or this music is full of the wizardry of perhaps the most exquisite
sensibility that has for a long while disclosed itself in music. Perhaps
only in the Far East, perhaps only among the Chinese, have more
delicious and dainty and ecstatic tempers uttered themselves in music.
Beside this man, with his music that is like clustering flowers breaking
suddenly from the cool and shadowy earth, or like the beating of
luminous wings in the infinite azure, or like the whispers of one
sinking from the world in mortal illness, Debussy, even, seems cool,
silvered by the fine temperance of France. For Scriabine must have
suffered an almost inordinate subjugation to the manifestations of
beauty, must have been consumed with a passion for communicating his
burningly poignant adventures. There are moments when he seems scarcely
able to speak, so intense, so enrapturing, is his voluptuous sensation.
Indeed, the sensuality is at times so intensely communicated that it
almost excites pain as well as pleasure. If there is any music that
seems to hover on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering, it is
this. One shrinks from it as from some too poignant revelation. One
cannot breathe for long in this ether. Small wonder that Scriabine
sought all his life to flee into states of transport, to invent a
religion of ecstasy. For one weighed with the terrible burden of so
vibrant a sensibility, there could be no other means of existence.

And the gesture of flight is present throughout his music. Throughout
it, one hears the beating of wings. Sometimes, it is the light flutter
of glistening ephemeridae that wheel and skim delightfully through the
limpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparing
themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of
pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poemes ailes,"
flights toward some island of the blest. They are all aspirations "vers
la flamme," toward the spiritual fire of joy, toward the paradise of
divine pleasure and divine activity. The Fifth Sonata is like the
marshaling of forces, the mighty spring of some radiant flyer launching
himself into the empyrean. White gleaming pinions wheel and hover in the
godlike close of the "Poeme divine." Impotent caged wings poise
themselves for flight in the mystic Seventh Sonata, beat for an instant,
are ominously still. Sometimes, as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is
like a gorgeous tropical bird preening hims