Serge Rachmaninoff & Alexandre Scriabine

 

 

The music of Alexander Scriabin and Serge Rachmaninoff produced an immediate and powerful effect on me. Their works, which have aesthetic and expressive aims that can hardly be compared, are nevertheless joined by the timelessness of human feeling, that of passionate love for their land, that of their ancestors. 

 

The often elegiac tone of their works, like a paradise lost, translates with a growing force the quintessence and complexity of the Russian soul, which never ceases to exhale its sorrows and joys in unison with time and history. Beyond a certain point, there are no words to describe this feeling. 

 

Great art often has the effect of an original shock, and when it takes our breath away, something immense happens: we begin to feel our own death, which paradoxically makes life even more precious and intense to live. If I were to summarize incompletely, and with all the fragility of language, what Alexander Scriabin and Serge Rachmaninoff offered me, it would be this.