Introduction
The Association is grateful to Dr. Virginie Déjos for permission to publish a short translated excerpt from her doctoral dissertation, Analyse et interprétation des six dernières sonates d’Alexandre Scriabine. The whole thesis is available in French online and is strongly recommended to the serious reader: https://www.academia.edu/48901920/DEJOS_Virginie_2014_These)
To the present writer and translator, Dr. Déjos’s work is distinguished from the numerous scholarly works on Scriabin by its profound musical insight, which reflects the depth and breadth of her musical experience as scholar, pianist and conductor, all of it at the highest level. I selected the extract given, a choice which Dr. Déjos approved, because of its clarity as to what Scriabin’s late music might ‘mean’, and how it ‘means’ – a difficult question often asked by listeners. A short biography follows:
Virginie Déjos is a versatile musician with extensive experience as both a pianist and a conductor. Her most notable musical engagements to date include collaborations with Radio France, the Lübeck Opera, and the Staatsoper Stuttgart, where she served as a pianist and assistant conductor for Cornelius Meister, Marc Piollet, Stefano Montanari, Sofi Janin, Alexander Myrat, Ryusuke Numaijiri, and Titus Engel. Currently, she holds the position of Choir Director at the Stadttheater Heidelberg.
Virginie Déjos earned her Master of Music in Piano Performance with high distinction from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels under the guidance of Professor Evgeny Mogilevsky, and a conducting diploma from the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. Additionally, she obtained her doctorate from Paris Sorbonne University, where she also served as a teacher.
She is a laureate of the international Scriabin Competition and the Piano Competition of Île de France. She also achieved success in the international Lied and Melodie competition in Gordes with soprano Déborah Attal. In 2016, she was awarded a scholarship from the Paris Cercle Wagner.
As a conductor, Virginie Déjos has led numerous symphony concerts with choir and orchestra in Paris, including performances with Choeur Harmonia and Orchestre Lyrique de Paris, as well as the premiere performance of Rémi Guillard’s Requiem in La Madeleine. She has conducted Benjamin Britten’s opera The Little Sweep, Kurt Weill’s Der Jasager at the Rochefort Theater directed by Olivier Dhénin, and Wagner’s Rheingold in Vendôme staged by Pierre Thirion-Vallet. In 2022, she conducted a new production of Philipp Glass’s Les Enfants terribles staged by Corina Tetzel at the Stuttgart Opera.
As a pianist, she frequently performs as a soloist, in recitals, and collaboratively in chamber music. Recent engagements include the opening recital of the Ruhrtriennale 2021, concerts at the Stuttgart Liederhalle, Liederabend at the Stuttgart Staatsoper, Liederabend at Vilnius Philharmonie, and chamber music concerts for the Nuremberg Bridging Arts Festival. With the Staatsorchester Stuttgart, she has performed as a soloist in Les oiseaux exotiques and the Quatuor pour la fin du temps during the Messiaen Festival. Her concerts have been broadcast by BR Klassik and LRT Lithuanian Radio and Television.
As an avid ambassador for music by French composers, Virginie Dejos, in collaboration with the Institut Français Stuttgart, founded in 2021 a chamber music festival, and recorded French composers with members of the Stuttgart Staatsorchester.
Virginie Déjos: Excerpt from: Analyse et interprétation des six dernièressonates pour piano d’Alexandre Scriabine (Doctoral Dissertation, Sorbonne, 2014)
(French original available on line: https://www.academia.edu/48901920/DEJOS_Virginie_2014_These)
From Part 1: Scriabin and Russian Symbolism/ Chapter 1: The musical figures
2. Listening to the sonatas (p.11)
Listening concentratedly to the last six sonatas, the musical language seems absolutely unique. In listening, the impression emerges of music which, born from nothingness, progressively advances step by step to an ecstatic climax. [Boris de] Schloezer points to an interesting scheme which corresponds in its broad outline to the overall perception of the form of Scriabin’s sonatas and symphonic works. He defines this perception as follows:
languor [tomlenie, anguish],longing, impetuous striving, dance, ecstasy and transfiguration.
[12]This schema almost describes a formal principle in the last sonatas:
[…] all Scriabin’s works, beginning with the Third Piano Sonata and ending with the Tenth Piano Sonata, are built according to a uniform succession of states – languor [tomlenie, anguish], longing, impetuous striving, dance, ecstasy and transfiguration.
Schloezer describes Scriabin’s musical forms in poetical terms. As we listen, a form in movement, generated by the first chord, is created. And yet the sonata form is very precise. The last six sonatas all respect, within a single movement, the form of a classical sonata first movement with an exposition, a development and a recapitulation. Schloezer, who was close at hand during the composition of several works, bears witness to the composer’s manner of working. Scriabin would start with a very precise initial phase, establishing the plan and form of the work:
His work progressed simultaneously in all directions, developing from different points of departure according to a plan worked out in the most minute details. This plan, which determined the general form of a musical composition and its structure, whether it be a sonata, a symphony, or a tone poem, was sketched by Scriabin in advance, when the thematic material was only beginning to shape itself. He followed this plan with unswerving logic, never deviating from it. Thus he worked on the whole piece at the same time; it was constructed in all directions at once, starting from different points, according to a plan elaborated in its smallest details. This plan, which determined the form of the musical work, the detailed constructional form of a sonata, a symphony or a poème, was always worked out by Scriabin in advance, at the moment when he was just marking down the thematic material on the paper. And he followed the plan with scrupulous exactness, hardly ever modifying it under any circumstances, and following it with imperturbable logic.
