Alexander Scriabin
Vers la flamme - Poème
Op. 72
This piece describes the world’s inexorable slide toward death and destruction by fire. Like many of Scriabin’s late works, it's notorious for its difficulty and the physical demands it places on the performer.
Year: 1914
Period: Late Romantic
Piano score: Scanned score 
Audiovisual Study Tool
Toward the Flame
Like many of Scriabin’s late works, this piece is notorious for its difficulty and the physical demands it places on the performer. This piece describes the world’s inexorable slide toward death and destruction by fire. Scriabin firmly believed that the world was storing heat and that it would destroy itself in a conflagration. The half-steps of the main melody stand in for tongues of flame, and the emotional turmoil of the piece signifies the way that fire devours objects and leaves them desiccated and destroyed.Background
This piece was composed in 1914, when Scriabin was also planning his "Gesamtkunstwerk" Mysterium, a great enactment of music, dance, ceremony, color, and perfume, whose effect he hoped would be cosmic. He considered all his late works as preparations for a "supreme ecstatic mystery". Scriabin didn’t have long for this world at the time he wrote this piece. Less than a year later, he died of sepsis after a pimple on his lip became infected.Forum posts about this piece:
Piece you can ALMOST play but always eludes you by fftransform
Hnngh, every year or two I pick up Vers la flamme for a few weeks (I think I was asking about it last year on here, even), then eventually drop it as I make little progress. I just can't get those...
Video Analysis: Scriabin's Vers la Flamme 🔥 by fredviner
Scriabin’s ‘Vers la Flamme’ paints an ecstatic vision of the apocalypse in which the composer's pianistic pyrotechnics, synaesthesia and spiritually all dramatically collide. But what's it all...
Vers la flamme Middle Section Interp by fftransform
Started this piece a while back, dropped it, then restarted it recently. In the middle, transitional section between the opening 'chorale' and the tremolos, what are people's thoughts...
Vers la flamme difficulty? by cuberdrift
Have anyone of you attempted or performed this piece before? I'm curious to know as to how difficult it may be in comparison to: Scriabin - Fantasy in b minor Scriabin - Etude Op. 8 No....
Scriabin by artlin02
Can someone tell me the difficulty order of all the Scriabin poèmes! Op 32, 34, 36, 41, 44, 63, 69, 71, 72 (don’t know if there is any more, is...
difficulty of late Sctiabin? by pianoville
What are your thooughts on the late works by Scriabin such as the sonatas, vers la flamme or the preludes op. 74? Are any of those pieces within my range? I have never played Scriabin before and the biggest...
What's Your Method on Polyrhythms? by xdjuicebox
[img width=600 height=317]i.imgur.com/g8DUmNV.png[/img] So I'm working on this right now. And I learned it. But it took wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy longer than I had planned for, and I...
Difficulty of Scriabin's Vers La Flamme? by ilsa
Can anyone tell me how difficult this piece is in terms of diploma levels? For example, would it be at the difficulty of DipABRSM/ ATCL, LRSM/LTCL or FRSM/FTCL? Or perhaps compare it to other...
Vers la Flamme by lil_stevie
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vers_la_Flamme 'Vers la flamme, Op. 72 (Towards the flame) was one of Scriabin's last few pieces for piano, written in 1914. The melody of the piece...
Scraibin's Vers la flamme by steinway88
Would this be consisdered a tone poem or sonata? And what do you think of the...
Vers la flamme: Poem - Op. 72 is a piano piece by the late romantic composer Alexander Scriabin who lived between the years 1872 and 1915.
The composition was first published in 1914 and is included in Miscellaneous pieces by Scriabin.