- Composer: Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (6 January 1872 -- 27 April 1915)
- Performer: Vladimir Sofronitsky
- Year of recording: 1960 (live)
Deux Danses {Two Dances} for piano, Op. 73, written in 1914.
00:00 - 1. Guirlandes (Avec une grâce languissante)
02:25 - 2. Flammes sombres (Avec une grâce dolente)
When Scriabin had little more than a year to live, besides making sketches toward his Mysterium, he completed just two more sets of piano pieces: the Deux Danses, Op. 73, and the Five Preludes, Op. 74, his last opus. The dances may perhaps suggest what he was imagining for the Mysterium, and contain a harmony similar to what he had been increasingly infusing in his music - the sound he had been searching for, and had found.
Scriabin wrote about the Deux danses to Sabaneev:
- The first, Guirlandes, evoked for him ‘crystalline and at the same time iridescent figures which grew, formed groups and, refined and ethereal, delicate and “glassy”, burst and palpitated, in order to grow and arise anew...in them is sweetness to the point of pain’.
- Of Flammes sombres, which he associated with the Song-dance of the fallen, a Dantesque scene of degraded souls delighting in evil, occuring in the Preliminary Action, he remarked: ‘This is very mischievous music...this is the border of the path of black magic...here the eroticism is already unhealthy, a perversion, and afterwards an orgiastic dance...a dance over corpses.’ The horrifying verse of the Song-dance reads as if written by a twentieth-century war poet.
