The Poem of Ecstasy - Alexander Scryabine (1908)

Scryabine is unique among composers, not only for his obsession with philosophy and mysticism but also on account of the global nature of his imagination. Through being, in Pasternak's words, ‘more than just a composer’, Scryabine was forced by his protean intellect and creativity to justify and rationalize his work as a musician; the maximalism so favoured by Russian artists of the Silver Age engendered in him not only an interest in unorthodox aspects of musical creativity such as synaesthesia but also, and more importantly, a desire to articulate by means of a metaphysical doctrine the ultima ratio of his creative existence. His philosophical tenets were reasons for, commentaries on and justifications of, but not programmes for, his music, and were not secondary nor auxiliary to his artistic creativity; although the discourse had a purely practical end it developed independently and in parallel to the music. Seen in the context of the literature of the time and the art of the Russian Silver Age as a whole, Scryabine loses much of the alien quality he assumes when compared with other musicians. His aesthetic code, wrote de Schloezer (1923), ‘is remarkably similar to that of the vast intellectual and artistic movement which animated Russia’ during the pre-Revolutionary era; Bal'mont, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Bryusov, like Scryabine, considered art a ‘superior form of knowledge, an intuition analogous to that of the mystics, bearing the promise to reveal true reality and provide a passage to a transcendental world, to divinity’. Mallarmé occupied a position analogous to Scryabine's in the canon of Symbolism, and as he idealized beauty, Scryabine sanctified ecstasy and the act of creation by which that state is achieved; for both artists this process represented a means of passage to and a form of self-identification with the divine, or, in essence, a form of gnosis. Scryabine's demiurge sought to convey the listener – or in the case of the Misteriya, participant – on a journey to a supernaturally heightened plane of existence by means of a language of symbols, a language in which conventional musical phenomena are dislocated from their usual significance by means of an extraordinary departure from traditional tonal procedures.

Already in 1905 while composing the Poème de l'extase, Scryabine enthused that the work would be ‘a great joy, an enormous festival’; this concept of his music to be not only a source of artistic celebration but a participatory act of celebration grew throughout the following years of the decade.
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Even though the literary companion piece to the Poéme d'extase is of Scryabine's own creation, the content of the text is reminiscent of Bal'mont's Budem kak solntse (‘We shall be as the Sun’), in which creation is identified with ecstasy and escape into the air. The sanctification of a creative process in which the sensation of uplift towards otherworldliness and ecstasy (often symbolized by the sexual act) is central to Scryabine's mature output.