Publish-Scriabin, catching up, 2025
This Week in Classical Music: February 3, 2025. Publish-Scriabin, catching up. For the entire month of January, we have been preoccupied with Scriabin and his common-law spouse, Tatiana Schloezer. We concede that we might have overdone it a bit, however many points of Scriabin’s story are fascinating. He was a sophisticated, troublesome particular person, a horrible selfish. He was additionally very gifted. His music, as soon as he bought away from copying Chopin, was extremely unique and interesting – as a lot right now as when it was written. He tried to develop the expertise of listening to music by combining sound with gentle; this will likely not have labored as he anticipated, however the experiments have been intriguing (the philosophy and poetics, with which he tried to imbue his music, have been a lot much less profitable). And he had large help from Tatiana, whose exalted adoration sustained him for a lot of troublesome years in Russia and overseas.
Scriabin was additionally part of Russian tradition at a historic
excessive level; he knew many key folks and was admired by many, from the up to date composers, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, and even Stravinsky, grudgingly, to poets like Balmont, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. His life was quick (he died on the age of 43 after a furuncle led to blood poisoning) and so was the lifetime of a few of his kids, two of whom, from his “official” spouse, died on the age of seven, whereas musically gifted Julian, his and Tatiana’s son, drowned on the age of 12. Their daughter Ariadna, a poet and energetic member of the Russian post-Revolutionary diaspora, grew to become a Zionist, transformed to Judaism, based a French Resistance group Armée Juive through the occupation, and was killed by a French Nazi collaborator shortly earlier than France was liberated. Tatiana Schloezer died in Moscow in 1922 on the age of 39.
So, whereas we attended to all these happenings, we missed two massive birthdays. The primary one, on January 27th, was that of Mozart. After which, on the 31st of January, was Franz Schubert’s birthday. Luckily, we lined each of them many instances and have tons of of items of their music within the library. Each composers have been tremendously prolific, despite the fact that each had tragically quick lives (Mozart died on the age of 35, Schubert – at 31), each created quite a few masterpieces. We’ll rejoice them with two vocal items: the trio Soave sia il vento, from the primary act of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (right here), and the tune An die Music by Schubert (right here). Nothing could be higher than this.