Perhaps
only in the Far East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have more
delicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered themselves in music.
Beside this man, with his music that is like clustering flowers breaking
suddenly from the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating of
luminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whispers of one
sinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool,
silvered by the fine temperance of France. For Scriabine must have
suffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations of
beauty, must have been consumed with a passion for communicating his
burningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcely
able to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation.
Indeed, the sensuality is at times so intensely communicated that it
almost excites pain as well as pleasure. If there is any music that
seems to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering, it is
this. One shrinks from it as from some too poignant revelation. One
cannot breathe for long in this ether. Small wonder that Scriabine
sought all his life to flee into states of transport, to invent a
religion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible burden of so
vibrant a sensibility, there could be no other means of existence.
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