Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexander Scriabin

Scriabin isn’t describing a cute programmatic gimmick so much as smuggling an entire cosmology into a musical footnote. Calling the Tenth Sonata “a sonata of insects” sounds whimsical until you remember his late style: shimmering trills, tremolos, and flickering high-register motifs that behave less like “themes” than like swarms. The insect image gives listeners permission to hear the sonata as motion without human narrative - sensation first, story second.

“Insects are born from the sun” is pure Scriabin metaphysics. By the 1910s, he’d drifted from Romantic psychology toward theosophy, synesthesia, and a near-mystical belief in art as spiritual ignition. The sun isn’t scenery; it’s a generator of ecstasy and transformation. Insects, in this framing, are not lowly creatures but emissaries of radiance: tiny bodies animated by light, jittering with the same energy the music tries to bottleneck.

“they are the sun’s kisses” sharpens the intent. A kiss is intimate, brief, electric - contact rather than possession. That’s how the sonata behaves: flashes of brilliance that land and vanish, caress and sting, never settling into the comfy architecture people expect from the word “sonata.” Scriabin is effectively instructing performance and listening: keep it airborne, iridescent, almost weightless.

Context matters: this is a late work by a composer increasingly preoccupied with transcendence, written as Europe hovers on the brink of catastrophe. The “insects” aren’t escapism; they’re a nervous, ecstatic micro-world - life vibrating at the edge of illumination, as if intensity itself could outrun history.