Alexander Scriabin

Scriabin began at the Moscow Conservatory as a virtuoso pianist writing preludes, études and mazurkas in Chopin's shadow, and ended by planning a work that would unite sound, poetry, colour, movement, architecture and scent, and close an era. The ten piano sonatas chart the route between: the early ones move within Romantic rhetoric, the later ones move beyond traditional tonal relationships and build their logic from characteristic chord-shapes. The orchestral poems — The Divine Poem, The Poem of Ecstasy, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire — treat music as an agent of transformation rather than description, and the score of Prometheus carries a part for a colour keyboard, an instrument that was not ready for the premiere. Mysterium remained unrealised; sketches survive for its Prefatory Action. He died in Moscow in 1915, at forty-three. He left the conservatory in 1892 with a gold medal, in the same graduating year as Rachmaninoff, and played in Moscow and St Petersburg, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, The Hague, Amsterdam and Cologne despite a right-hand injury caused by over-practice during his studies; he continued performing until 1915. Mitrofan Belyayev supported him through those years and published his music, and he began teaching piano at the conservatory in 1898.