ABSTRACT
According to Richard Taruskin, Alexander Skryabin purportedly exhorted us to ‘walk around’ this chord and, although Skryabin’s meaning is typically elusive, we certainly do have much to gain from a perambulation around this particular complex of interlocking fourths. Interpretation of the mystic chord as a composite of dominant-seventh drives is supported in bar 4 when the C7 and D7 implications come to fruition through Skryabin’s coincident F7 and G7 chords. Skryabin controls tensile dominant-seventh energies in his late style in a way that offers a deep correlation with these Lacanian drive formulations. For all Skryabin’s hyperbole about desire, perhaps Faubion Bowers was correct in his intuitive speculation: How easy to translate Scriabin’s words ‘wish’ and ‘desire’ into ‘drives’. Scriabin’s world-view falls easily into the linguistics of ‘compulsion’ and ‘obsession’. One could argue that Skryabin’s ultimate desire, as propounded in his discourse surrounding the global celebration of the Mysterium, was to single-handedly bring the world to its final destruction.
