Form
Scriabin sometimes referred to The Poem of Ecstasy as his "fourth symphony", although it was never officially called such and avoids the traditional division into separate movements. Although played as a single movement, there are traces of the classical sonata key-scheme that Scriabin had employed previously, but it is no longer structurally important. As described by Bernard Jacobson:
The form depends instead on the constant interpenetration and cross-fertilization of a multiplicity of tiny thematic units, most of them so sinuously chromatic as to subvert tonal feeling almost entirely beneath the vertiginous onslaught of shifting harmonic colors.
Scriabin wrote a long poem to accompany, but not be recited with, the music. It ends with, "I am a moment illuminating eternity....I am affirmation...I am ecstasy."
Scriabin professed to evaluate music as being the most highly evolved of all the human arts. He also claimed that the emotion of ecstasy was the most highly evolved of all the human emotions. The Poem of Ecstasy attempts to combine these two aesthetic principles.
Modest Altschuler, who helped Scriabin revise the score in Switzerland in 1907, and who conducted the premiere with the Russian Symphony Society of New York on 10 December 1908, reported that Scriabin's implied program (which does not appear in the score) is divided into three sections as follows:
I. His soul in the orgy of love;
II. The realization of a fantastical dream;
III. The glory of his own art.
Read more about this topic: The Poem Of Ecstasy
Famous quotes containing the word form:
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there.... These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and “fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,” in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The sense of an entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centred, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)