interview by Oliver Kupper
photography by Pat Martin
The Greek myth of Prometheus is one of the most powerful metaphors for our current era of emergency. Seeing Earthly mortals living in the brutal, primitive dark, he steals fire from the gods and offers it to humans as a form of technology and knowledge that would become vital to civilization. Knowing that humans would destroy the world with this new resource, Prometheus was bound eternally to a rock by the gods, where his liver was eaten each morning by an eagle and regenerated each night. In 1911, Russian composer and theosophist Alexander Scriabin created Prometheus: The Poem of Fire; a short, powerful composition inspired by the myth. It was intended to be performed not only with sound but also with a synesthetic explosion of lights. In March of 2024, The San Francisco Symphony and Cartier presented a multisensory reimagining of Scriabin’s Prometheus with olfactory curation, led by Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Cartier’s in-house perfumer Mathilde Laurent. Together, they discuss their immersive collaboration.
OLIVER KUPPER The myth of Prometheus, who gave the world fire, light, and inspiration very much fits within the milieu of levity. Through the lens of Alexander Scriabin's piece, what are your definitions of levity?
MATHILDE LAURENT The function of art is elevation. A way towards levity. This work, and the way Scriabin wanted to make all art forms meet, is really important nowadays. I think it helps us find a sense of optimism and light in our lives. Total art was a way to unite art with all the senses. This is where olfaction can help because it’s a very specific path in the brain and in the body. It is the only sense that creates unity between the brain, the heart, and the gut. This is a definition of ecstasy and of transcendence. So, we are here with French pianist Jean-Yves [Thibaudet] and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen trying to create a transcendental experience toward light and joy.
JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET Beautiful. I agree with everything you said. God only knows how much we need to be elevated in this world with everything that's going on. That's why music is here too. I think music is the true elevation of the soul. After a concert, people would come to see me and say, “You know, for two hours you made me forget about all my problems, and it felt so good.” We are transporting people both with the music and the olfaction. We are taking them to another world. Now, Scriabin was probably a little crazy, in a good way. He was incredibly ahead of his time. I don't think he could show his pieces in the way we can do it now, certainly not with the lights. So, it was only an invention in his mind. And his music is very unique. You hear one chord of Scriabin and you know it couldn't be anybody else. I remember with Mathilde, when we heard it together—she was listening to it for the first time—how powerful it is. It's a power that is very hard to describe in words. He invented a language of harmonies, of colors. I can't even tell you how many years I've been dreaming about this project.
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN Prometheus is one of the most important myths. Today, we are facing, for the first time in the history of humankind, a moment where we are potentially using the tools we have developed to destroy not only ourselves, but the planet. And of course, it all started with Prometheus on a highly symbolic level. Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem Of Fire is technically a piano concerto. It's a piece that doesn't deal with the story in any particular narrative way. It's an expression of the ecstatic moment when Prometheus hands over the fire to humankind, which was, in his opinion, deserving of it. Scriabin was interested in this kind of mystical expression of joy and excitement. He was one of the pioneers of describing sexual love in his music. Not in concrete terms, but the sort of anticipation, excitement, and the climax. Scriabin somehow saw the act of Prometheus stealing the fire and giving it to humankind as not only the ultimate gift but also the ultimate sacrifice, because as we know, Prometheus was punished. So, it becomes almost like a physical manifestation of love. The only reason Prometheus gives the fire to humans is because he loves them. The Greek gods were fairly ordinary people, except that they were immortal. I think that's the center of this: the idea that what makes a life valuable and worthy is the fact that we know that it's finite. Every second counts.
KUPPER It's completely fascinating. Mathilde, you studied as a molecular chemist, which is the perfect background for somebody going into olfaction. Can you talk about your background in that?
LAURENT I wouldn't dare call myself a molecular chemist. I went to university to study chemistry, but I did not perform well. I only got my degree in chemistry to become a perfumer. I was scientific enough to get a degree. (laughs)
KUPPER What was it about olfaction that inspired you to begin with? I'm curious what your first memories of perfume were.
