Alexander Scriabin

Scriabin was born and died in Moscow, and nearly all his music is for piano. His ten sonatas trace a change from a Chopin-like Romantic to a composer whose harmony has no home key. No. 1 (finished in 1892) has four movements and ends with a funeral march in F minor. No. 2, the Sonata-Fantasy in G-sharp minor, has two movements and a programme: a quiet night by the sea, then a stormy ocean.

From No. 4 (about 1903) the harmony grows more chromatic and dissonant. No. 4 has two movements played without a break, and the slow theme of the first returns as the climax of the fast second. No. 5 (1907) is his first sonata in a single movement. The last five sonatas have no key signature. In them Scriabin builds chords from stacked fourths and treats dissonance as colour rather than tension. His "mystic chord" belongs to this world, as do his interest in theosophy and a private system that linked keys to colours.

Nos. 6 to 9, written between 1911 and 1913, are each in one movement. No. 6 moves between dreamlike calm and sudden terror. No. 7, which Scriabin himself called the White Mass, is full of chords that imitate ringing bells and near the end has a five-octave arpeggio like a flash of light. No. 8 opens with muted bell-like chords, and its texture is dense and contrapuntal. No. 9, the Black Mass, was named by someone else but approved by him; it grows from a trill-based theme into a grotesque march.