The Poem of Ecstasy (Le Poème de l’extase), Op. 54

Program notes

About the Work

Alexander Scriabin worked on The Poem of Ecstasy between 1905 and early 1908, years he spent mostly outside Russia, and he sometimes referred to it as his fourth symphony. The name has stuck as a subtitle, though the piece is a single movement of about twenty minutes with no breaks. It was first performed in New York on 10 December 1908 by the Russian Symphony Orchestra under Modest Altschuler, a friend of the composer.

By this point Scriabin, who had begun as a pianist writing preludes and mazurkas in Chopin’s manner, believed that music could change human consciousness, and his own art was the instrument. Alongside the score he wrote a long poem with the same title, some three hundred lines about a spirit that struggles, plays, desires and finally recognises its own creative power; the same text lies behind his Fifth Piano Sonata. He did not want it recited, and it is not printed in the score. The note he approved for the premiere begins: ‘The Poem of Ecstasy is the joy of liberated action.’

None of that needs to be believed for the music to work. What Scriabin had actually found was a way of writing harmony that leans forward without ever settling, so that twenty minutes can pass in a state of expectation. The orchestra is huge: eight horns, five trumpets, two harps, celesta, bells and organ besides full woodwind and strings.

What to Listen For

The opening is slow and languid. A flute has the first idea, which the composer associated with longing, and a clarinet answers over hazy strings with what he called a dream. Then a trumpet enters with a figure of short rising phrases. That trumpet theme is the one to hold on to: it stands for the will asserting itself, and it returns again and again, each time more insistent, against faster music full of trills and darting leaps.

The piece builds twice. The first climax, around the middle, collapses back into the languor of the opening. The second does not. The trumpets take over, the horns join them, bells and the organ are added underneath, and after pages of harmony that refuses to resolve the whole orchestra finally arrives on a blazing chord of C major. The LSO’s own guide to the composer quotes markings from the score such as ‘ever-increasing drunkenness’ and ‘almost deliriously’. Whether the ending sounds like transcendence or like a very loud chord is each listener’s own business, but in the hall it is physically overwhelming.