A Russian Mystic in the Age of Aquarius: The U.S. Revival of Alexander Scriabin in the 1960s

Nearly every account of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) mentions the love-hate relationship critics and audiences have had with his music. Scriabin’s supreme confidence in his creative powers convinced him that his music could affect the world at large, and while this megalomaniacal streak attracted devotees, it challenged writers to provide impartial assessments of his output. Several commentators have insisted that Scriabin’s historical value can only be measured “in an atmosphere free of the incense that clouded the minds of his earliest admirers,” as Hugh Macdonald put it in 1978.¹ Scriabin’s reception offers a powerful lens through which to examine the individuals and organizations that promoted Russian music in the United States as well as taste-making critics’ views on modern style, but scholars have devoted little attention to his reception. Olga Tompakova and Gareth Thomas each catalogued the fame his music enjoyed in England in the 1910s–1920s, but his presence in the United States remains poorly documented.² Scriabin’s works may have been performed more often in his homeland and in England than in the United States before 1930, but they enjoyed a concurrent vogue in America, especially due to his well-publicized interests in Theosophy and synaesthesia. Once spiritualism and the occult fell out of fashion in the 1920s, though, Scriabin’s legacy became a cautionary tale of an artist whose fringe interests damaged his reputation.

Mutual contempt for Scriabin’s music and aesthetics prevailed well into the twentieth century among critics and scholars working in the United States. To cite a representative example, Joseph Kerman scoffed in a 1960 essay that “Scriabin, who would have added Indian mysticism, color, and scent to the already bulging Gesamt of Wagnerian orthodoxy, came to nothing.”³ Expressed in an era when rationalism and positivism dominated art music and its scholarship, Kerman’s reproach of Scriabin’s maximizing tendencies is unsurprising, but his estimate accorded with the pervasive opinion of Scriabin as an ephemeral product of his time. Indeed, by the early 1960s his music was rarely performed in public and sorely underrepresented on recordings. Joseph Machlis, then, understandably assured readers of his Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961) that “We shall never again view Scriabin with the enthusiasm he aroused among certain sections of the intelligentsia forty years ago.”⁴ Little could these writers have foreseen that a full-scale Scriabin revival would develop in the midst of the U.S. counterculture movement of the late 1960s, which renewed an appreciation for this abandoned body of music and all its extramusical baggage that seemed so risible at mid-century.

Initial Exposure, First Impressions

By what means did earlier U.S. audiences encounter Scriabin’s music? The pianists and conductors who first performed his works on U.S. soil are names both familiar and forgotten. In March 1898 pianist Josef Hof-mann impressed audiences at Carnegie Hall with a batch of Scriabin’s preludes and the now famous D-sharp Minor Etude op. 8, no. 12. Frank Van der Stucken, founder of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, conducted Scriabin’s orchestral Rêverie at Music Hall on December 2, 1900, and repeated the work in 1905 and 1906. At Josef Lhevinne’s Carnegie Hall debut in January 1906, he encored with Scriabin’s Nocturne op. 9, no. 2 for left hand alone and added the Etudes op. 42, nos. 4 and 5 to recital programs he delivered across America over the next year. But for Scriabin’s music to reach a wider public, it behooved him to tour the United States in the winter of 1906–7. Potential fortune lured the cash-strapped composer and salvation came via former Moscow Conservatory classmate Modest Altschuler (1873–1963), who proffered the services of his fledgling Russian Symphony Orchestra. J. E. Francke, a veteran concert manager at Steinway Hall, handled Scriabin’s bookings, but as of the composer’s arrival in Hoboken, New Jersey, on December 11, 1906, via the liner Ryndam, only one concert date had been confirmed.⁵

Critical acclaim...