ich makes his craft comparable to Bach's in
its mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "Chromatic
Fantasy and Fugue" and the Ninth Sonata justly in a single breath. And
yet, the compositions of the middle period, the one that follows
immediately the early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely less
rich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt the influence of
Scriabine's masters, though considerably on the wane, is still evident.
The "Poeme satanique" refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite its
lambent andante, is patently the work of one who has studied his Liszt
and loves his Chopin. And yet, these works are characteristically male
and raging and proud. And in all the works of this period there appears
something new and magnificent that has scarcely before informed piano
music. There is a truly Russian depth and vehemence and largeness in
this now languid, now mystical, now leonine music, that lifts it
entirely out of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon school
into that of those composers who made orchestra and opera speak in the
national tongue. The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almost
frenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirely
from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes
monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march
with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the
orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has
the sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern stuffs, in
silken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the orchestral faery of some of
the Russian composers, in the orchestral chemistry of, say, a
Rimsky-Korsakoff, such brimming, delicious colors. Nevertheless, the
voluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious restraint. Scriabine
is always the fine gentleman, intolerant, for all the splendor of his
style, of any excess, of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. And
throughout the work, there is evidence of the steady, restless
bourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, almost Chinese delicacy which
in the work of the last period attains its marvelous efflorescence.

These final works, these last sonatas and poems and preludes of
Scriabine are but the essentialization of the personal traits adumbrated
by the compositions of the earlier periods. It is as if in adopting the
system based on the "mystic chord" that persist