Skrjabin - Opus 68 for large orchestra

There would have been no sense in orchestrating Skrjabin’s 9th Sonata in a historically correct way. My interest was in projecting this music onto my own sonic ethos. The work is at a remove from Skrjabin; it is like a commentary leaving almost all the pitches untouched and adding only a few more. The pitches and harmonic scheme are Skrjabin’s, while the tone-colours and their alternations are by Haas. With its formal layout and harmonic boldness, the 9th Sonata cries out for a more expanded sound, extending beyond the piano only; I wanted to translate the subcutaneous in this music into orchestral language. I was gripped by the formal aspect; the sonata breaks off just at the moment when the recapitulation should be starting. That “reprise” signifies a hush, a disaster – I identify very closely with this approach to a recapitulation.

Skrjabin proceeds from a single motif which burrows its way into the music, dissipates it and destroys it. He persists with that melodic gestalt, which changes only in its tone-colour – that is incredibly fascinating.

In my music I often configure spirals beginning in the infinite and continuing into the infinite, their direction never wavering. Skrjabin’s 9th Sonata has that, too; instances of minor thirds harmonically create an endless spiral. My orchestration elucidates that – it does not work with the piano alone, of course, because it cannot create such a spiral that way; the piano sound cannot begin dal niente [from nothing] or be altered after the keys are struck.

I chose not to use microtonality in this piece; Skrjabin’s original thrives on the chromatically twelve-tone, tempered harmonic system. Yes, there are moments which could be analysed in terms of microtonality, but they cannot be filtered out of the context of equal temperament; for example, when he mixes two overtone chords a tritone apart with each other, it only works because the overtone chords are derived from the tempered scale.

Skrjabin works from the outset with those tempered, deformed overtone scales; it would be wrong to try to deform that again by reworking it – that would destroy the sense of the music.

Apart from the prominent accordion part (I like it because of its forlorn tone-colour), the orchestration is conventional other than the tympani, which play a huge part. I used them almost like a piano, except more as melodic instruments.

Georg Friedrich Haas (from an interview with Martina Seeber)