Universe of Scriabin:   Ritual and Sacrifice

The penultimate concert in our Scriabin cycle focuses on the period when his Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 9 and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps were written, i.e. between 1911 and 1913. Scriabin was already devoting himself more and more to the Gesamtkunstwerk, the idea of the Messianic, of art as a means of redemption. His contemporaries were not averse to this approach, either and turned to the idea of ritual and sacrifice, among other things. Scriabin was afraid of his 6th Sonata, which for him is full of mysterious extremes; tonality in the conventional sense is no longer recognisable. It is followed by the White Mass, Sonata No. 7, which was written as an antithesis to balance out the previous one. The focus is on ecstasy, one of the most important emotions, the peak of human emotional expression, for Scriabin. His contemporaries referred to the 9th Sonata as the Black Mass; for the composer, it contains dark forces at the beginning, nightmares in the middle, and dark forces again at the end, which transform the lyrical theme into a cruel march.

Michael Schöch – piano