Scriabin’s First Symphony is the first large-scale orchestral composition by the composer who would subsequently write the “Divine Poem”, the “Poem of Ecstasy” and “Prometheus” (during the years 1898–1900, simultaneously with the Symphony, a small-scale orchestral piece “Reveries” was written). Despite the fact that all the usual flaws of a first work of its type, nonetheless, among the Russian symphonies it presents a rather original phenomenon. The last twenty years of the next-to-last century and the first years of the previous century presents a hitherto unprecedented flourishing of the genre of the Cantata in Russian music. First the Moscow-based composers – Tchaikovsky and Taneyev, later followed by Rachmaninoff, and then the St. Petersburg composers – Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov (who wrote four cantatas) proceeded to compensate for the scarcity of Russian compositions in this genre. And if Rimsky-Korsakov composed, for example, the Prelude-Cantata (“From Homer”), the young Scriabin aims at once at a hybrid genre of a symphony-cantata, literally “cramming” the traditional four-movement orchestral cycle amid two parts of a cantata – the purely instrumental and the vocal. The return of the second theme of the first movement, Lento, occurs only at the beginning measures of the Finale. What turns out is a symphony with an instrumental prologue and a choral epilogue. The theme of the Cantata is determined by the poetry of Scriabin himself, which he set to music in his Finale: it is the faith in the omnipotent power of art, one of the most important themes of Russian and European culture of the fin-de-siècle. However, the composer’s poetry, addressed to art, was in themselves rather inartistic:
May overflow and reign the earth
Thy spirit free and bold and stoic;
Thou, mankind’s truest guide from birth
Incite the man to deeds heroic.
Up to the present day the low quality of the Scriabin’s poem in many ways present a drawback to frequent performances and recordings of the Symphony. The “Cantata” is separated from the Symphony both in terms of semantic content (a lofty serenity, slow tempi) and in terms of tonality (the “inner” symphony is written in the relative E minor and its themes and tempi are related to the tempestuous Romanticism of the early piano sonatas, preludes and etudes). Due to this close relatedness the composition, which in itself is quite expansive, presents a loss in terms of proportions: the symmetric construction of most of the themes, their sequential development, the spacious recapitulations, seemingly negating the results of the tempestuous development sections – everything which is so characteristic for Scriabin’s early piano style, at times reduces to naught the efforts of the orchestral ensemble, which in itself is exceptionally large for that time period. In many ways inheriting the legacy of the “Moscow style” orchestral symphonic writing (manifested in the works of such composers as Tchaikovsky and Arensky), the symphony carries, in addition to fresh-sounding orchestral colors, a host of clichés forerun by these masters. Notwithstanding this, the bold character of the First Symphony, the synthetic quality of its conception, the rapidity of the impulsive fast themes and the dazzling majestic climaxes disclose in themselves those “hidden yearnings”, which will subsequently lead Scriabin towards his cosmic revelations of his late period. This is especially why his first experiment in the genre of the symphony is so valuable for us.
