Alexander Scriabin completed his 2 Poems, Op. 63 for solo piano in 1912. These pieces depict an undeniable French influence that initially reveals itself in the name of the two movements, "Masque," and "Etrangeté." Cumulatively, these works add up to slightly less than three minutes in duration. Though Scriabin would write highly original works during his next two, final years of his life, there is little that can be called original about these pieces. Anyone acquainted with the piano music of Debussy from a decade beforehand will automatically hear the similarities. The Russian composer spent most of his career aggrandizing himself as a messiah, but wrote music that had already been matched and surpassed in France, Germany, and Austria, in invention as well as lyricism. Because Scriabin spent much of his life acting strangely and actively cultivating a macabre weirdness with messianic pretensions, many people were bamboozled into regarding him as an avant-garde composer. There is truth to this, but not in the way he is said to have been. Scriabin, like Stravinsky and many other composers who were willing to recast tonality rather than discard it, successfully developed a tonal sound that complemented his own view, with was large, bizarre, and celestial. Works such as his Op. 63 do contain charm and some originality, but they are not indicative of some previously unfathomed way to compose. More annoying were the extra-musical associations of apocalypse; his works had everything to do with his fervent belief that the world was about to be destroyed, and that somehow he was capable of saving certain sensitive segments of the population with his music. Some people were willing to believe this, and many writers have emulated the blaring strangeness of the man in order to give their own work more notice. However, the 2 Poems, Op. 63 are simply a pair of well-written chamber works, brief and engaging. The power of the harmonies was not new, and the free-flowing forms had come up already in Paris, as far back as 20 years previously. This is not to say that these two small works should be discarded. They are certainly worth hearing, but the hype that has surrounded them and the entire output of this composer has robbed it of some of its impact. They are good enough musical poems that the beauty they contain are genuine, though what is said about Scriabin clouds the issue. Listeners would be well advised to simply enjoy the music and not take any proselytizing information regarding it and the composer seriously.

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