| Few composers have either elicited more rapturous praise or suffered harsher denigration than Alexander Scriabin, yet no scholar has tracked fundamental shifts in his popularity. This dissertation explores the vicissitudes of his reception in Russia and the West and assesses the impact of these fluctuations on his canonic status. While Scriabin ranked as a pioneering modernist from the 1910s through the mid-1920s, over the next four decades, his music failed to find popular favor in either the Soviet Union or the West. The 1972 centenary of his birth renewed an appreciation for Scriabin in both regions, but by the 1980s, popular interest dwindled while scholarly interest continued to thrive. Ultimately, conflicting images of the composer spawned by historians, performers, and critics have left Scriabin everything but an artist of his own age. The inconstant reception his music has met with and the exceptions it has posed to accepted Isms has prevented the composer from maintaining a stable position in the Western canon.;Chapter One explores how Scriabin frustrated historians' expectations for Russian music traditions and early twentieth-century style. The composer's failure to establish a compositional school further marginalized him in the eyes of historiographers until late in the twentieth century, when cultural historians and analysts mutually recognized Scriabin as a representative of Russian symbolism. Chapters Two through Five compare two eras of critical acclaim (1915-1925 and 1960-1975) with two periods of misunderstanding or neglect (1925-1960 and 1975-2000) in order to assess the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic factors that shaped archetypes of the composer and dictated his canonic status.;Primary texts consist of Western and Soviet journals, newspaper articles, memoirs, monographs, and performance or recording reviews. Vital secondary materials include period studies, historical surveys, and scholarly essays that evaluate Scriabin's significance in twentieth-century music. This dissertation synthesizes a wealth of newly consulted and recently published sources on Scriabin and overturns several persistent myths about his reception. The appendix offers translations of seven primary source articles by Soviet authors of the 1920s-1940s. |