Schloezer adds that Scriabin never modified his plan and preferred ‘to sacrifice some of his abundant materials’, compensating in this way for his not very rational nature. Scriabin insisted on the absolute, primordial necessity of self-limitation, of imposing frameworks. His great precision is revealed by the neatness of the designs of the construction, which are revealed by analysis. The musicologist Manfred Kelkel dedicated an important part of his thesis to the study of Scriabin’s sonata-forms; it is remarkable for proposing a schematisation of the form according to very strict rules concerning the proportions of number and symmetries. While listening, however, these proportions are not identifiable, and Schloezer’s first description comes to mind. The poetical terms he employs:[13] ‘desire’, ‘flight’, ‘dance’, describe the musical themes most closely according to their reality as sound. The music responds to this kind of listening: as our listening allows the music its head,the figures and themes become metaphors in sound.
3. Idea-images
Thematic material in Scriabin’s sonatas does not develop in long melodic lines. This fact is rare enough in a Russian composer to be worthy of emphasis. Besides, there are very few piano pieces by Scriabin in which it is possible to identify a genuine melody. The music is principally constructed and structured from and around what I shall name figures to emphasise the metaphorical aspect in the elaboration of the thematic material. These figures are very short, composed of a few notes and clearly identifiable to the listener.
Boris de Schloezer speaks of the ‘idea-image’ to evoke the act of creation as experienced by Scriabin. The work would appear to the composer in its completed unity, simultaneously in the forms of sound and of colour: ‘he liked to call this image a “sounding body” possessing a colour of its own.’ If, for Schloezer, the term ‘idea-image’ evokes the overall unity of the work, I am referring to it here in order to describe the nature of the thematic material of the work at a more ‘local’ level. This idea of a ‘theme-image’ makes it possible to grasp the importance of the association between the musical idea of the works, i.e. the thematic material, and what they represent, what they evoke: the image. The musical material is conceived as a metaphor in sound. With this concept of the idea-image Scriabin turns away from pure music – the very idea of it is profoundly displeasing to him: ‘I cannot understand how, even now in our era, how it is still possible to write something which is “just music.” That is so uninteresting!’
Six idea-images are presented in the exposition of each of the last sonatas. The progress of the sonata, constructed as a gradual ascent towards a final ecstasy – the culminating point of the work – is structured around their successive transformations. They are superimposed over each other, forming a developed counterpoint.
The idea-images are the musical figures which constitute the thematic material of Scriabin’s sonatas, often associated in the scores with written indications in a metaphorical [14]style which lead us back to Schloezer’sdescription (flight, dance). They have often been compared with Wagner’s leitmotives. This is a valid juxtaposition to the extent that Wagner and Liszt were incontestably the models for Scriabin, but the leitmotive and the idea-image differ in certain respects. With Wagner the musical leitmotive is immediately associated either with the presence of one of the characters (for example, the horn motive in Siegfried) or a physical element (the love potion in Tristan or Valhalla in the Ring), with a dominant emotion (desire in Tristan) or else the evocation of one of the elements (fire in Die Walküre). If, in Wagner, the association is made directly by the simultaneity of the scenic action and of the music – at least at the first appearance of the leitmotive(discounting the orchestral preludes) – (for example, the motive of the giants in Rheingold is played every time one of the giants appears or when Fasolt or Fafner is evoked), in Scriabin, who composes only for piano or orchestra, on the contrary, the visual support is absent. By its morphology, its intervals, its rhythm, the idea-image calls us to an immediate correspondence. Further: in Schloezer’s view, Scriabin did not seek to ‘imitate’ a concept, but the idea and the music came from the same intuition. The sound image and its visual equivalent occurred to him simultaneously. Scriabin was a synaesthete and therefore heard music in colours, in sound-colours. Speaking of the Fifth Sonata, Scriabin described a ‘being of sound and colour’ which, he said, had been revealed to him and of which he had only to ‘lift the veil to make it visible to others’:
He observed it in his inner self and at the same time separate from him, or rather above him […] During the process of composition he felt as though he were projecting a three-dimensional body on a flat surface, stretching and flattening in time and space a prophetic vision that saw and heard it from the inside and at the same time separately, above him […] While composing he had the feeling that he was projecting a three-dimensional body that he experienced as an instant revelation, simplifying and at the same time impoverishing it. The integral vision
that he perceived with his entire being, in which all the human senses participated,
he reduced to a system of sounds, thus utilizing only one sensory medium. He also said that in the apperception of this primary vision he did not feel that he was merely a passive recipient, but was at all times creatively active.
The universe of correspondences assembled by Scriabin appeals to a common ground of reference between composer and audience. Certain points of reference have their origin in current associations, others have more subtle foundations, a musical origin. To the first category belongs, for example, the idea of flight, commonly associated with lightness, ascent, speed, freedom. It is translated into music via groups of quick, rising grace notes in the upperregister, associated with the idea [15] of height. For the second category, that of idea-images with a musical reference point, one of the best examples is to be found in the Ninth Sonata: [mus. ex. 1]
Mus. ex. 1
The sonata’s sub-title, ‘Black Mass’, leads us to associate the figure (the repeated notes in the low register) with a feeling of anxiety or a disquieting person – the latter, all the more easily because it seems to have been inspired directly by the theme generally associated with the character ofMephistopheles in Liszt’s piano sonata: [mus. ex. 2]
Mus. ex. 2
In Scriabin, the idea-image is not only a metaphor in sound, but, like the leitmotives in Wagner’s operas, acts like a signal for the listener, announcing to him, for example the arrival of a character. For Scriabin, as for Wagner,certain figures, like that of the call, alert the listener on their reappearance because they are instantly memorised. The notion of the idea-image and the particular resonance it encounters in the other arts calls for a rapprochement with the works of the Russian symbolist poets. At this period, the limits between sound, language and image demand to be overcome and the artists are drawn to researching in a new direction, tending towards a fusion of the arts.