The C-sharp minor Sonata, composed in 1887, is an unfinished early work by Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin. The manuscript, preserved at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, contains 86 measures of the first movement. This fragment was published for the first time in 1997, more than 110 years after its composition. Given that Scriabin composed this C-sharp minor Sonata between two other, better-known early sonatas (the G-sharp minor Sonata of 1886 and the E-flat minor Sonata of 1889), analysing this fragment is an essential step in defining the composer's early style. Following an overview of the historical context and previous research on the Sonata's creation, this article focuses on a harmonic analysis of the fragment, as one of the key musical elements through which the composer's style can be better understood. The analysis is based on the 2011 edition published by Bärenreiter and edited by Christoph Flamm. The methodology applied is a distinctive combination of traditional style analysis by American musicologist Jan LaRue and conventional approaches to harmonic analysis. The author previously employed this methodology in his master's thesis on Scriabin's early sonatas. Guided by LaRue's approach, the harmonic elements - including programmatic influence, polyphonic components, chord vocabulary, harmonic rhythm, internal tonal relationships, inter-movement and sectional relations, tonal phases, and principal harmonic functions - are analysed on three structural levels of form.
Ivor Prajdić (Wed,) studied this question.