LAURENT I came to perfumery to express myself about the world and beauty—to offer something and to have a dialogue with other people. When I was a child, I was not only seeing and listening, I was smelling, touching, and tasting everything. I was hypersensitive. So, when I was thinking of choosing a job, I hesitated between architecture, photography, and perfumery. I was creative, so I needed a job with artistic expression. I was about to become a photographer, but then something interesting happened. I got a job writing articles for different psychoanalysts and scientists who were learning how a perfumer's brain works. This is when I realized that photography and perfumery are totally linked. Each smell has a photograph and each photograph has a smell.
KUPPER Both are very connected to memory.
LAURENT Exactly. They work together. I cannot smell something without printing an image in my mind. And now, I know that the brain works like that. You can register a photograph without the smell, but you cannot register a smell without a photograph of it. It’s the olfactory path I was speaking of previously. When you smell something, all of your senses are activated. Each time you detect a certain smell, you will come back to where you were, eating what you ate, listening to what you listened to, and feeling the same emotion, whether it’s a good or very bad one.
KUPPER It's very Proustian. Jean-Yves, I want to talk to you about your beginnings as a pianist because you were performing from a very young age.
THIBAUDET I was seven—a late bloomer. Growing up, I felt very lucky because I never thought of doing anything other than music, in particular, the piano. All my friends were having nightmares, saying, “We go to bed and think: what am I going to do when I grow up?” It was very heavy. So, I felt lucky. I said, “Well, I'll be a pianist.” I didn't know what it meant, but I thought it would just happen. My parents were not professional musicians, but music was very present at home and there was a piano. I also remember the sound of my father playing the violin. Music is almost like a smell for me. Music is also very much connected to memory and the brain in the same way that the other senses are.
KUPPER It's interesting that music and scent both have the language of notes. Mathilde, how did you write this score through the notes of olfaction?
LAURENT I just had to listen to the music. What I wanted to express through olfaction is what Jean-Yves and Esa-Pekka wanted to present to the audience through the music. So, I needed to have them tell me what they were feeling when playing, and the meaning of the different moments of the piece. It was about listening and sharing, and understanding the different instruments. We all agreed on three different areas in the piece: before the fire, the moment when the fire appears, and after the fire. Before the fire, the world was a dangerous place where man had to survive against thunder, cold, and wildness. Nature was an enemy. Immediately, I smell this place and I only have to evoke it: the smell of thunder, the smell of water, of ice, of anxiety, of cold nature, of wild vegetation, of humid earth, of stones.
KUPPER Esa-Pekka, when this was brought to you, how did you imagine the symphony hall adapting to this new olfactory technology?
SALONEN It's all about technology because every attempt to combine music and scent generally fails. We all know from experience that perfume lingers, because the alcohol, which carries the scent molecules, takes time to evaporate. Over a number of years, technology was developed to dry diffuse molecules without any carrier, which means that the experience is instantaneous and finite. You can accentuate things with the scent, and you can also regulate the intensity of it. It's all WiFi-controlled. I went to see Mathilde in her lab in the Fondation Cartier building, pre-pandemic. I was expecting to see a Severus Snape type of person mixing these vials. But no, her lab was all white with iMacs everywhere. And I said, “Mathilde, how do you create a scent? Do you experiment with various components and then come to the right one?” And she said, “Oh, no, no, no. Quite often, I conceive the scent in my dreams.” And then, she wakes up and writes it down. But she doesn't write it down as “This was the smell of daffodils in a field on an April morning.” She writes down an actual molecular formula. So, I realized that this is a highly sophisticated thing based on science and theory as much as sensitivity to fragrances. She had made thirteen scents based on Remembrance of Things Past, the big seven-part novel by Marcel Proust. And the scents were stored in leather boxes with nothing to see inside—just the molecules, I guess. So, she opens the lid and I sniff one called l’Heure Perdue, the most Proustian one, she said, because it’s about the smells of childhood, of grandmotherly things. It's interesting because my grandmother was not a very good cook. She was not particularly warm as a person. There was very little that was grandmotherly about her. She definitely didn't bake cookies. I was smelling the sort of archetypal “good grandmother” and that was astonishing. I said to Mathilde, “This takes me to a childhood I didn’t have. It’s somebody else's story, not mine, but it's pleasant nevertheless.” It’s powerful.
