Piano Sonata No. 9 in F Major

There are few more disturbing pieces in piano literature than Scriabin’s one-movement Ninth Sonata. Composed between 1911 and 1913, it became known as the Black Mass Sonata—a subtitle suggested by one of the composer’s most devoted admirers that fully reflects the dark and Satanic nature of its musical invention. The work opens quietly with a sequence of mournful sounding descending chords. These create an otherworldly effect, suggesting that the listener is being lured into an unsettling dream that will very soon become a nightmare. A new menacing idea with spiky repeated notes increases a sense of anxiety. The music becomes yet more destabilizing as ghoulish trills and more lyrically seductive writing, marked by the composer to be played “with a sweetness of an increasingly caressing and poisonous nature,” enter the fray. Progressively wilder musical ideas and a series of dissonant climaxes are followed by a brutal sounding march, described by the composer as “a parade of the forces of evil.” At the close, the mists of the nightmare suddenly evaporate leaving us with luminous chords that mirror the atmosphere of the opening bars.