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 synesthesia-inspired 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.
“We are, I would say, sensorial people,” says Cartier in-house perfumer Mathilde Laurent, who cooked up the project several years ago with her good friends Esa-Pekka Salonen, San Francisco Symphony’s music director, and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. (Scent, says Thibaudet, has always had a powerful sway over him: “I remember scent as much as I remember pictures, situations, people,” he tells me.)
The combination of fragrance and performance is not new. Plumes of incense have wafted around the organ pipes and through the choir’s chancel in Catholic Church ceremonies for centuries, while in the 19th century theaters sometimes distributed scented fans to help with body odor issues. More recently, there have been technology-driven experiments to combine scent with motion-picture entertainment (think of the “scent tracks” of AromaRama or Smell-O-Vision, which debuted in 1959 and 1960). Other olfactory interventions have sought to influence not how we receive art, but how they might affect us physically: A nightclub scented with orange, seawater, and peppermint, one Netherlands study found, fosters more energy on the dance floor. In 2009, Green Aria: A ScentOpera was performed at the Guggenheim, and last fall, the Icelandic artist-run perfumery Fischersund teamed up with Jónsi, the Sigur Rós frontman, for “A Night of Scent and Music” at Le Poisson Rouge, the Manhattan experimental music space.
So many other of these multisensory adventures, however, have been curtailed by practical realities. How, for instance, do you sequence a series of scents—clearing out one before you release the next? And of course it’s one thing to suffer through a dull performance; imagine being trapped in a concert hall rapidly filling with a scent you find unpleasant. Laurent, though—perhaps a bit more of a mad scientist or poet than your typical in-house perfumer—is not one to back off from a challenge. Calling from the Fondation Cartier in Montparnasse, she describes a few of her experiments with olfactory installations—a staircase that ascends through plumes of fragrance within a glass box, for instance, to allow visitors to, as she put it at the time, experience “the smell of the rain.” For the San Francisco Prometheus, the technology will involve dry diffusion, which encapsulates the fragrances without water and uses fans underneath each seat to intermittently distribute them. It’s hard to imagine when most of us think of fragrance as something spritzed from a bottle or emanating from a scented candle, but the technology, Laurent says, “allows us to be very quick with the different smells—they can appear and disappear.” (At a test in October, the trio fine-tuned their approach, making sure the scents weren’t too overpowering.)
When it comes to the aromas themselves, Laurent is reluctant to reveal much detail, preferring that people arrive at Davies Symphony Hall without preconceived aversions or predilections, and will only describe them in broad terms: “It’s storms; it’s chaos,” she says of the first scent, which is associated with the earliest, dark iterations of the Prometheus myth. “It’s the smell of dangerous nature.” (A fragrance for a turbulent Monday morning commute?) The second scent, timed to Prometheus’s offering of fire, comes from a preexisting Cartier concoction, La Treizième Heure Eau de Parfum, a leathery, woodsy scent that reminds me of winter nights, furs wrapped around shoulders, dark skies punctuated by stars. The third relates to a more joyful, creative time. Man is in a good place: “He is going to be able to create beauty and to achieve the elevation of the soul, of the mind, the intelligence,” says Laurent.