KUPPER Esa-Pekka, on the topic of your childhood, I want to talk about your beginnings in the world of music, because you didn't intend to become a conductor. You were a composer, but you felt like you needed someone to be able to conduct your pieces correctly. Can you talk a little bit about that transition into conducting from composing? And what is it about classical music that inspired you?
SALONEN I was a late bloomer according to classical music standards. My mom tried to send me to piano lessons when I was four years old and I said, “No. I play soccer. That's my thing.” I started playing instruments without any external pressure when I was about nine. And when I was about eleven, I thought that it was the coolest thing on Earth. I had found my thing and there was nothing else I wanted to do. Even through the shittiest days in my life, professionally, and even privately, I have never seriously thought that I would do anything else. It's my function on this planet. I felt that writing one's own music was the coolest thing. My world, my rules. I was very suspicious of conductors because in those days, conductors were these men who filled the LP covers with their silvery manes, and they seemed to be hogging all the air in the room. To give you an example, there was an LP of Herbert von Karajan conducting Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben or some heroic piece—on the cover was a picture of him in a leather jumpsuit leaning on a Harley-Davidson. And I thought, What is this all about? So, I didn't like conductors as a species, but I was in this group of young composers and no real conductor was interested in our music. So we thought, somebody has to conduct these things. And I thought, okay, I'll do it. I had a lot of experience as a performer already because I was a horn player, and I played a lot in Helsinki orchestras, and also on backing tracks for various pop and rock songs. Even today, sometimes, I will listen to the car radio and hear myself playing at nineteen. So, I started taking conducting lessons. I had no plans to be a conductor, but I thought at least I should know something about it. And then, I realized that it seemed to come quite naturally to me, and I enjoyed the interaction with musicians. If somebody had told me that a little over a decade later I'd be the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, I would have laughed. By and large, I'm still kind of astonished that it happened, but it happened. And now, with all these decades of experience, I'm quite enjoying what I know now as opposed to what I didn't know forty years ago.
KUPPER Speaking of the cult of personality around conductors, Leonard Bernstein has been in the zeitgeist a lot lately. But it seems like you had a similar experience coming to the international stage—or some kind of prominent stage—through stepping in and replacing another conductor for Mahler's Symphony No. 3. It seems like you have to wait for somebody to move out of the way to jump in.
SALONEN Well, you know, the one I replaced was Michael Tilson Thomas in London. Michael and I have been laughing about this. In some funny way, our lives and careers have been intertwined, because now I'm sitting in his former office. So yeah, a lot has to be said about being in the right place at the right time. Luck plays a big part in all this. There's a series of seminal moments in my life, like getting the right teachers and meeting some people who then became my mentors or supporters in other ways. But I think everybody's career and everybody's life is a result of those seemingly random encounters. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
KUPPER A couple of last questions about Scriabin. He was working on a last piece called Mysterium, which he planned to perform in the Himalayas, and he thought it was going to heal the world.
SALONEN Yeah. (laughs) I'm not so sure about that. Most likely, he started talking rubbish after six vodkas to some friends, saying “You know, my next piece is going to be written for 12,000 people and played in the Himalayas.” And everyone was like, “Yeah, what a great idea.” But I don't think it was a concrete plan. It was just like his usual hubris because he had a very, very high opinion of himself. So, it's more like some kind of bullshit among friends.
KUPPER And it became a legend.
