ABSTRACT

Poeme orgiaque began life in Beatenberg in the summer of 1907 and was completed the following year. This ‘Fourth Symphony’ was planned as a standard four-movement work in Alexander Skryabin’s Italian notebook of 1905, but was soon compressed into a single movement and renamed Le Poeme de l’extase. Given that both Hegelian ‘force’ and Schopenhauerian ‘Will’ pass through the Freudian ‘drive’ as they flow into Lacanian-Kristevan thought, a more nuanced appraisal of this same drive could well elucidate Skryabin’s compositional procedures. And some primal driving agent is surely the first sound encountered in Le Poeme de l’extase. In Skryabin’s harmonic chain, the free-floating dominant-seventh ‘drives’ lacked tonal governance, which this C major retroactively affords. For Jacques Lacan, by contrast, drives were Symbolically mediated as evidenced in his classical illustration of a baby’s cry. James Baker deftly surveys Le Poeme de l’extase’s thematic structure and follows the Lisztian transformations of what he terms ‘Theme D’.