Ex. 13-8: Romance

This is Scriabin's only song — he wrote almost everything else for piano alone. He composed it around 1893, in F-sharp major, and wrote the Russian words himself. He dedicated it to Natalya Sekerina, a young pianist he was in love with.

Scriabin met Natalya when he was 20 and she was 15. Over four years he sent her about 67 love letters, and he came to think of them as engaged. But her family was against the marriage, and in the end she refused him. There is no sign that she ever heard the song he wrote for her.

The song comes from a hard time in Scriabin's life. In 1891, trying to keep up with a brilliant fellow student, he injured his right hand by over-practicing two very hard pieces — Balakirev's Islamey and Liszt's fantasy on Mozart's Don Giovanni. A doctor told him he would never play again. To get better, he went to Samara on the Volga river, where he drank fermented mare's milk as a cure, and later swam in the sea in Crimea. Out of the same crisis came his Two Pieces for the Left Hand, Op. 9 — a prelude and a nocturne he could play with his uninjured left hand alone.

Scriabin linked musical keys with colors, and for him F-sharp major was bright blue. He kept a special feeling for this key throughout his life.

Scriabin never published the song. He died in 1915 of blood poisoning, from an infected sore on his lip. The manuscript came to light only after his death, and his friend Leonid Sabaneyev put it back together in 1916. The soprano Nina Koshetz was the first to sing it, and it was printed in Paris around 1920.