Erinnerungen an Alexander Skrjabin (review)

The history of music in the early Soviet era is studded with the name of Leonid Leonidovich Sabaneyev. He was a prolific theorist and critic, founder member of the Association for Contemporary Music and co-editor of the journal Contemporary Music, and founder and staff member of the short-lived State Institute for Musical Science, to name only the most prominent of his activities. He proselytized for the unfashionable notion (by Soviet lights) of music as 'organized sound', and for the view that what a revolutionary epoch needed above all was music that was revolutionary in style, as opposed to conservative music on revolutionary themes. His views were controversial in his homeland well before his emigration in 1926, and it is anything but a surprise to learn that he became one of the first bêtes noires of Soviet musicology. His reminiscences of Skryabin—published in Moscow the year before he left Russia and now widely regarded as his most valuable achievement—were blacklisted soon after their appearance and only reprinted in Russian in 2000. They have never been translated until now.

Sabaneyev continued to write energetically in exile, having virtually a regular column in The Musical Times between 1928 and 1940. But he did not escape the fate of so many of his fellow exiles—of being an un-person in his homeland and a virtual non-person (at least by comparison with his previous prominence) in his adoptive France. Yet his survey Modern Russian Composers (New York, 1927, repr. 1975) continues to be read, not least because it provides the only significant English-language coverage of early Soviet music from the time of its composition. And his writings on Skryabin are the source for most of the juicier anecdotes that have come down to us concerning the composer's aesthetics and working practices. For anyone daunted by the Russian language barrier, Ernst Kuhn's excellent translation of the reminiscences will help to put context around those well-known snippets; it also supplies a more sceptically inclined counterbalance to Boris de Schloezer's Scriabin: Artist and Mystic (trans. Nicolas Slonimsky (Oxford, 1987); originally publ. Berlin, 1923).

Sabaneyev's credentials for the job are impressive. Nine years Skryabin's junior, he trained initially in mathematics and physics, then studied piano and composition with the same teachers as Skryabin (Zverev and Taneyev). He gradually outgrew a liking for Mozartian pastiche and developed some fluency in composing in the Skryabinian style, though most of his published works date from his years in exile. He encountered all Skryabin's major compositions, from the Piano Concerto on, when they first appeared, and his personal contact with the composer was intense between 1909 and Skryabin's death in 1915. These were the years of the last five piano sonatas, of numerous preludes and poems, and most notoriously of plans for the unrealized and unrealizable Mysterium, to all of whose birth-pangs Sabaneyev was the closest witness, at least among the musically informed of the Skryabin coterie. At this time he enjoyed numerous one-to-one conversations—sometimes virtually all-night vigils—in addition to those many group encounters at which Skryabin would hold forth either at the piano or verbally, or more often both. Sabaneyev's skills as pianist and arranger led to his being entrusted with the piano solo and duet reductions of Prometheus.

His reminiscences display a greater degree of sympathy with his topic than he has sometimes been credited with. In later years he may have 'stressed the diseased and sexual elements in Scriabin's music' (Larry Sitsky, Music of the Repressed Russian Avant-Garde, 1900–1929 (Westport, Conn., 1994), 297), and there are indeed plenty of indications of this train of thought in the reminiscences; perhaps the most thought-provoking of these is Sabaneyev's pointed assertion that schematization and rhythmic dissolution of the Skryabinian kind are also symptoms of psychiatric patients' music (p. 275). It is true that Sabaneyev was a...