Moscow museums · House museums
House museums · since 1922
The Scriabin Museum
The Scriabin Memorial Museum-Flat
A flat from which nothing was carried out: Scriabin rented it for his last three years and died here in 1915, and it became a museum in 1922 — almost without a gap. Furniture, books, piano and the fittings of the study are the very ones. But the chief thing is another: Scriabin conceived music together with light, and the trace of that conception survives in the flat — the colour score of Prometheus and the light apparatus. No other composer’s museum in Russia shows the idea and not merely the domestic life.
Minimum route
45 minutes – 1 hour
Founded
1922
What to see
The Bechstein grand at which the last works were written. The study and the library with the owner’s markings. The colour score of Prometheus and the colour-light apparatus assembled to his design. A concert hall in the same house.
Minimum route — 45 minutes – 1 hour for the essentials
An hour.
- 30 minutesthe flat: study, drawing room, bedroom.
- 20 minutesthe colour-light: without a demonstration it cannot be read, so ask the attendant.
- 10 minutesthe Arbat lanes round about, which are part of the matter here.
Reference
About the museum
Scriabin lived in this flat from 1912 until his death in 1915. The museum was opened in 1922 by his widow and his pupils; it has been a branch of what is now the Museum of Music ever since.
The building
An ordinary Arbat apartment house of the turn of the century. The value here is not the architecture but the fact that inside nothing has been moved.
Good to know
The museum is small and a group fills it entirely. The light apparatus is not always demonstrated — it is worth asking in advance.
What to read
Faubion Bowers, “Scriabin, a Biography” — the standard life in English, and the one that takes the colour hearing seriously instead of treating it as an eccentricity. New York: Dover, 1996.
ISBN 9780486288970
Getting in
How to get there
Metro Smolenskaya or Arbatskaya, about seven minutes from each through the Arbat lanes.
Opening times
Check the hours on the site of the Museum of Music, of which this is a branch.
When to go
A concert evening: the house has its own hall, and Scriabin is played here on his own piano. On an ordinary day the flat is quiet and almost empty.
Contacts
Of interest to children
A conversation about colour hearing and about why music should want light is too early for children. From 12, and for those who study music.
· No. 76