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The
Piano Sonata in Mi minor flat was composed by Skrjabin between 1887 and 1889,
that is to say when he was 15-17
years old and had just been admitted to Moscow Conservatoire; although the
Sonata had already been completed and only needed a revision, Skrjabin decided
to publish only the first movement which, with a few small changes, was
published in 1892 as “Allegro appassionato” op.4. The original manuscript
did not reach us as a whole, in fact some short passages from the second and the
third movements, which anyway can be easily reconstructed, are missing: hence
the several arrangements which
followed Skrjabin’s death, from the one by his friend and biographer Leonid
Sabaneev in 1918, to the one by pianist Roberto Szidon in 1972, to the one by
Soviet composer Vladimir Blok who, in order to reconstruct the contents of a
torn page in the manuscript between the second and the third movements, made use
of some musical elements from the first movement. Although it is possible to
disagree on proposing a work in a form which at that time had been rejected by
its own composer, in the case of this sonata the recovering operation does not
seem inappropriate: the second and the third movements, which follow one after
the other without solution of continuity, show infact evident thematic analogies
with the first one, which in turn is slightly different from “Allegro
appassionato” op.4. The appellative of Sonata n.0, therefore,
suggested by some scholars, does not seem inappropriate. Another reason
leads us to allow the recovery of the original version: in 1889 Skrjabin changed
his teacher of Counterpoint and Fugue, infact Arenskij succeeded Safonov, who in
the meantime had been appointed director of
Moscow Conservatoire. Arenskij
immediately started to dislike Skrjabin and did not miss the occasion to scorn
him, and there are grounds to believe that it was him to lead Skrjabin to reject
the second and the third movements of the Sonata, considering them bad. The
Sonata op.0 is the first early work clearly showing the features of Skrjabin’s
early style. The first movement, in the traditional Sonata form, opens with a
panting motif of triplets consisting of rising semitone appoggiaturas which,
repeating themselves for as many as 33 bars, contribute to create an atmosphere
of particular emotional tension; the use of triplets is peculiar to the whole of
Skrjabin’s production and is at the origin of the rythmical instability and
indeterminatedness which will characterize his further production in a more and
more refined way. The second theme appears suddenly, bright and serene, and
creates a very effective contrast with the tumultuous development of the first
part; this contrast involves all the movement, in a process of opposition which
will be typical of many of Skrjabin’s next works. Click here to request the complete text (Italian version only) |
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