CLASSICAL MUSIC - ALEXANDER SCRIABIN: TOWARDS THE LIGHT

This documentary on the unconventional life and ground-breaking music of the Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) sheds light on the mystical ideas which inspired him.

Having graduated from a strict military-style academy for pianists in Moscow, the early years of his career seemed un-ambitious. He wrote and performed pieces in the style of Chopin and from 1989 - 1903 became a Professor of Piano at the Moscow conservatoire.

Then, in 1903, he left Russia, and his wife Vera, for Europe, and Nana Fjodorowna de Schoelzer. His music style became more intensely personal and he encountered the theosophical ideas of Madame Blavatsky, described by her as aiming to extract and reunite the mutual esoteric core of all wisdom and religions.

Scriabin's music became concerned with blazing, compelling, voluptuous belief. His symphonies The Divine Poem, The Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus were composed to prepare humanity for a final, willing, gratified extinction. He became consumed by a vision of a union of the arts, a coalescence of music, words, movement, light, colour and ideas, to create transcendent experiences in which there would be no spectators, only participants. Scriabin wanted to "suffocate in ecstasy". At his death he left a complete poetic text and fifty-five pages of musical sketches for the apotheosis of his work, Mysterium. He saw this as a piece which would release emotional energy of a cosmic degree. It would exterminate, and therefore save, mankind.

Madman or genius? Scriabin did not separate the realms of fantasy and reality. In the film his daughter Marina explains that his music was his way of expressing his inner experiences, and also recalls his conviction that if he could pass on just a small part of his inherent joy that the whole universe would rejoice.