Alexander Moser (chemist)

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Alexander Moser ( Russian Александр Эдмундович Мозер ; * 1879 in Moscow , † 1958 in Lima ) was a Russian chemist who created photographic artist portraits of the Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin and a light piano for private preview of his composition Prométhée. Le Poème du feu constructed.

Life

Moser grew up in Moscow in a family of Russian Germans. His father Edmund Moser (1850–1935) and his mother Berta Moser, b. Blessing emigrated to Moscow in 1873 from Unterkirnach in the Black Forest in Baden . They imported orchestrions from the company "Ambros Weisser formerly Hubert Blessing" and took over the distribution and maintenance of the instruments on the Russian market. Moser's uncle Oskar Blessing (1856–1945) also came to Moscow in 1875. Since then the company has been called Moser & Blessing.

Alexander Moser studied chemistry in Moscow and worked between 1906 and 1910 at the University of Karlsruhe with Fritz Haber . With him he wrote an essay, and Haber also wrote an introduction to Moser's monograph on "The electrolytic processes in organic chemistry". From 1910 Moser was a private lecturer in Moscow. Despite the fact that his parents and his uncle lost their company during the revolution and returned to their German relatives in the Black Forest, Alexander continued to work in Russia after the revolution. A postcard from 1925 documents a trip to the northern Urals , which was probably made in connection with the planned expansion of magnesium mining near the cities of Berezniki and Solikamsk . According to a reference in the journal Stahl und Eisen 46 (1926) p. 451, Moser, together with Alexander N. Kuznetsov from Leningrad and Yevgeny Iwanowitsch Schukowski from Moscow, applied for a German patent for a process for the production of ferrosilicon and aluminum oxide. On this occasion, Moser's name is spelled for the first time in a German publication with the patronymic Alexander Edmundowitsch Moser, Moscow. From the late 1920s, Moser lived in Zumikon near Zurich. Around 1940 he emigrated to Lima , where he died in 1958.

family

After a first, presumably only short, marriage with an unknown woman Gandolf, from which the sons Alexander and Waldemar emerged, Moser married Vera Haensel, who came from Riga and who he presumably met at the Chemical Institute of Moscow University, on August 17, 1919 where she worked as a chemical laboratory technician. With her he had the daughter Elisabeth (May 14, 1921–?) And Georg (July 27, 1923–1999). After Vera's death in 1928, Moser married his third wife, Anja.

Acquaintance with Scriabin

Alexander Moser belonged to the closer circle of friends of the composer Alexander Nikolajewitsch Scriabin. Vasili Jakowlew was probably the first biographer of Scriabin in 1925, who referred to Moser as "one of the composer's friends". The two had met in the summer of 1909 at the latest when Moser traveled to Brussels and took photos of Scriabin there. The regular contact between the two probably only ended with Scriabin's sudden death in 1915. Most of Scriabin's biographers mention Moser as the designer of the first light piano with which the tastiera-per-luce voice was used in private previews of the composition Promethée. Le Poème du feu was played. How the light piano built by Moser for Scriabin worked, however, can no longer be reconstructed. The non-functional device, which is located in Moscow's Scriabin Museum, was referred to as a “model” by Vasily Jakowlewitsch in 1925 when he described the fourth room of the museum in Scriabin's former apartment, which was set up in 1922, although it was made by Moser during the composer's lifetime :

“One draws one's attention (on the wall with the windows) to the model of a device for lighting effects for the performance of the 'Poem of Fire' ('Prometheus'), which a friend of Scriabin, the engineer AE Moser, constructed with it To realize the 'light keyboard', which is provided for in the score of 'Prometheus'. This model was made during the time when Scriabin was creating his poem . ”(Translation by Friedemann Kawohl)

It is possible that Moser only made this model and later wanted to equip it with the appropriate technology.

A report by the actress Alisa Koonen (1889–1974) shows that Scriabin used lighting effects when he made parts from Promethée in his apartment in the winter of 1911/1912. Performed Le Poème du feu on the piano. Scriabin had asked Koonen to develop the music with him in a dance. She dressed in chiton and sandals and “tried out simple movements which, through their plastic drawing, could reproduce the mood of those etudes and musical excerpts” that Scriabin played. “Often,” Koonen remembers, “he switched on this and that light behind the grand piano, and the room was bathed in blue, yellow, red and violet light.” Whether or not Moser was present at this performance an apparatus by Moser was used, as Sigfried Schibli suspected, has not been handed down. However, Koonen's account suggests that Scriabin himself switched the lights off and on.

Moser is of particular importance as the author of several important photographic portraits of the composer. A famous portrait of Scriabin shows the composer seated, his right hand lying on a table and his left hand propped up in a thinking pose.

Fonts

  • Fritz Haber and Alexander Moser: The generator gas and the carbon element, in Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie 11 (1905) pp. 593-609.
  • Alexander Moser and N. Isgarischeff (also Isgarischev), in Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie 16 (1910) 613–620. N. Isgarischeff (also N. - possibly Nikolai?) A. (Alexandrowitsch) Isgarischev is named as one of Haber's assistant working in Karlsruhe. In: Dietrich Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (2005) p. 320.
  • The electrolytic processes of organic chemistry. With the assistance of F. Haber, written by Alexander Moser. Monographs on Applied Electrochemistry, Vol. XXXVI. XVI and 205 S. Verlag von Wilhelm Knapp, Halle a. P. 1910.
  • Oxidation. In: Concise Dictionary of Natural Sciences, Vol. 7 (Jena, Gustav Fischer 1912), 392.
  • Determination of thermal dissociation. In: Handbook of Working Methods in Inorganic Chemistry, Volume Three, Part 2, ed. by Arthur Stähler (Leipzig 1914), 1346–1383.

literature

personal data
SURNAME Moser, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Мозер, Александр Эдмундович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian chemist
DATE OF BIRTH 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH 1958
Place of death Lima