THE MYSTERIUM

Two weeks ago I finished my most difficult semester of college thus far.  This statement (the part about it being difficult) carries legitimate weight, since I’m in the third year of the drudgery they call “higher education.”  I don’t know exactly why it seemed so hard – maybe because it was my first semester as a married student, or because my professors were all kinds of demanding, or because I was always operating on a deficit of sleep.  The college student’s relationship with sleep is the most unhealthy relationship you’ve ever heard of.  Sleep and I were mortal enemies at midnight when an assignment was due the next morning, but bosom friends when it came time to get up for a 7:30 Music Literature class.  I would welcome him after lunch and allow him to steal away my afternoon, then curse him into the ground when I woke and found that he had been distracting me from important obligations.  I was as fickle a lover as ever there was. 

So it was a crazy semester, but a successful one if measured in the way school should always be measured (and rarely is).  I learned things, and I was made to think.  Looking back over it now, the frustration of it all is still fresh in my mind, but I can also see how much I grew in the course of those fifteen perilous weeks.

I was introduced to Alexander Scriabin during a class called “Visual Music from Mimesis to Abstraction.”  The name is a mouthful, and the class was too, but it was a delicious and enjoyable mouthful, so it wasn’t all that bad.  Through the course of the class we examined the ideas about beauty, starting in Ancient Greece and continuing all the way up to now.  It turns out that what the Greeks thought was beautiful isn’t necessarily what we think is beautiful, and depending on who you ask and what they think about art, music and the world, you may find that people don’t agree about beauty even now.  There are so many different kinds of art being made by so many different people that it seems at times that we aren’t even on the same planet, much less thinking about the same idea of beauty.  But ultimately, it turns out that we are. 

Alexander Scriabin was an artist with a very original artistic ideal.  Actually, he was a musician, but he had plans to make a certain kind of art that was about more than music.  In fact, it was going to be about everything.  It was going to be mind-boggling.  He had it all planned out.  He just died before he could finish making it.

His idea was similar to that of an earlier musician name Richard Wagner, of whom my professor said, “we don’t admire him as a human being, but as a philosopher.”  Wagner (pronounced “vog-nur” to rhyme with “dog fur,” and I will shoot you if you try to say it any other way!) was perhaps the most dreadful person that has ever been admired, but despite being horrible he presented a blueprint for what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk which is very important to people who study the connections between visual art and music.  The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk was that all of the arts – including music, dance and drama – are joined together in one performance.  Scriabin took Wagner’s idea and made it something even bigger and more ambitious.  He called it Mysterium.

First of all, Scriabin did not want people to come and merely sit to watch a performance.  In his Mysterium, everyone is a participant, so that the work became more of an experience than a show – “I will not have any sort of theatre,” he said as he explained how he planned to depart from Wagner’s vision.  Scriabin planned to include sights, sounds, smells and tastes in his Mysterium.  There would be music, there would be dancing, there would be lights and colors and poetry.  It is really no wonder that he hardly even started this project – his ideas about what it would be must have seemed daunting even to him.  He must have realized that he could never live up to everything he wanted Mysterium to be.

The Mysterium was to begin with a tremolo chord (a chord which rocks back and forth between two or more notes very quickly) and with these words:

 I will admit that as I read about Scriabin and the Mysterium, I was overwhelmed.  It was unbelievable that he had ever believed that such a thing was possible (or did he believe it at all?)  It was almost a ludicrous idea.  But I loved it.  I put down the book, looked at my husband, and said, “I think we should do it.  I think we should make the Mysterium.”

I’m not sure that we ever will.  But the idea of it will never leave me.  The idea of bringing together all of the arts, and doing so in a way so complete and so perfect, is completely enchanting to me.  I am primarily a writer, which gives me a bit of a handicap, since writing is considered an art only in the loosest sense, but I am strongly attracted to music, dance and painting – to beauty.  To me, the Mysterium represents the highest ideal of beauty.  

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that Scriabin was not describing anything very foreign to us.  He was describing life.  Where else but in our human journey will we encounter music, light, color, poetry, sound, smell taste and dance, and be permitted to interact with all of those elements?  Where else do all the senses meet? 

So here I am.  One girl, almost a woman, trying to dissect life and put it back together in a way which shows the inherent beauty of it all.  Maybe I will succeed; maybe I will not.  I see so much beauty every day, and I want to make other people understand how much it invades our lives.  There is so much to take in, because life is a Mysterium.

Welcome.  It will be an adventure, I promise.

Information on Alexander Scriabin is taken from Visible Deeds of Music: art and music from Wagner to Cage, by Simon Shaw-Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).