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In this chapter I consider two early twentieth-century masters, Skryabin and Szymanowski. The first is, in my view, one of the greatest of modern composers, while the second, who followed in Skryabin’s footsteps, deserves almost as high a reputation. Szymanowski attempted to come to terms with the problem that exercised Schoen-berg, while rejecting Schoenberg’s search for a theory with which to solve it.¹ The problem was that of redeeming a musical idiom from its inherited decadence; of purging its super-abundance of clich´e, and preventing its lapse into emotions that can no longer be genuinely felt.

It is partly because of his highly original manner of confronting this problem that Szymanowski deserves our respect.

Szymanowski was a Polish composer, but perhaps only in the sense that Chopin was a Polish composer. We should not be misled, either by his nationality, or by his nationalism, into thinking that his music must be understood as the expression of a burgeoning national conscious-ness. Chopin was strongly attached to Poland, and celebrated its native music in many of his compositions, and in particular in the exquisite mazurkas, through which he created a musical idiom that was to have a profound influence on both Skryabin and Szymanowski. However, the musical significance of Chopin’s experiments lies not so much in their Polishness, as in their contribution to the development of the romantic keyboard.² Chopin added to the harmonic and thematic repertoire of Schumann only those elements of Polish sentiment which could be heard to develop—in a new and surprising direction—what was already there. Polish folk music was a stimulus to Chopin; but the structure of his musical thought is to be understood in terms of the larger tradition of piano writing to which he belongs.

Likewise with Szymanowski, whose most self-consciously Polish works must still be understood, not as attempts to discover a purely Polish idiom (comparable to Bart ´ok’s purely Hungarian idiom), but as off-shoots of the musical thinking which grew in cosmopolitan Europe.

The same applies, I believe, to Skryabin. While many of his contempo-raries tried to make sense of his astonishing idiom by describing it as

Russian—or at any rate as Slav—his music obeys a logic which can be understood neither in terms of the idioms of Russian folk music, nor in terms of the music of the nationalist composers who were his contem-poraries. Of course, the insensate extremism of Skryabin’s metaphysics is very Russian, as is the apocalyptic longing for ‘world conflagration’

which inspired his symphonies. This peculiar longing has been a vital element in much that is good in Russian culture, as well as in much that is disastrous. Nevertheless, Skryabin is not a Russian composer in the way that Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky or Shostakovitch are Russian. His art, like Chopin’s, and also like Debussy’s (and who could be more French than Debussy?), must be understood in terms of the develop-ment of Romantic keyboard music, and in particular in terms of the new harmonic possibilities which the piano presented to its most thoughtful exponents. It is part of Skryabin’s genius that he did not allow his overblown emotions to corrupt his music. On the contrary, it was through the finesse and discipline of his art that he was able to contain and resolve the discordant mania of his soul. (Cf. Pushkin:

‘Madam, my writings are genteel, but my heart is completely vulgar’.) Skryabin’s later music displays an impressive struggle to contain and give form to his decadent emotions. It is the true expression of the

‘elegant soul’ which Sabaneev attributed to him, and which triumphed first in his art, and also in his life, over the extravagant self-indulgence which warred with it.³

Like Skryabin, Szymanowski was born into the milieu of the szlachta, isolated from the popular movements and the political developments of his time. His education was refined and indulgent, allowing complete freedom for the development of his talents. Both composers dedicated their lives to composition, and lived, in consequence, in constant debt.

Both men saw the external world as an arbitrary, indulgent parent, who sometimes gave, sometimes withheld, and whose concerns were of a separate order from those of music, and largely inscrutable. This similarity of spirit is matched by an unmistakable similarity of musical inspiration. Although Szymanowski was by no means an imitator, it could be said that the influence of Skryabin over his music is that of a master, not a colleague. The influence is apparent already in the early piano music. The opus 4 ´Etudes, for example, show a detailed derivation from Skryabin, both in structure and in harmony. Even the justly famous third ´Etude, in B flat minor, involves a remaking of melodic and harmonic devices already used by Skryabin – in the B flat minor study, op. 8 no. 11 (the resemblance of which to Szymanowski’s has already been noted by Jim Samson⁴), but also, perhaps more

importantly, in the beautiful slow movement to the F sharp minor Piano Sonata (no. 3).

The influence here is not confined to melodic line or harmonic progression: there is a resemblance of what, for want of a better term, I shall call ‘musical personality’. The disposition of notes on the keyboard, the movement of the musical line, the ‘feel’ of the chords in the fingers, and the peculiar resonances of the fourth, the tritone, the open fifth, and the major seventh—all these acquire, from the very first of Szymanowski’s experiments in piano writing, a significance that closely parallels their significance for Skryabin. There are, of course, important points of difference. In particular, Skryabin’s piano music follows a steady path of logical development; it is informed, if not by theory, at least by system, so that each new piece extends and develops the language of the preceding one, and the sequence as a whole gradually moves towards, and also justifies, one of the most original styles in all keyboard writing. While there is development—or at least, considerable movement—in Szymanowski’s keyboard style, it is also true that there is not the same effect of system, and therefore not the same attempt to follow through the harmonic and melodic implications of individual ideas.

