Go listen yourself. 

I remember reading YouTube comments or message board posts or something of people talking about how terrifying this piece was, how it was like the horror genre of piano music, and on and on, and I expected to gasp and for my skin to crawl or something, and it just didn’t click that way, and never really did. I’ve come to see how truly unique these later sonatas are, how haunting and eerie they can be, but as a result of some of those built-up expectations early on, I always felt like I was missing something. 

I would say this piece is as dark and unsettling as the fifth is exuberant and celebratory. As I talked about in that article, in the fifth, you can feel the sense of relief he had after getting out of the city and moving into a place where he had the freedom to write and play to his heart’s content. In this piece, though, we’re descending, darkening, not brightening, and it suffocates. Let’s talk briefly about the structure of the piece.

It is in sonata form, but we’re not (really) dealing here with key areas in any traditional sense (that I can readily identify or be bothered to pick out tonalities of). Scriabin’s late sonatas are very free or nebulous with tonality (think like, Debussy or Messiaen here), focusing on certain tone qualities or colors. 

Below are some nonstandard musical markings Scriabin makes throughout the work that may support or challenge the horror-sonata idea so many people have. I’ll reference these in the rest of the article. (Also, thanks to my friend Axel for some of his help with verifying the meanings of these.)

Markings from First Subject:

• mystérieux, concentré- mysterious, concentrated
• étrange, ailé- strange, winged
• avec une chaleur contenue- with a contained warmth
• souffle mystérieux- mysterious breath
• onde caresssante- caressing wave
• concentré- concentrated
• ailé- winged

I’m not including things like ‘un peu plus lent’ here, which do occur but are directly related to performance than mood or imagery. 

Second Subject

• le rêve prend forme- The dream takes shape
• avec entrainement- with training (this is apparently more like ‘with purpose’ or focus/movement, drive, etc.)
• ailé, tourbillonnant (at codetta)- winged, swirling 
• l’epouvante surgit- terror arises

Development

• avec trouble- with turmoil
• de plus en plus entraînant, avec enchantement- increasingly captivating, with enchantment
• joyeux, troiphant- joyful, triumphant
• joyeux- joyful
• sombre- dark/gloomy
• epanouissement de forces mystérieuses- blossoming of mysterious forces
• rieuses- laughing
• avec in joie exaltée- with exalted joy
• effondrement subit- sudden collapse

Recapitulation

• ailé- winged, 
• tout devient charme et douceur- everything becomes charming and gentle
• avec entraînement- ‘with purpose’ or focus/movement, drive, etc.
• ailé, tourbillonnant- winged, swirling
• l’epouvante surgit, elle se mêle à la danse délirante- Terror arises, mingling with the frenzied dance

What we can see is that there are two themes made up of their own tone colors and melodic shapes. Our first theme feels almost liminal, hollow, empty. It’s still and solemn at many points. The lowest register of the piano echoes out in the still pauses between repetitions of this simple gesture that really lays on the thick, weird harmonies. It’s like a giant sea monster just barely breaching and swimming under the surface of a thick, black lake of oil. Does that make any sense at all? The treble tinkling in response creates the ‘space’ that makes this feel naked, expansive, bare, and exposed, and yet it’s also alluring in a way that is… suspicious. 

The second part of the first subject area coats us in languid, listless textures, almost intoxicated with its flowing, more expressive melody, but we can certainly not shake the sense that something is sort of off, but for this listener not in a run-for-your-life way. 

The second subject begins at bar 39 with the le rêve prend forme marking, followed by clarté, douceur, pureté (clarity, gentleness, purity), and we do get a sense of transparency here: the bass voices thin and the upper treble melody stands out on its own with a little room to breathe. Like the first subject, this one comes in two parts, and the second part is sort of an extension/expansion of some of the material. Here is where we get the avec entrainement marking, with those 64th-note gestures. 

The codetta is marked ailé, tourbillonnant and falls into a 2/8 meter that almost feels like it could become a march. It doesn’t. We get a few tall chords that then climax in the l’epouvante surgit moment to close the exposition and lead us into the development, which is to be played avec trouble. 

While the exposition and its subject areas may have seemed a bit vague, the development treats the source material beautifully. We recognize the material on an almost genetic level: whether you find it horrifying, ghostly, alluring, or languid, the gestures are sort of imprinted on the ear, so when they show up all mixed together, they’re still identifiable. Throughout all of this, we’re getting little notations or reminders, like the ‘de plus en plus entraînant, avec enchantement‘ or a passage marked ‘joyeux, troiphant‘ that starts to sound like it wants to approach the sunny nature of the fifth sonata. Just after this, we get ‘rieuses.‘ Everything is building here, ‘blossoming’ as Scriabin notes, ‘of mysterious forces. It’s growing to a really grand climax, but the very last bar before the very clear, apropos-of-nothing return of the first subject in the recapitulation is marked effondrement subit, sudden collapse. 

And it does. The bubble, whatever weird intoxicating joy and glory that filled it, has burst as quickly as they are wont to do, leaving us right back where we were at the beginning. The big question is, how does this material feel now? Perhaps we were unsure at the beginning of where it would lead, like meeting a new person that seems very charismatic and enchanting but also throws up some red flags or alarm bells. The development was really making something of this, though, getting somewhere almost magnificent before crashing back down to where we began, and then, at least for this listener, it’s bleaker. 

In Beethoven’s sonatas, say, that moment of arrival back home is a satisfying one: we are lost in the woods in the development, see glimpses of familiar scenery but don’t know where to go an that arrival is the satisfying moment, the one where tension is released and we’re back where we should be and all is right with the world. Here, though, the development seemed to be ascending, escaping from this material’s inevitable return, but… here we are. 

Hauntingly, the piece also just completely evaporates at the end, leaving more questions than answers, like waking up from a too-real nightmare. 

Does this piece make your skin crawl? Is it as ghastly and Edgar-Allan-Poe-disturbing as some of the more sensational YouTube comments would have you believe? For me, no. It’s dark, for sure, all shades of deep blue and purple and black, but it’s also so rich and mesmerizing that I’m perfectly happy to be intoxicated by its dulcet, disturbing tones for twelve minutes. 

So yes, this is one of the two/few that the composer himself couldn’t stand to play more than a few bars of because it creeped him out, and yet… he managed to complete writing it. Its brighter, lighter, ascending twin, the seventh sonata, is next on our list here, and it really is suitable to think of them as a pair, opposite sides of the same coin, even using similar figures and material at times. They have a very close relationship but serve very different purposes, according to the composer, so please stay tuned for that and enjoy the dark, threatening sixth. I’d love to hear what you think about this piece, how you see/hear it, and what it means to you. 

As always, thank you for reading.