In the early years of the twentieth century, when vital new forces were revolutionizing the arts, Russian-born Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was among the visionary pioneers who sought a new musical language. Scriabin began the process of a complete break with all musical conventions at least a decade before the advances of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. By 1905 he was immersed in a search for a way to express, in sound, his obsession with mystical and...