The comparison may be usefully extended to the orchestral works. It is undeniable that Szymanowski explored the range of dissonance to its furthest reaches, and employed harmonies that were well beyond Skryabin’s in their defiance of the innocent ear. Nevertheless, his harmonies are, in one way, less daring than those of Prometheus, or of the late Skryabin sonatas. For their dissonant quality is part of the colour, rather than the structure, of the music. In Skryabin, there is an harmonic order which, even when it stretches tonality to the limit, retains the two guiding principles of tonal structure: the principle of progression, whereby chords arise out of, resolve into, and diverge from one another; and the principle of resonance, whereby melodic line and harmonic progression are mutually dependent, with the shape of the melody dictating, and also dictated by, the underlying harmonic movement.

Skryabin’s ‘mystical’ harmonies do not belong to the common Western repertoire. But they are, in their own way, functional, inherit-ing tensions and resolvinherit-ing or augmentinherit-ing them in ways that make sense only in the longer musical term. Hence they impose large and often barely tolerable harmonic and melodic obligations. The composer must shape progression and melody in accordance with their imperatives. He must approach them by sequences which are compelled by a musical

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logic in which dissonance is actually required. I believe that, even in the Messiaen-like prodigies of Metopes, and the densest superimpositions of King Roger, Szymanowski never undertook risks of so high an order.

The resemblance to Skryabin is also revealed in Szymanowski’s melodic lines. Jim Samson has again perceptively pointed to Szyma-nowski’s indebtedness to an important Grundgestalt of Skryabin’s music: a sequence of rhythmically characterized ascending leaps, fol-lowed by a stepwise chromatic descent.⁵ (Ex. 1 reproduces Samson’s examples, together with an example of my own, in which the basic ‘cell’

of this structure is displayed, and also its ultimate source in the opening motive of Tristan und Isolde.)

This is but one of many extremely important resemblances between the melodic thinking of the two composers. However, I think that it would be wrong to place too much emphasis on these resemblances. In art difference is more important than similarity. And here the difference is great. While Skryabin is through and through an integrated com-poser, deriving his abstruse harmonic experiments from a sense of the melodic relations between tones, and his melodies from the musical space created by his chords, Szymanowski remains a composer of motive and colour, whose thinking is not truly permeated by melodic principles.

Example 1

The influence of Skryabin is perhaps most apparent in the colour and the mood of certain middle period works, in particular, in the Third Symphony (The Song of the Night), whose resemblance in texture and atmosphere to Le Po`eme de l’Extase is remarkable. The chromatic and insistent melodic line, the shimmering orchestral colour, the growling organ pedal—all these, which are structurally decisive features of the Szymanowski, derive from the closing section of Skryabin’s poem (and, indirectly, from Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra). Most important of all is the sense of Skryabin’s music as being constantly driven towards a climax, falling back only to take breath, and again rushing into frenzy.

When the accumulated wave finally breaks, Skryabin produces one of his most magnificent resolutions. (Ex. 2.) Here huge beautifully spaced brass chords are backed by organ over a low C pedal and percussion, while tremolando strings and woodwind carry the movement to its peak. The harmonic structure is of an extended IV–I progression, in C major. The subdominant chord is ‘coloured in’, first with a major seventh, and then with a minor seventh, so displaying an exaggerated tension which endures and diminishes, until the final release into C major.

It is interesting to find a complex reminiscence of this passage in the conclusion to The Song of the Night. The music works towards its final culmination in Skryabin’s manner, with constant feints at a climax, interspersed by breathy hesitation and dazed voluptuousness. When the culminating point is reached, at bar 495, we are assailed by an overwhelming chord, orchestrated in a manner strongly reminiscent of the Skryabin. (Ex. 3.) Again there is a choir of brass, backed up by organ over a pedal note of low C. The melodic line is carried by high Example 2

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tremolando strings, together with woodwind, while massive trilling percussion (complete with bells and piano) gives a tumultuous charac-ter to the movement.

Szymanowski does not resolve the chord, but allows it to dwindle, gradually adding new and colouristic harmonies, while retaining the pedal note on low C until bar 526, when the orchestra and chorus, having lingered in the harmonic region of C major for almost twenty bars, finally subsides with a brilliantly orchestrated C major sigh. The effect of this is of a vastly extended and heavily burdened IV-I cadence, the climactic chord—itself straight out of the Skryabin repertoire

—being given a subdominant character by virtue of the pedal on the tonic note of C.

Such comparisons show Szymanowski to be deeply influenced by Skryabin, precisely when he is attempting to give form to the state of mind, and the musical language, which he had appropriated as his own.

The Song of the Night is the major expression of Szymanowski’s orientalism,⁶and one into which he put all his meticulous knowledge of orchestral atmosphere. It is both highly personal in its meaning, and at the same time flagrant in its desire to open that meaning to its audience.

