The hour that created him was an hour in which
the power of feeling had waxed inordinately, almost to the point of
hampering action, when an Asiatic delicacy had begun to be manifest in
Western character, when the fusion of Europe and Asia was commencing to
make itself felt. And in Scriabine, that new intensity of sensation
attained something near to heroic supernatural stature. What was
beautiful and sick in his age entered into his art. Through it, we
learn, not a little, how we feel.
His music was a thing created in the flesh of a man, out of his agony.
"Eine Entwicklung ist ein Schicksal," Thomas Mann once wrote. For
Scriabine, the awakening of that aerial palpitant sensibility was such.
It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at the
destiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those last
quivering poems--"Guirlandes," "Flammes sombres," he entitles them,--or
in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of
the dream, or in those last haunted preludes. Existence for the man who
could write such music, in which unearthly rapture contrasts with
unearthly suffering, must have been a sort of exquisite martyrdom. The
man must have been indeed a nerve exposed. And, like a fragile thing
suddenly ignited, he flared up, fiercely, magnificently, and went out.
Pages:
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195