Nikolay Obukhov
The Russian composer Nikolay Obukhov (1892-1954) studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Maximilian Steinberg and Nikolay Cherepnin, and emigrated to Paris in 1918. He followed composition and orchestration lessons there with Ravel and, existing on the margins of musical life, dedicated himself to his life’s work: Le Livre de Vie, an 800-plus page composition for voices, piano quatre mains and ‘croix sonore’, an invention of the composer and precursor of the ondes martenot. Not surprisingly, this work remains largely unperformed to the present day. Le
Livre de Vie can be seen, both musically and philosophically, as the work of Obukhov’s compatriot Skryabin taken to the extreme. What the unfinished Mysterium was to Scriabin, Le
Livre de Vie was likewise to Obukhov: not just a composition, but a revelation in the form of a musical ritual, intended for performance in a temple specially designed for this purpose. As with Skryabin, Obukhov’s focus was on ecstasy, the isstupleniye of the Russian mystics.
Four Balmont Songs
Of the four songs to texts by Konstantin Balmont (originally for voice and piano), the first two (from 1913) show the most kinship with Skryabin. The vocal style is more conventional than the instrumental language, with its altered chords and tritone-dominated bass lines. Although the later poèmes lithurgiques (1918) also relate idiomatically to late Skryabin, they give a very clear signal of what is to come in Le Livre de Vie. All the trademarks of his later work are evident in the vocal part. In addition to conventional singing, the performer screams (avec un cri aigu; râlant et poussant un cri perçant), wails (sanglotant, avec extase), sighs, moans, whistles, sings in falsetto and glides from one note to the other. This vocal glissando can be regarded as the symbol of the breaching of the traditional limitations of twelve tones, becoming what amounts to an infinite sound pallet.
Skryabin’s biographer Boris de Schloezer recalled Obukhov in St. Petersburg as a pale young man with a fixed gaze, whose music existed in a sort of ‘state of hibernation’. Of these songs he wrote: ‘The dark and mysterious passion, the exceptional exaltedness of this art seen by some as abnormal, perverse, even hysterical, offers us a glimpse of a new world: a nocturnal world of spine-tingling and fearsome, but at times also strangely sweet visions; a world that is not subject to our judgment, our standards or to any general foothold in our logic.’
Of the four songs to texts by Konstantin Balmont (originally for voice and piano), the first two (from 1913) show the most kinship with Skryabin. The vocal style is more conventional than the instrumental language, with its altered chords and tritone-dominated bass lines. Although the later poèmes lithurgiques (1918) also relate idiomatically to late Skryabin, they give a very clear signal of what is to come in Le Livre de Vie. All the trademarks of his later work are evident in the vocal part. In addition to conventional singing, the performer screams (avec un cri aigu; râlant et poussant un cri perçant), wails (sanglotant, avec extase), sighs, moans, whistles, sings in falsetto and glides from one note to the other. This vocal glissando can be regarded as the symbol of the breaching of the traditional limitations of twelve tones, becoming what amounts to an infinite sound pallet.
Skryabin’s biographer Boris de Schloezer recalled Obukhov in St. Petersburg as a pale young man with a fixed gaze, whose music existed in a sort of ‘state of hibernation’. Of these songs he wrote: ‘The dark and mysterious passion, the exceptional exaltedness of this art seen by some as abnormal, perverse, even hysterical, offers us a glimpse of a new world: a nocturnal world of spine-tingling and fearsome, but at times also strangely sweet visions; a world that is not subject to our judgment, our standards or to any general foothold in our logic.’
The two poèmes lithurgiques in particular exceed, in their original scoring, the limits of normal pianistic capabilities. The extremities of register, dynamics and performance indications suggest something much more colourful than simply a piano, and in his instrumental arrangement for an ensemble of nineteen players I have attempted to imbue the music with the vast visions of sound Obukhov may have had in mind. As a result not only Obukhov’s kinship with Skryabin came to the surface, but also, unexpectedly, in certain passages Obukhov’s music seemed to touch on the exuberant sound of another exponent of religious ecstasy, Olivier Messiaen. (Elmer Schönberger)