Scent Symphony

The latest mash-up: Cartier x Scriabin. Chloe Schama investigates the ever-expanding fusion of live music and fragrance.

In March of 1915, a crowd of fashionable patrons gathered for the New York premiere of Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire. The Russian-born Scriabin had composed the piece by means of what he called his “color hearing,” a synesthesiainspired interpretation of the correlation between notes and hues— something the staging at Carnegie Hall was meant to reflect. “Over the heads of the musicians stretches a gauze screen,” reported one gushing contemporary account, “and across this screen play many-colored lights, blending, sweeping onward in overpowering beauty.” It was the first complete performance of the first composition arranged this way, notes musicologist James Baker, and a culmination of the pianist and composer’s future-forward music. Mere weeks later, the avant-garde visionary died, taken down by a simple infection.

This month, more than a hundred years after that premiere, a new iteration of Prometheus will unfold at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco—one that involves not just color but scent as well, with three distinct fragrances released at key moments throughout the performance. The effect intends to create an all-encompassing experience—and given that the myth of Prometheus describes nothing less than the triumph of human ingenuity against the brute forces of nature, a concert that seeks to elevate its patrons to another plane seems appropriate.