Related to the Fifth Piano Sonata and scored for a large orchestra including eight horns, "Russian" bells, organ, multiply divided strings and solo violin, the C major Poem of Ecstasy or Fourth Symphony (conceived 1905, completed summer 1907 - January 1908) was first heard in New York on 10th December 1908 (Modest Altschuler), the Russian public premiere following in St. Petersburg on 31st January 1909 (Blumenfeld). "The nerves of the audience were worn and racked as nerves are seldom assailed even in these days, " ventured W. J. Henderson in the New York Sun. "The hero of the concert was Scriabin, composer, who is not yet forty but whose already well-known name ignites the most fervent controversies: for some his music is utter nonsense, for others it is a revelation of genius... After the performance of the Poem of Ecstasy under the baton of Blumenfeld, the composer was wildly called for, and his success was enormous" (Rech, 2nd February; 1909). "What a work of genius!" Prokofiev enthused (along with Miaskovsky) - "But later, when the intellectual coldness of some of Scriabin's 'flights' became discernible, that opinion had to be downgraded a bit". This "radiant poem, " Scriabin's pupil, the pianist Maria Nemenov-Lunz, recalled, "was composed in a tiny half-dark garret rented from the owner of a greengrocer's [ in Bogliasco on the Italian Riviera ]. There was a jolly din and hum of voices in the shop from early morning until late into the night... for composing he had a broken piano, which was a tone-and-a-half lower than normal pitch and was rented from a cafe. Trains roared past the windows. Despite all this, despite constant worries about making ends meet, Alexander never uttered a word of complaint... he was working on his new composition in ecstasy, with feverish enthusiasm". The hundreds of surviving sketches and changes show just how hard he had to labour over his creation.

Structurally, the music is in the form of a single-movement tone-poem consisting of a tripartite sonata Allegro volando (exposition, development, reprise) flanked by a double motif slow prologue (Andante, lento: "human striving after the ideal" [ longing theme, flute ], the Ego [ dream theme, clarinet ]) and a quick, diatonically affirmative coda (Allegro molto). The sonata core features three subject groups: (a) "The Soaring Flight of the Spirit" (flute), (b) Human Love (solo violin, the receptive female), and (c) "The Will to Rise" (trumpet, the phallic male [ victory theme ]), Scriabin intended the whole to be an orgiastic, orgasmic excitation and release through mounting climax: descriptively, the final blinding gush of "red" C major spells "the union of the Cosmic Eros in the final act of love between the male principle of the Creator and the Woman-World". And he wrote a theosophical/symbolist poem to go with it, the self-assertion, the "I am" of the Spirit, which he was wont to recite to anyone who would listen. Realizing, however, that its independence from the sound event might confuse, he withheld it from the published score, advising instead that "conductors ...should start by approaching [ the work ] as pure music". Pictorial, associative suggestion nevertheless always remained important, "When you listen to Ecstasy, look straight into the eye of the Sun!"

Writer: Ates Orga