SALONEN But the fact that one can even entertain such a concept, drunk or sober, tells you something about his character. I think he was removed from reality in many ways, but also super talented. And you referred to him being ahead of his time in terms of his harmonic language—yes, he was, and he developed a very individual harmonic language.
KUPPER Scriabin was also a theosophist. A lot of his tonalities were metaphysical. So, of course, these Greek gods would inspire him. How did you discover his music?
SALONEN My first-ever contact with Scriabin's music is one of those rare, unforgettable moments in my life. I remember it very, very clearly. I went to a concert—I must have been in my early teens—in Helsinki. The USSR State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra was visiting Helsinki with the chief conductor, Yevgeny Svetlanov, who was a truly fantastic musician. I can’t even remember what the first half was, but the second half was The Poem of Ecstasy, which is perhaps the best-known Scriabin orchestral piece. The conductor was quite visibly drunk but conducted really well. And the orchestra responded fantastically. The last chord from that piece is massively, massively loud. It's one of the loudest songs in all of classical music. And he decided to make it even louder, so he sort of crouched, and as he would rise, the orchestra would hit this crescendo. But he was so drunk that, for a time, the audience was mesmerized by whether he was going to keel over or not. He started wobbling, but he stood up triumphantly and the orchestra, because they had no choice, made this unbelievable crescendo. The noise was just completely deafening. I had never, ever heard anything like that beyond amplified music. As the last chord cut off, I realized a lady, who I didn’t know and was maybe in her thirties, was grabbing my hand. When she realized she was grabbing my hand, she was like, “Sorry. I didn't mean anything by it.” She was maybe twenty years older than me and shocked.
KUPPER Yeah, that's memorable.
SALONEN I thought, there's definitely something here. And then, I started studying his music. I learned some of his piano preludes and so on. And I got interested in his world, which was a very strange place, I must say. I guess he is somebody who these days would be called a narcissist. It was all about him and his universe. You’re welcome to visit, but it's still his world. And he had synesthesia, as we know. So, he had this private experience with music that he couldn't share with anybody. Synesthesia is a connection between any two senses. But in his case, it was the most common, which is hearing sound in color.
KUPPER Which he tried to translate into his performances through the invention of a light organ.
SALONEN In Prometheus, of course, he's trying to share this with other people by writing the light organ part. But of course, the score that is available has no further instruction. It's just like, “Here's the light organ. Deal with it.” So, there's no detailed instruction as to how he wants it done, and especially what happens when he writes two notes at the same time. I mean, a note is supposed to correspond with a color. But then when he writes two notes, like an interval, what on Earth is that supposed to mean? So, we don't know this. But to do this piece with scent makes sense. Because, as we know, synesthesia can be any connection between any of the senses. It's kind of a meaningless speculation, but I'm pretty certain that if Mr. Scriabin was sitting in my office at the moment, he would be totally beside himself by the potential of having scents connected to his harmonic language.
KUPPER What do you hope people take away from this unprecedented performance?
LAURENT I would like people to understand that olfaction has an incredible power to enhance the experience of listening to music. Because they will listen to music with their other senses activated. Maybe more with their guts and hearts than with their brains.
SALONEN When I sat through the test runs with the fragrances, my reaction was that scent works on a subliminal level. These scents are designed to evoke very deep feelings. In the very beginning, I realized that I was feeling unsettled and slightly fearful, but I didn't know why. And then, I figured out that it was the scent. It was the scent of chaos. The scent of fire. Before the invention of fire, the nights were always scary because of darkness. All you hear are the sounds, but you don't know where they come from or what they are. The sense of smell is the first sense that develops in utero. So, what I hope is that people will feel that they've had a deep experience over the full spectrum of what we can perceive, and in the best-case scenario, people will have felt things that they haven't felt before.
THIBAUDET Absolutely. We are bringing a new experience—a new dimension to art. To show how music can touch from different angles. And how the brain can be affected by vision, hearing, smelling. I think it's an experience that should change people. It will be extremely powerful. I think it's going to open a new road and a completely new artistic path in front of us.