Scriabin's music is characterized by great rhythmic complexity and melodies marked by upward skips. He was born in Moscow, and trained at the Moscow Conservatory, where he later taught piano. After 1903 he devoted himself to composition and to concert tours, performing his own piano works.

Scriabin, greatly influenced by theosophy, envisioned a synthesis of all the arts in the service of religion. He attempted to prove the relationship between tone and color by inventing a clavier à lumières, or color keyboard, which would project on a screen colors supposedly corresponding to musical tones. It was never built, and his orchestral tone poem Prometheus, The Poem of Fire (1910), was performed with simple color slides. Scriabin abandoned traditional harmony for his own system based on a "mystic"chord built entirely on intervals of a fourth: C F-sharp B-flat E A D.

His works include ten piano sonatas; his third symphony, The Divine Poem (1903); and The Poem of Ecstasy (1908), for orchestra.