Scriabin’s Prometheus

This visionary work for piano and orchestra was conceived as the penultimate entry in a four-part orchestral feast, begun by The Divine Poem and The Poem of Ecstasy. The final piece, Mysterium, was never actually realised before Scriabin’s death. The composer takes the mythology of Prometheus and makes him a symbol of the evolution of the human mind – the listener is taken from its nascent development to a more cosmological, higher state of being. He planned for it to be performed by a ‘Colour Keyboard’, linking notes to colour projections, but that was rather beyond 1911 technology.