Piano Sonata No. 3 (Scriabin)

The Piano Sonata No. 3 in F-sharp minor, Op. 23, by Alexander Scriabin was composed between 1897 and 1898. The sonata consists of four movements, typically spanning 18 minutes in performance.

Scriabin had been married to a young pianist, Vera Ivanovna Isaakovich, in August 1897. Having given the first performance of his Piano Concerto at Odessa, Scriabin and his wife went to Paris, where he started to work on the new sonata. Scriabin is said to have called the finished work "Gothic", evoking the impression of a ruined castle. Some years later however, he devised a different programme for this sonata entitled "States of the Soul":

Together with Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg and Sergei Rachmaninoff, Scriabin is one of the few composers from the Romantic era to have left a recorded legacy. He recorded this sonata before 1912 on piano rolls for Hupfeld-Phonola, a German maker of Player Pianos. This recording includes some deviations from the printed music. Many of the sonatas were also recorded by Scriabin’s son-in-law Vladimir Sofronitsky. Other notable recordings include those by Emil Gilels, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Evgeny Kissin and Burkard Schliessmann.

The sonata features a typical four movement layout with an opening sonata form, a ternary scherzo, a slow movement (also in ternary form) and a finale in sonata form. Also, like other Russian composers (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, etc.), Scriabin makes use of cyclic form, in this case by making references of movements I and III in the finale.

The first movement is laid out in a conventional sonata form without repetition. The sonata opens with a dramatic first theme in F# minor, with measures 1 and 2 presenting the insistent rhythmic motifs which will pervade throughout that section. The theme is unusually short, spanning only 8 bars and ending in a rest over the dominant chord. After this, the following 16-bar transition develops the previous material in several violent outbursts, progressively diverging from the original key and preparing the entrance of the second theme.

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