Czech Philharmonic • Daniil Trifonov

“In Russia over the last five years, he came to the forefront, he had more numerous and more fanatical followers than Rachmaninoff ever had, and year by year as Tchaikovsky’s circle of admirers has become thinner, the enthusiasm for Scriabin has been growing”, read an obituary summarising the importance of the composer Alexander Scriabin in the history of Russian music. In a broader context, he is regarded as a link between the musical ideas of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg; he arrived at the frontiers of tonality, but before crossing over, he created his own system that seemed eccentric to many of his contemporaries. In the piano compositions that predominate in Scriabin’s oeuvre, he took as his departure point the legacy of Chopin and Liszt, like Richard Wagner he strove to synthesise total works of art, the influences of Russian Symbolism are undeniable, and he had much in common with the world of Gustav Mahler. However, the line of development also leads back to the beginnings of Romanticism and to the structural principle of art as the conflict between good and evil in life.

Alexander Scriabin apparently inherited his musical talent from his mother, a piano pupil of Theodor Leschetizky and Anton Rubinstein, but she died when Scriabin was just two years old. He graduated from a school for cadets and took piano lessons privately. He was admitted to the Moscow Conservatoire in 1888, but a crisis came when excess strain led to partial paralysis of his right hand, threatening his career as a pianist. Marina Scriabine (1911–1998), the composer’s daughter from his second marriage, was a musicologist living in Paris. She saw this crisis as the cause of the change to her father’s attitude towards spirituality. “There was nothing mystical in the family, but already as a child he had perceived music as something religious. The doctors regarded his affliction as incurable, and they forbade him to play the piano. That was when he realised the duality of his personality.” For Scriabin, the opposition of physical and spiritual represented an impulse. He overcame his illness and began to take an interest in the mysterious, the esoteric, the occult, and the teachings of Theosophy as a path towards learning about man’s place in the world: “I am subject to the laws of time and space. And meanwhile, time and space are mere creations of my ‘I’”, he wrote in his notes published posthumously under the title Promethean Fantasies. “The true centre of the universe is comprehensive consciousness, wherein everything from the past and future resides.” However, according to the composer’s daughter, Scriabin had no regard for so-called artistic spontaneity: “he was distrustful of anything in the arts that was not thought through and worked out.” For him, creative freedom meant a struggle with material, not as its destruction, but rather as the ability to penetrate to its essence and transform it, as the alchemists had attempted to do in former times. 

Scriabin wrote his Piano Concerto in F sharp minor, Op. 20, in 1896–1897, and it is his only concerto for solo instrument and orchestra. A descending motif for French horn opens the work and recurs throughout in various forms, lending internal unity to the three movements. After a short introduction to the first movement in sonata form, the piano enters with a theme that is meant to give the impression of an improvisation. The intimate second movement is a set of variations, and the third movement (sonata rondo) points the way to the handling of themes and the sonic character of Scriabin’s later works; the coda brings a reminiscence of the main theme of the first movement. The premiere took place on 11 October 1897 in Odessa with Vasily Safonov conducting and Scriabin as the soloist. Václav Talich led the Czech Philharmonic in the Czech premiere on 7 December 1924 with the soloist Emil Mikelka. The work was heard on a peculiar programme that combined the concerto with Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachmusik, the world premiere of Bohuslav Martinů’s Half-Time, and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8 in G major. Scriabin’s Piano Concerto in F sharp minor has remained undeservedly overshadowed by the composer’s later revolutionary works with their air of the mystical, and its neglect has been caused in part by the solo part’s extraordinary difficulty.

“Highly esteemed, dear friend! I am constantly thinking about you and remembering you with gratitude”, wrote Josef Suk to the conductor Karel Kovařovic in January 1907. “It is truly brilliant how you bring everything to life; everything is filled with spirit, and none of the other conductors [...] have so much feeling for the beauty of sound and shading.” The letter was sent from Berlin, where the Bohemian Quartet was on tour. Meanwhile in Prague, the orchestra of the National Theatre was preparing for the premiere of Suk’s Asrael Symphony under Kovařovic’s baton. Suk also asked that the announcements in the press report that the symphony was dedicated to the memory of Antonín Dvořák, who had died on 1 May 1904, and of Dvořák’s daughter Otilie, who had become Suk’s wife and died soon after her father on 6 July 1905. The dedication “to the exalted memory of Dvořák and Otilie” was printed in the first edition of the score. 

The composer named the symphony after the angel of death Azrael, a figure who appears in Eastern religions. A few years earlier, Suk had composed incidental music to Julius Zeyer’s fairy tale Radúz and Mahulena (1898) and music for the same poet’s dramatic legend Under the Apple Tree (1901). The subjects of both works and Suk’s musical treatment of them can be seen to foreshadow Asrael. A recollection may have led to associations with the angel of death and the choice of the title. Between 1890 and 1900, the National Theatre was giving performances of the operatic legend Asrael by the Italian composer Alberto Franchetti (1860–1942), who was for a time a competitor of Giacomo Puccini. The action takes place between heaven, earth, and hell, and it is the story of the love of two angels, Nefta and Asrael. Their love is ruined by the fallen angel Lucifer, whom Asrael must serve. Nefta descends to earth, and in the form of a nun she overcomes evil and fights for Asrael’s return to heaven. The public was fascinated with Orientalism and poetic symbolism in those days, and that helped the production get 60 performances in Prague, an unusually high number. Although we have nothing to document that Suk ever saw it, he could hardly have failed to notice the frequent discussions of the work and its descriptions in the press and in public forums.

Suk’s five-movement composition is divided into two parts. The first three movements are a remembrance of Dvořák, and the main idea is a fate motif that is heard initially in the first movement and that permeates the symphony. The second theme is derived from it, and another idea is a remembrance of happy times. Death announces itself in the next movement, then it carries off its victim in the third movement, which draws melodic material directly from Dvořák’s Requiem, among other things. The second part of the symphony belongs to Otilie, and in it a fervent song of love is disturbed by another tragic loss. Like Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, this is a programmatic symphony with content that is not formulated in words—everything is said by the dedication to two beloved persons. The premiere of the Asrael Symphony took place on 3 February 1907 at an afternoon concert of the orchestra of the National Theatre led by Karel Kovařovic. The other work on the programme was Dvořák’s Te Deum (the concert was repeated on 24 February). In describing the effect the symphony had on him, the music critic Emanuel Chvála concluded: “As a confession from life, this intimate work is of great value overall as an artistic statement. [...] It is our country’s most modern composition, and let us hope that it will become one of our most enduring works”. The symphony was performed again on 7 January 1912 with Vilém Zemánek leading the Czech Philharmonic augmented by players from the orchestra of the National Theatre. This was the first concert of the Czech Philharmonic in the newly built Municipal House. Then on 17 October 1919 the Asrael Symphony was heard with the same orchestra for the first time under the baton of Václav Talich, in whom the work found a congenial interpreter. Over the years, Talich gave the symphony more than 20 performances including one in 1922 while guest conducting in Vienna and another while working in Stockholm. He recorded the symphony with the Czech Philharmonic in 1952.