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:
“Patience. A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)
“Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same and everywhere one and the same in her efficiency and power of action; that is, nature’s laws and ordinances whereby all things come to pass and change from one form to another, are everywhere and always; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature’s universal laws and rules.”
—Baruch (Benedict)