Aleksandr Scriabin

In 1882 he enlisted in the Second Moscow Cadet Corps. As a student, he became friends with the actor Leonid Limontov, although in his memoirs Limontov recalls his reluctance to become friends with Scriabin, who was the smallest and weakest among all the boys and was sometimes teased due to his stature. However, Scriabin won his peers' approval at a concert where he performed on the piano. He ranked generally first in his class academically, but was exempt from drilling due to his physique and was given time each day to practice at the piano.

In 1892 he graduated with the Little Gold Medal in piano performance, but did not complete a composition degree because of strong differences in personality and musical opinion with Arensky (whose faculty signature is the only one absent from Scriabin's graduation certificate) and an unwillingness to compose pieces in forms that did not interest him.

In 1894 Scriabin made his debut as a pianist in St. Petersburg, performing his own works to positive reviews. During the same year, Mitrofan Belyayev agreed to pay Scriabin to compose for his publishing company (he published works by notable composers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov). In August 1897, Scriabin married the young pianist Vera Ivanovna Isakovich, and then toured in Russia and abroad, culminating in a successful 1898 concert in Paris. That year he became a teacher at the Moscow Conservatory and began to establish his reputation as a composer. During this period he composed his cycle of études, Op. 8, several sets of preludes, his first three piano sonatas, and his only piano concerto, among other works, mostly for piano.

Scriabin's second wife Tatiana Fyodorovna Schlözer was the niece of the pianist and composer Paul de Schlözer. Her brother was the music critic Boris de Schlözer. Scriabin had seven children in total: from his first marriage Rimma (Rima), Elena, Maria and Lev, and from his second Ariadna, Julian and Marina. Rimma died of intestinal issues in 1905 at the age of seven. Elena Scriabina was to become the first wife of the pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky, though only after her father's death; hence Sofronitsky never met the composer. Maria Skryabina (1901–1989) became an actress at the Second Moscow Art Theatre and the wife of director Vladimir Tatarinov. Lev also died at the age of seven, in 1910. At this point, relations with Scriabin's first wife had significantly deteriorated, and Scriabin did not meet her at the funeral.

With the financial assistance of a wealthy sponsor, he spent several years travelling in Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium and the United States, working on more orchestral pieces, including several symphonies. He was also beginning to compose "poems" for the piano, a form with which he is particularly associated. While in New York City, in 1907, he became acquainted with the Canadian composer Alfred La Liberté, who went on to become a personal friend and disciple.

In 1907, he settled in Paris with his family and was involved with a series of concerts organized by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who was actively promoting Russian music in the West at the time. He relocated subsequently to Brussels (rue de la Réforme 45) with his family.

In 1909 he returned to Russia permanently, where he continued to compose, working on increasingly grandiose projects. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalaya Mountains, that would cause a so-called "armageddon," "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world." Scriabin left only sketches for this piece, Mysterium, although a preliminary part, named L'acte préalable ("Prefatory Action") was eventually made into a performable version by Alexander Nemtin. Part of that unfinished composition was performed with the title 'Prefatory Action' by Vladimir Ashkenazy in Berlin with Aleksei Lyubimov at the piano. Nemtin eventually completed a second portion ("Mankind") and a third ("Transfiguration"), and his entire two-and-a-half-hour completion was recorded by Ashkenazy with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin for Decca. Several late pieces published during the composer's lifetime are believed to have been intended for Mysterium, like the Two Dances Op. 73.

Scriabin gave the final concert of his lifetime on 2 April 1915 in St. Petersburg, performing a large program of his own works. He received rave reviews from music critics such as Ossovsky, who called his playing "most inspiring and affecting", as well as Ellen von Tiedeböhl, who proclaimed "his eyes flashed fire and his face radiated happiness". Scriabin himself wrote that during his performance of his Third Sonata, "I completely forgot I was playing in a hall with people around me. This happens very rarely to me on the platform."

Scriabin returned triumphantly to his apartment in Moscow on 4 April, when he noticed a resurgence of the little pimple on his upper right lip. He had mentioned the pimple as early as 1914 while in London. His temperature rose, he took to bed and cancelled his Moscow concert for 11 April. The pimple became a pustule, then a carbuncle and again a furuncle. Scriabin's doctor remarked that the sore looked "like purple fire". His temperature shot up to 41 °C (106 °F) and he was now bed-ridden. Incisions were made on 12 April, but the sore had already begun to poison his blood, and the composer became delirious. Bowers writes: "intractably and inexplicably, a simple spot had grown into a terminal ailment." On 14 April 1915, at the age of 43 and at the height of his career, Scriabin died in his Moscow apartment, on the same day his lease expired.

While Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, they are among his most famous, and some are performed frequently. They include a piano concerto (1896), and five symphonic works, including three numbered symphonies as well as The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a machine known as a "clavier à lumières", known also as a Luce (Italian for "Light"), which was a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's tone poem. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound. Most performances of the piece (including the premiere) have not included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen. It has been claimed erroneously that this performance used the colour-organ invented by English painter A. Wallace Rimington when in fact it was a novel construction supervised personally and built in New York specifically for the performance by Preston S. Miller, the president of the Illuminating Engineering Society.

Scriabin's funeral, on 16 April 1915, was attended by such numbers that tickets had to be issued. Rachmaninoff, who was a pallbearer at the funeral, subsequently embarked on a grand tour of Russia, performing only Scriabin's music for the benefit of the family. It was the first time Rachmaninoff had publicly performed piano music other than his own. Sergei Prokofiev admired the composer, and his Visions fugitives bears great likeness to Scriabin's tone and style. Another admirer was the English composer Kaikhosru Sorabji, who promoted Scriabin even during the years when his popularity had decreased greatly. Aaron Copland praised Scriabin's thematic material as "truly individual, truly inspired", but criticized Scriabin for putting "this really new body of feeling into the strait-jacket of the old classical sonata-form, recapitulation and all", calling this "one of the most extraordinary mistakes in all music."

By the winter of 1904, Scriabin and his wife had relocated to Switzerland, where he began work on the composition of his Symphony No. 3. While living in Switzerland, Scriabin was separated legally from his wife, with whom he had had four children. The work was performed in Paris during 1905, where Scriabin was now accompanied by Tatiana Fyodorovna Schloezer—a former pupil and the niece of Paul de Schlözer. With Schloezer, he had other children, including a son named Julian Scriabin, a precocious composer of several piano works before he drowned in the Dnieper River at Kiev in 1919 at the age of 11.

Scriabin's music was greatly disparaged in the West during the 1930s. Sir Adrian Boult refused to play the Scriabin selections chosen by the BBC programmer Edward Clark, calling it "evil music", and even issued a ban on Scriabin's music from broadcasts in the 1930s. In 1935, Gerald Abraham described Scriabin as a "sad pathological case, erotic and egotistic to the point of mania". Scriabin's music has since undergone a total rehabilitation of image, and can be heard in major concert halls worldwide.

Ariadna Scriabina's daughter (by her first marriage to French composer David Lazarus), Betty Knut-Lazarus, became a famous teenage heroine of the French Resistance, personally winning the Silver Star from George S. Patton, as well as the French Croix de guerre. After the war she became an active member of the Zionist Lehi (Stern Gang), undertaking special operations for the militant group and she was imprisoned in 1947 for launching a terrorist letter bomb campaign against British targets, and planting explosives on British ships which had been trying to prevent Jewish immigrants from travelling to Mandatory Palestine. Regarded as a heroine in France, she was released prematurely, but was imprisoned a year later in Israel for being allegedly involved in the killing of Folke Bernadotte, but the charges were subsequently dropped. After her release from prison, she settled at the age of 23 in Beersheba in Southern Israel, where she had three children and she founded a nightclub which became the cultural centre of Beersheba, before her early death at the age of 38.

On 22 November 1969, the work was fully realized making use of the composer's color score as well as newly developed laser technology on loan from Yale's Physics Department, by John Mauceri and the Yale Symphony Orchestra and designed by Richard N. Gould, who projected the colors into the auditorium that were reflected by the Mylar vests worn by the audience. The Yale Symphony repeated the presentation in 1971 and brought the work to Paris that year for what was perhaps its Paris premiere at the Théâtre des Champs Élysées. The piece was reprised at Yale once again in 2010 (as conceived by Anna M. Gawboy on YouTube, who, with Justin Townsend, has published 'Scriabin and the Possible').

In 2009, Roger Scruton described Scriabin as "one of the greatest of modern composers".

In 2015, German-Australian pianist Stefan Ammer, as a part of The Scriabin Project Concert Series, joined forces alongside his pupils Mekhla Kumar, Konstantin Shamray and Ashley Hribar to honour the Russian composer at various venues across Australia.

In 2020, a bust of Scriabin was placed in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.