

Artist Jean Delville’s title page for Scriabin’s Promethée, originally a section of the Mysterium



When he died in 1915, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was still working on some tunes intended to bring about the end of the world. The Mysterium and its prelude, the “Prefatory Action,” were, in the words of Scriabin’s biographer Faubion Bowers, “cataclysmic opuses to end the world and its present race of men.” If all went according to plan, the first and only performance would immanentize the eschaton, thereby annihilating space and melting reality; no one would have to pay the band.

The composer tended to describe his vision in gentler terms: “the whole world,” Scriabin said, would be invited to the performance. “Animals, insects, birds, all must be there.” Artists of all kinds would contribute to the seven-day ritual; the audience’s senses would be dazzled by lights, incenses, textures, music and poetry. Together with fellow Theosophist Emile Sigogne, Scriabin “worked on an absolutely new language for the Mysterium. It had Sanskritic roots, but included cries, interjections, exclamations, and the sounds of breath inhaled and exhaled.”

All this may sound life-affirming, but Bowers’ words are unequivocal. “The universe would be completely destroyed by it, and mankind plunged into the holocaust of finality.”





Scriabin’s drawing of part of the Mysterium set



Scriabin died young, and he only left sketches of the musical component of the “Prefatory Action.” Russian composer Alexander Nemtin set about finishing it in 1970. He delivered the “Prefatory Action” in 1996, just three years before his own death. Bowers describes Scriabin’s vision of the full show, as the composer planned to stage it in India:

