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In\u00a0early April 1915, the Russian music critic Leonid Sabaneyev visited his friend, the composer Alexander Scriabin<\/a><\/strong>, at the latter’s Moscow home. He found the composer in bed with the covers tucked up to his nose, suffering from an infected boil on his upper lip. Scriabin tried to make a good fist of it, making small talk and insisting he would be better in no time, though the furuncle nestling amidst his fulsome moustache was now so big he couldn\u2019t pronounce his consonants properly.\u00a0<\/p> Sabaneyev noticed the piano lid was open, a familiar white notebook on its music stand. Inside were notes and sketches for a work that had occupied Scriabin\u2019s thoughts for over a decade; a vast Gesamtkunstwerk<\/strong><\/a><\/em> more ambitious in scope and conception than any composition before or since. In comparison, Wagner<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s late, great opera Parsifal<\/a><\/strong><\/em> would seem a mere bagatelle. <\/p> Scriabin\u2019s work was Mysterium<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 a medieval miracle play raised to the point of cosmic transfiguration. A tumult of light and sound, perfumes and pyrotechnics, it would last seven whole days. And it would climax \u2013 its composer believed \u2013 with the end of the world as we know it and the birth of a new, \u2018nobler\u2019 human race.\u00a0<\/p> The composer\u2019s grand plan was never completed. Mere weeks after Sabaneyev\u2019s visit, Scriabin was dead from septicaemia, aged just 43. Thousands lined the streets for his funeral. The newspaper obituaries in his homeland declared him the greatest of contemporary composers. <\/p>‘A seven-day tumult of light and sound, perfumes and pyrotechnics’<\/h2>