Scriabin: Waltz in F minor, Op. 1

About the piece.

Scriabin wrote the Waltz in F minor around 1885 or 1886, when he was thirteen or fourteen, a cadet and a piano pupil of Nikolai Zverev. It was not published until 1893, when P. Jurgenson in Moscow brought it out together with a few other early pieces. Those were his first published works, and he received no fee for them.

At least five pieces survive from those teenage years, three of them waltzes. Why this one became Op. 1 is not known. It is a single waltz of around three minutes, and it sounds like what it is: a young pianist who loved Chopin, writing salon music in his style. Reviewers of the recordings keep saying it could pass for Chopin. The one hint of the later Scriabin is a sharply dissonant harmony in the middle section.

This tutorial is made from Xiayin Wang’s recording on Naxos, which Gramophone praised in 2009. Among the many other recordings are Stephen Coombs’s on Hyperion, Michael Ponti’s and Maria Lettberg’s in their complete Scriabin sets, and Valentina Lisitsa’s.

Learn it at your own speed.

This tutorial was made with LumaKeys, a Mac app for learning piano from falling notes. Open a MIDI file of the piece, or transcribe a piano recording you have, then slow it down, loop the hard bars and practise one hand at a time. The download is free.