Universe Scriabin

The penultimate evening of the Scriabin cycle is dedicated to the period around the Sonatas No. 6, No. 7 and No. 9 as well as the creation of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps. Written 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 also not averse to this theme 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 and counterbalance to the previous work. At its centre is ecstasy, for Scriabin one of the most important emotions, the pinnacle of human emotional expression. 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.