Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system, accorded to mysticism, that presaged twelve-tone composition

Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...

 and other serial music

Serialism

In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...

. The first major example of this is the 5th piano sonata of 1907, although the process of innovation was somewhat gradual.