Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was born on 6 January 1872 and began as a pianist-composer writing in the late-Romantic idiom of Frédéric Chopin. Somewhere in the early 20th century he broke away, developing a highly dissonant musical language that transcended traditional tonality independently of Arnold Schoenberg's parallel experiments. He embraced synesthesia and the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, associating specific harmonic tones with colors in a system inspired by theosophy. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia noted that no composer had ever received more scorn or greater love; Tolstoy called h…