Scriabin House-Museum

The museum charts the life and works of the famous Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), who spent the last years of his life in this house not far from the bohemian district of The Arbat. Born in Moscow in 1871, Scriabin initially attended the Moscow Cadet School before concentrating on his music and choosing to enter the Moscow Conservatoire in 1888. He studied piano and composition under some of the most celebrated Russian musicians of the day and alongside fellow student and future composer Sergei Rakhmaninov.

Scriabin's reputation as both pianist and composer grew steadily and his works were regularly published and performed in the concert halls of St. Petersburg and Moscow. He developed close relationships with fellow composers Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov and became more and more interested in philosophy and musical experimentation. He developed his own very complicated harmonic style and sought to combine all the arts - music, poetry, drama and the visual arts - in one greater celebration of creativity. Scriabin believed that this all-encompassing art form would have a much more profound impact on the spectator that any single form. In his later years this theory of the "synthesis of arts" was being echoed elsewhere in Moscow, most notably in Vsevolod Meyerhold's theatrical productions at the Moscow Art Theater.

Scriabin's house has been preserved just as it was in his day. The composer's study features a Bechstein grand piano and a curious color-coded keyboard, which Scriabin commissioned from the physicist Alexander Moser especially for the performance of his symphonic poem "Prometheus" in 1911. This premiere called for the projection of colors onto a screen to correspond with the different notes of the harmonic scale. The museum also features numerous photographs of the composer and his circle of artistic and literary friends and Scriabin's extensive library of works on philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and poetry.