The Poem of Ecstasy in C Major

By the time Scriabin composed The Poem of Ecstasy (Le poème de l’extase) (1905-08), his ambitions as a composer had been fanned to new heights both by the adulation around his work, and by his involvement in Symbolism. For Symbolists, the business of art was not representation, but to discover profound “correspondences” with life’s underlying will or lifeforce, as expounded by such philosophers as Schopenhauer. Some Symbolists believed their mission was to transform the world through the divine creative force. Scriabin, in time, came to believe he was the high priest destined to bring about that transformation. The Poem of Ecstasy was an important landmark in his journey to that “realisation”, in which he—perhaps consciously—confused the ecstasy of artistic creation with the ecstasy of religious revelation and of sexual intercourse. “I wish I could possess the world as I possess a woman,” he once wrote. Written for a large orchestra, and involving important solos for violin (heard at its soft and sensuous start) and trumpet (particularly at the climax of the piece), its tonally ambiguous chords and the way they are orchestrated sound French rather than either Russian, or in the style of such Germans as Wagner and Richard Strauss. Indeed, Scriabin’s score is peppered with French directions, such as “très parfumée” or “avec une volupté de plus en plus extatique” (“with an increasingly ecstatic pleasure”). It is a work that has strongly divided opinion, but the soundworld of Stravinsky’s early works including The Firebird (1910) are inconceivable without its example.