Unfortunately, however, once the comparison with Le Po`eme de l’Extase is made, it seems to show the relative weakness of Szyma-nowski’s idiom. The Song of the Night does not match the architectonic brilliance of Skryabin’s poem, with its relentless energy, and its superb arch of consecutive harmonies. Le Po`eme de l’Extase has a structure of struggle and resolution, which is foretold in the opening bars. (Ex. 4.) Example 3

Here the passage from the whole tone chord to the relaxed C major provides a marked harmonic resolution, closely related to the progres-sion from ‘Skryabin sixth’ to tonic, as in the concluprogres-sion to the Satanic Poem, op. 36. And this progression through atonal regions into plain C major provides the dominating movement of the symphony. (Mac-Donald has argued that Skryabin had to ‘earn’ the right to C major;

that he had somehow to graduate towards this key from such darker regions as G flat.⁷ On the contrary, it seems to me, Skryabin’s accomplished use of the C major tonal region was a recurring feature of his idiom, and one that made a considerable impact on Szyma-nowski.)

Even Prometheus shows the same sense of resolution, moving slowly out of its penumbra of fourth-built chords into a magnificent conclu-sion in F sharp major. By contrast The Song of the Night, although it ends in a heavily emphasized C major, does not really resolve. It does not have the harmonic impetus of the Skryabin, and nothing which precedes the climax necessitates the movement into C. Szymanowski’s firm pedal-based tonal structures seldom seem to be compelled by any harmonic logic: the harmonies which precede them are obliterated, but not quietened, by the tonal utterances. When tonality reaffirms itself in Skryabin, it is because it has been summoned up by atonal passages which seem to yearn for it. The effect is so powerful as to provide one of the major justifications for the finicky perfumes of accumulated fourths.

Of course, Skryabin’s piano music shows a movement away from the idea of tonal resolution towards that of a Schoenbergian ‘unity of musical space’. But often, as in the augmented E major chord that concludes Vers la Flamme, chords which are by no means part of the tonal directory are used in a manner that creates a strong suggestion of tonal resolution. And equally, when there is not even a hint of tonality, Example 4

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Skryabin is seldom without the logic of tonality—the logic that enables us to hear a chord as compelled by, and answering to, those which had preceded it.

Musicologists have attempted to analyse this ‘logic of tonality’ in ways which do not suppose that only strictly tonal music can possess it.⁸But it seems to me to be a defect in many of these analyses—a defect not unrelated to their implicit claim to a ‘scientific’ rigour—that they can, in the end, be applied equally to the music of Skryabin and Szymanowski. Consider, for example, the concept of ‘pantonality’

advanced by Reti. This seems to encompass equally the shifting tonal foundation in the music of Szymanowski, and the uncompromising logic of Skryabin’s eighth sonata, which neither alludes to tonality, nor defies it, but simply reproduces its underlying dynamic compulsion.

A more important criticism emerges, I believe, from the comparison with Skryabin. It seems to me that—with some exceptions to which I shall shortly return—Szymanowski’s style creates a need for melody which he cannot satisfy. This is not to say that there are no melodies in Szymanowski’s music. On the contrary, there are very many, perhaps even too many. It is rather that the melodies are often lacking in vigour and appeal: they have a studied, abstract quality, which it is hard to describe, but easy to hear. Consider the two melodies in Ex. 5, from The Song of the Night and the Fontaine d’Ar´ethuse (no. l of Mythes, for violin and piano, justly famous for its lovely impressionistic harmo-nies). These are beautifully crafted ideas, without a hint of banality, and rich in implications. And yet they leave the listener cold. We are not absorbed by them, and cannot hear them as constituting the essence of Example 5

the musical movement. On the contrary, it is an important feature of the style exemplified in these works that we generally hear the musical movement to progress independently of the melody, the melody being, as it were, superimposed upon a separate dynamic idea.

I do not wish to imply that all melodies must be diatonic, or borrow the logic of the diatonic scale. On the contrary, one of the great achievements of twentieth-century music has been to overthrow that idea, giving us melodies derived entirely from the whole-tone scale (Debussy), or catchy phrases which defy tonality altogether (Berg in Lulu). Nevertheless, it seems to me that, in the sense in which Debussy and Berg produced atonal melodies, which may stand alone as the expressions of an integrated musical movement, the two examples from Szymanowski fail to be melodies.

Once again the comparison with Skryabin is useful. The opening theme of the Po`eme de l’Extase—con voglia languido (Ex. 6)—alth-ough of indeterminate key, is an exquisitely turned melodic fragment, which can stand as self-sufficient and also grow and develop (the hints of B major/minor are entirely negated both by the harmony and by subsequent developments). Throughout his career Skryabin organized musical movement according to melodic principles, whether tonal (as in the melody which provides the energy of the Divine Poem’s first movement), or atonal (as in the theme, Ex. 7, from the extraordinary seventh sonata). By virtue of his melodic emphasis, Skryabin is able to engage the listener in the movement of his music, to create as an inner necessity the transition from disharmony to disharmony, which can exist as movement only in the ear of the listener who is persuaded so to hear it. In comparison with Skryabin’s melodies, even the much praised Example 6

Example 7

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