G sharp minor12/28/2023 A further device used in the late style emerges in the Second Sonata’s opening movement: exposition, development and recapitulation all start with the same music. A favourite device of Scriabin, who liked to give the melodic line to his stronger left hand, it reappears in the slow movement of the Third Sonata, the end of the first movement of the Fourth, and in the Seventh and Tenth Sonatas. Liszt, who played in competition with him in 1837, often made use of the device, most famously in the concert étude ‘Un Sospiro’. The device of embedding the melody in the middle of an arpeggiated texture goes back to the virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg (1812–1871), whose speciality it was. The key of E, in which this movement ends, an unusual departure from the norm for Scriabin, was to him bluish-white, the colour of moonlight. Scriabin saw colours when he heard music and erected an elaborate synaesthetic system on this basis. At the move to B major the music has a subtlety and spontaneity of rhythmic articulation rarely heard before in Scriabin’s music, and the second subject is one of Scriabin’s happiest inspirations, a soaring melody placed in the middle of the texture, with glittering figuration around it like sunlight or moonlight playing on dancing waves. The brooding opening makes use of a motive, rhythmically the reverse of that in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which dominates the movement. The piano writing has done away with the bombast of the First Sonata and returned to the delicacy and filigree of its youthful predecessor. This does not represent a turning away from personal emotion: the sea is an ancient symbol for the psyche, and the Sonata represents an early example of Scriabin’s later tendency to equate the phenomena around him with his own interior life. The second movement, presto, shows the stormy agitation of the vast expanse of ocean. The section in E major represents the tender moonlight which comes after the first dark of the night. The composer wrote a short ‘programme’: The first part evokes the calm of a night by the seashore in the South in the development we hear the sombre agitation of the depths. Their honeymoon took place in the Crimea, on the shores of the Black Sea. A visit to Genoa in 1895 may have been a further stimulus, but the Sonata was not finished until another turning point in Scriabin’s life had been reached: his marriage to the pianist Vera Isacova in 1897. The Sonata No 2 in G sharp minor, Op 19 (1892–7), takes its inspiration from nature: the sea, which Scriabin first experienced on a trip to Latvia in 1892.
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