Skryabin's Prefatory Action and Mysterium

Prefatory Action is an unfinished work existing partially in the realm of hypothetical hearsay, and partially in the drafts of the libretto and musical sketches found after Skryabin’s death. Nearly all of the literature on this piece is cursory, or focuses only on summarizing and reiterating information from his early biographers. This dissertation undertakes an in-depth study of the libretto and sketches, presenting new research on primary sources, and positing interpretations of the work in the context of Skryabin’s theories. The composer’s philosophies, as described in his private journals, are the product of the diligent study and fusion of studies from contemporary psychology, nineteenth-century philosophy, and Theosophy. Skryabin constructed both an ontology of the nature of consciousness and reality, and proposed strategies for transcending the limited mode of human experience through spiritual and mental unification. Prefatory Action would be both a representation of this unification, and an artistic event that would help educate the human race in order to fully realize it in the future. The Prefatory Action libretto outlines Skryabin’s version of the history of humanity - a cycle of unified, and differentiated consciousnesses - and represents the near future, in which humanity embraces death and abandons corporeal form to mingle their consciousnesses. Contrary to the typical characterization of Skryabin’s ideas, especially those concerning Prefatory Action, as wildly insane, they are actually organized into a fairly consistent and logical system, and they are deeply connected to contemporary occult culture, which would have found many sympathizers in the early twentieth century. The Prefatory Action libretto demonstrates many of the characteristics of modernism, including an emphasis on progress and the future, and the aesthetics of early twentieth-century symbolism and ritualism. The musical sketches for Prefatory Action contain no obvious connections to the libretto, but they reveal the style of the music intended for the work. Skryabin’s strategies for atonal composition included deriving octatonic and acoustic collections by stacking intervallic patterns, and outlining and progressively developing very brief fragments of music. Small fragments of some of his late, published works appear in the Prefatory Action sketches, helping to flesh out our understanding of both the Prefatory Action style and the compositional process for Skryabin’s late pieces.