Poetry and Poems

Martha Argerich plays Scriabin’s “Prométhée,
le poème du feu” Op. 60 (Symphony No. 5),
with Claudio Abbado, Berliner Philharmoniker
and Berliner Singakademie

Berlin – May 23/25, 1992

Link to part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt3_amr3fOg

At the heart of the creative output of Alexander
Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915) is his music
for piano. The russian composer and pianist
wrote ten piano sonatas and a piano concerto.
Around the turn of the century he composed
the first of three symphonies. And on top of
all this there are two symphonic poems.
In 1908 Scriabin moved with his wife
Tatiana to Belgium, where he immersed
himself in theosophy. Here, he worked with
the rhetorician Émil Sigogne and the artist
Jean Delville, who designed the frontispiece
for the score of Scriabin’s last and shortest
orchestral work, PROMÉTHÉE – LE POÈME
DU FEU (PROMETHEUS – THE POEM OF
FIRE) op. 60. Having completed this symphonic
poem back in Moscow during the autumn of
1910, the work was premiered the following
spring under the direction of Serge
Koussevitzky. It represents a milestone in
Scriabin’s creative output and marks the
beginning of his third and final period of
creativity, during which he was to explore
music’s farthest reaches by creating a
synthesis involving other sensory
perceptions. The score of PROMÉTHÉE,
for example, calls for a “colour keyboard” –
an instrument which first featured in the
work only four years after its world premiere
at a concert in Carnegie Hall. The “light
keyboard” was designed to link musical notes
with coloured lights. Each note on the
chromatic scale was assigned a colour, e.g.
red for C, green for A and blue for F sharp,
and the interplay of colours was then projected
during the performance onto a screen.
PROMETHEUS is based around a “tonal
centre”. The key Prometheus chord, also
known as the “mystic chord”, is built around
the interval of the fourth C-F sharp-B flat-E-A-D.
It is not treated as a discord, however, but it
is accorded the same value as a tonal root
chord. This chord of fourths is the point of
departure for the composition’s entire melodic
and harmonic action, with the result that – as
Scriabin himself put it – “melody is harmony
opened out and harmony is melody drawn
together”.

Duration : 0:9:44

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