The Poem of Ecstasy

The Poem of Ecstasy by Alexander Scriabin is a superb example of the huge, self-obsessed orchestral repertoire from the period before World War I, which we generally associate with Mahler and Richard Strauss. Scriabin was a strongly progressive and individualistic composer who saw himself as the prophet of a new cosmos, and his works as the voice of a divine being. 

Like many Russian artists who, once they are attached to an idea, pursue it relentlessly to its ultimate point — Mussorgsky and Tolstoy also come to mind — Scriabin was driven by a powerful inner force to capture his mystical vision in music. He is easily dismissed as a crazy egomaniac, but his music is superbly crafted and excitingly modern, even today. 

Most of Scriabin’s music is for the piano, with some important orchestral works composed at regular intervals throughout his short career. His previous orchestral piece, The Divine Poem, was a three-movement symphonic work completed in 1904, when he was 32. It ventured into the territory of philosophical abstraction, which had begun to fascinate him shortly before. (A later work, Prometheus, explored synthetic imagery in its scoring for piano, orchestra, and “color organ.”) 

His next orchestral work was to be titled Orgiastic Poem, but it eventually became The Poem of Ecstasy, giving an even greater prominence to the composer’s obsession with the spirit’s search for joy and his intense belief in his own creativity. Alongside this orchestral work, Scriabin wrote a 300-line-long poem of the same name, full of mystical fantasizing, which also inspired his Fifth Piano Sonata. 

While the poem text can be safely ignored as self-absorbed rambling, the musical work is a masterpiece that stands fittingly beside other great orchestral creations of the early 20th century. The Poem of Ecstasy was completed early in 1908 and premiered later that year in New York City, led by the composer’s friend Modest Altschuler. Two months later, it was performed in Moscow and was soon adopted by orchestras worldwide that were keen to present the latest in “advanced” music. 

The orchestra is large, and the contrasts of mood are extreme, yet the piece has a concentration that would become even more pronounced in Scriabin’s final works. While Mahler’s symphonies were reaching further out into all realms of human thought, Scriabin’s were concentrating into a densely packed kernel of feeling and belief. 

The themes heard in The Poem of Ecstasy have specific functions, according to the composer. For instance, the opening line in the flute is the theme of longing, the clarinet’s melody over hazy strings is a dream theme, and the trumpet’s succession of rising phrases represents victory. Such labels are easily understood in the context of 19th-century program music, although a crystal-clear interpretation of their relationship to the music is hardly possible. We have simply an alternation of moods in the composer’s mind, with a recapitulation of the opening material leading to an ecstatic climax. 

The emotional intensity is extreme, whether languid and erotic, playful, volatile, or blazingly triumphant. The textures are intricate and complex, yet the harmonic progress is plodding. The key of C major, in which the work closes, had come to represent Scriabin’s central focus after years of exploring remote tonal regions. The next step, which he took shortly after, was to cut loose from tonality altogether. Scriabin was thus, with Schoenberg and Debussy, one of the most progressive and visionary spirits of his time. 

— Hugh Macdonald