Alexander Scriabin had a rare gift for synesthesia (color hearing). For him, each tone or chord symbolized a color or color scheme. The composer aimed at joining opportunities of sound and visual arts; names of his some compositions include images that relate to light or fire in one way or another. Prometheus: The Poem of Fire is the last of Scriabin’s completed orchestral works. This tone poem has not a specific program and is only loosely based on the Greek myth of Prometheus, whose image serves only as a symbol for Scriabin. “Prometheus represents the active energy of the universe, its creative principle. The fire is light, life, struggle, effort, thought,” said the composer. Prometheus is performed with a huge orchestra including an extended brass and percussion section, an organ and a soloing piano that impersonates the image of Prometheus. According to Scriabin’s conception of sound and light blending, his idea was to perform the poem featuring a choir and the clavier à lumières (“keyboard with lights”). The whole harmonic-and-melodic pattern of Prometheus is deduced from a dissonant six-note chord that opens the poem. In the theory of music it has become known as the “Prometheus chord”, and Scriabin himself called it the “chord of the pleroma”, alluding to the idea of all Space of the universe in various mystic teachings. In Prometheus some themes interact, and its structure includes several related sections that are continuously performed to make a beeline for the final climax. Only at the end, during the symphonic poem’s apotheosis, the “Prometheus chord” turns into an exultant major triad that reflects symbolically the transformation of chaos into world harmony.
Vladimir Khavrov
