ensely
sharpened. For, in spite of the fact that at moments he handled it with
rare sympathy, the orchestra was not his proper medium. The piano was
his instrument. It is only in composition for that medium that he
expressed indelibly his exquisite, luminously poetic, almost disquieting
temper, and definitely recorded himself.

There have been few composers more finely conscious of the piano. There
have been few who have more fully plumbed its resources, few who have
held it in greater reverence, few who have hearkened more solicitously
to its voice that is so different from the voices of other instruments.
Of all piano music, only that of Debussy and Ravel seems as thoroughly
steeped in the essential color of the medium, seems to lie as completely
in the black and white keys, part of them, not imposed on them. And
Scriabine, the barbarian and romanticist, is even more free of the hues
of the keyboard than they, the Latins, the classicists. His works make
one keenly aware of the rhythmical, the formalistic limitations of
Chopin's piano pieces, of the steeliness of much of Brahms', of the
shallow brilliancy, the theatricality, of Liszt's. They even make us
feel at moments as though in them had been realized the definitive
pianistic style, that the hour of transition to the new keyboard of
quarter tones was nigh. For Scriabine appears to have wakened in the
piano all its latent animality. Under his touch it loses its old
mechanical being, cries and chants like a bird, becomes at instants cat,
serpent, flower, woman. It is as if the currents of the man's life had
set with mysterious strength toward the instrument, till it became for
him an eternally fresh and marvelous experience, till between him and
the inanimate thing there came to be an interchange of life. There is
the rarest of science in his style, especially in that of his last
period, when his own individuality broke so marvelously into flower. He
wrote for it as one of two persons who had shared life together might
address the other, well aware with what complexity and profundity a
smile, a gesture, a brief phrase, would reverberate. No one has caressed
it more lightly, more tenderly, more voluptuously. No one has made of
the piano-trill, for instance, more luminous and quivering a thing. And
because he was so sensitive to his medium, the medium lured from out him
his creative strength.

He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant and aristocratic
crafts