ABSTRACT
After fifteen years of carving out a successful career as a composer-pianist, Skryabin had amassed a wealth of piano preludes and etudes, three sonatas, a symphony and a concerto. Susan McClary exposes the descending line as a trope of female seduction in nineteenth-century opera, using the famous Habanera as her the principal illustration of Carmen’s confinement to chromatics. Feminine control corresponds to the rate of chromatic descent as Carmen playfully lingers over certain pitches to secure power over her suitors. Schloezer classified the thirteenth-century mystics Meister Eckhart and St Angela of Foligno as feminine; these people extinguished their willpower in trance-like states, epitomised by Mme Guyon in eighteenth-century France, whose state of intense passivity led her dangerously close to death. The obvious biographical connections with Skryabin’s effeminacy and his ludicrously molly-coddled upbringing by aunts could afford all-too-easy psychological interpretations of this ‘feminine’ angle of composition.
