He grew to his high poetic stature from an elegant and aristocratic craftsman of the school of Chopin. More than that of any modern master, his art is rooted in the great romantic tradition as it comes to us through Chopin, Wagner, Liszt and Strauss; and develops almost logically out of it. And in the compositions of his first period, the period that ends, roughly, with the piano concerto, the allegiance is marked, the discipleship undeniable. The influence of Chopin is ubiquitous. Scriabine writes mazurkas, preludes, études, nocturnes and waltzes in his master's cool, polite, fastidious general manner. These pieces, too, might seem to have been written in order to be played in noble salons lit by massive candelabra, to countesses with bare shoulders. The twenty-four preludes Opus 11, for instance, are full of Chopinesque turns, of Chopinesque morbidezza, of Chopinesque melodies. The harmonic scheme rarely transgresses the limits which Chopin set himself. The pieces are obviously the work of one who in the course of concert-playing has come to discover the finesses of the Pole's workmanship. And yet, César Cui's caustic description of the preludes as "Bits filched from Chopin's trousseau," is eminently unjust. For even in those days, when Scriabine was a member of the Russian salon school, there were attractive original elements in his compositions. There is real poetry and freshness in these soft-colored pieces. The treatment of the instrument is bold, and, at moments, more satisfactory than Chopin's. Scriabine, for instance, gives the left hand a greater independence and significance than does as a rule his master. Nor does he indulge in the repetitions and recapitulations that mar so many of the latter's works. His sense of form is already alert. And through the silken melodic line, the sweet, rich harmonies, there already makes itself felt something that is to Chopin's spirit as Russian iron is to Polish silver.
It is perhaps only in the compositions subsequent to Opus 50 that Scriabine emerges in the fullness of his stature. For it is only in them that he finally abandoned the major-minor system to which he had hitherto adhered, and substituted for it the other that permitted his exquisite delicious sense of pianistic color, his infinitely delicate gift of melody, his gorgeous, far-spreading harmonic feeling, free play. And it is only in these later pieces that he achieved the perfection of form, particularly of the sonata form, of which the Ninth Sonata is the magistral example, and which makes his craft comparable to Bach's in its mastery of a medium, and enables one to mention the "Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue" and the Ninth Sonata justly in a single breath. And yet, the compositions of the middle period, the one that follows immediately the early, immature, Chopinesque period, are scarcely less rich and refined, scarcely less important. No doubt the influence of Scriabine's masters, though considerably on the wane, is still evident. The "Poème satanique" refines on Liszt. The Third Sonata, despite its lambent andante, is patently the work of one who has studied his Liszt and loves his Chopin. And yet, these works are characteristically male and raging and proud. And in all the works of this period there appears something new and magnificent that has scarcely before informed piano music. There is a truly Russian depth and vehemence and largeness in this now languid, now mystical, now leonine music, that lifts it entirely out of the company of the works of the Petrograd salon school into that of those composers who made orchestra and opera speak in the national tongue. The rhythms are joyously, barbarically, at times almost frenetically, free. They are finely various and depart almost entirely from the one-two, one-two, the one-two-three, one-two-three that makes monotonous so much of Chopin. At moments, the tones of the piano march with some of the now festive, now majestic, now solemn, movement of the orchestral processionals of a Moussorgsky and a Borodin. And one has the sense of having encountered only in sumptuous Eastern stuffs, in silken carpets and golden mosaics, or in the orchestral faëry of some of the Russian composers, in the orchestral chemistry of, say, a Rimsky-Korsakoff, such brimming, delicious colors. Nevertheless, the voluptuousness and vehemence are held in fastidious restraint. Scriabine is always the fine gentleman, intolerant, for all the splendor of his style, of any excess, of any exaggeration, of any breach of taste. And throughout the work, there is evidence of the steady, restless bourgeoning of the exquisite, disquieting, almost Chinese delicacy which in the work of the last period attains its marvelous efflorescence.