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Olivier Messiaen 1908–1992

An appreciation

by Julian Anderson

Olivier Messiaen’s death last April at the age of 83 – co-incidentally, on the same day as his contemporary and exact opposite, the painter Francis Bacon – deprived us of the last composer to enter the concert repertoire without making stylistic compromises. Messiaen shares with his two great contemporaries, Shostakovich and Britten, an ability to combine immense technical sophistication with direct, even naive musical expression which makes his work immediately accessible to the large public. As this might suggest, and contrary, perhaps, to his public image as grand and wise old man, he was full of contradictions as a composer and as a person, and the closer one examines his life and work, the more evident these contradictions become.

Not the least of the contradictions is the fact that a man who claimed to have been ‘born a believer’ was in fact the child of agnostic, unreligious parents. His childhood, which he passed in Grenoble largely in the company of his mother and grandmother, was secluded and happy. He recalled it as an ‘éducation féerique’, dominated by his poetess mother reading him fairy-tales and French poetry, and by the toy theatre on which he and his brother Alain, later a poet, produced Shakespeare, Calderon and Goethe, rather than bothering with ordinary children’s literature. Messiaen retained an acute literary sensibility throughout his life, and many pupils, amongst them Alexander Goehr, have remarked on Messiaen’s abilities as ‘a literary critic of great astuteness’ in commenting on Maeterlink or Mallarmé in his analysis classes, gifted at drawing his students’ attention to ‘finesses and nuances in poetry which one could easily have missed’. His first attempts at composition and playing the piano were virtually simultaneous, and he developed an equally precocious taste for opera, playing through vocal scores of Gluck, Mozart, Berlioz and even Wagner which he would request for his birthday. On his tenth birthday, a harmony teacher with whom he had been taking preliminary lessons presented him with a score of Debussy’s Pelléas, which he later recalled as being ‘a revelation . . . probably the most decisive influence of my life.’

Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatoire the following year, studying there for eleven years and gaining Premiers prix in Counterpoint, fugue, piano accompaniment, organ, improvisation, the history of music and composition, although, like Ravel before him, he twice failed to win the Prix de Rome. His first mature compositions date from the late 20s, whilst he was studying with Paul Dukas, who persuaded his own publisher, Durand, to issue one of them, the Preludes for piano of 1929; in these his harmonic language based on ‘modes of limited transposition’ is already consistently employed and clearly recognisable, although he was not to categorise these for another six years.

Upon leaving the Conservatoire, Messiaen was appointed Titular Organist at the Paris church of La Trinité, at 22 the youngest such organist in France. He held the post for the rest of his life and developed a lasting affection for the Cavaillé-Coll organ of La Trinité, whose unusually wide range of colour, including some almost electronic-sounding stops such as the Basson 16’, was put to good use in the seven large-scale organ cycles he composed over the next 55 years. Messiaen’s improvisations, with their daring harmonic pallette and use of timbral extremes, became somewhat notorious and, although La Trinité became a place of pilgrimage for many young composers, Messiaen’s parishioners were initially disconcerted. In fact, at that time, the French Catholic establishment was far from enamoured with Messiaen’s music, finding it ‘pseudo religious’ and detecting ‘an impure atmosphere’, as one early critic wrote of L’Ascension. Messiaen was to suffer from such accusations for the rest of his life; even as late as 1984, a biographer could write of Turangalîla as being ‘stupifyingly vulgar’. People also never tired of drawing comparisons between Messiaen’s harmonic language and that of Gershwin or dance-band music, in spite of Messiaen’s repeatedly professed loathing for jazz.

Messiaen’s other works from the 30s include the organ cycles La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) and Les Corps Glorieux (1939); in the elaborate preface to the former, Messiaen published his earliest account of his ‘modes of limited transposition’ and non retrogradable rhythms’, and both works display an increasingly developed degree of rhythmic and harmonic independence. Messiaen married the violinist Claire Delbos in 1934 and in 1937 they had a son, Pascal. These events were reflected in the two song-cycles from this time, Poèmes pour Mi and Chants de Terre et de Ciel, composed in 1936 and 1938 respectively, to half-religious, half-surrealistic texts by Messiaen himself. He briefly joined forces with three other young French composers, André Jolivet, Yves Baudrier and Daniel Lesur to form the group ‘Jeune France’ in 1936. About all they had in common was a loathing of Les Six and the Stravinsky-inspired neo-classicism then prevalent in France; they published a short manifesto outlining their aims (probably written by Messiaen himself) and organised a few concerts which drew considerable attention; but the group disbanded with the outbreak of the Second World War and the four composers subsequently went in such different directions that it is hard to believe they were ever grouped together.

At the outbreak of War, Messiaen was mobilised as a soldier and, one year later, he was taken prisoner after the fall of France. He spent the next year in a POW camp in Sileisia, in conditions of extreme cold and deprivation, where he composed the Quartet for the End of Time (1941) for himself to play with three fellow prisoners, a clarinettist, a violinist and a cellist. This was his longest and most exploratory work to date, developing his rhythmic experiments and including a broader, more dissonant harmonic vocabulary. Messiaen nevertheless recalled of its first performance in the POW camp, to an audience of several thousand, that he had ‘never been listened to with such attention’.

On his repatriation in 1942, Messiaen was appointed Professor of Harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was to teach numerous distinguished composers and musicians over the next 45 years. Amongst his first pupils were the pianists Yvonne Loriod and Yvette Grimaud, and the composers Pierre Boulez and Serge Nigg. His open, unprejudiced attitude towards all music made him a perfect teacher, but it earned him the reputation of being an eccentric within the Conservatoire establishment, with whom he was never very popular. He wasn’t officially given a Professorship of Composition until 1966, before which his class went under a variety of names such as ‘Philosophy’, ‘Aesthetics’, ‘Analysis’, and so forth. Later pupils included Stockhausen, Xenakis, Amy, Jolas, Murail and George Benjamin.

Yvonne Loriod’s brilliant pianistic talents, and her immediate sympathy with Messiaen’s music were a lasting source of inspiration. Almost all the music he composed over the next six years was written for her either to play alone (Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus (1944)), or in duo partnership with him (Visions de l’Amen (1943)), or as soloist in an orchestral formation (Trois Petites Liturgies (1943)), Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–8)). The latter formed the central panel in Messiaen’s so-called ‘Tristan-trilogy’, a series of secular works exploring the intensity of a ‘fatal love which leads irresistibly to death’, as Messiaen put it; the song cycle Harawi (1945) and the darkly melancholic Cinq Rechants (1949) form the outer panels of the cycle. These works secured Messiaen’s international reputation.

Having explored the extremes of harmonic lushness and melodic warmth in these works, Messiaen chose to explore very different areas in the 50s. Finding himself under fire from several former pupils, including Boulez who described Turangalîla as ‘brothel music’, and Stockhausen, who referred witheringly to the ‘Jerusalem mit sixte ajoutée’ side of Messiaen, he changed direction dramatically and pushed his rhythmic explorations much further than before. The resulting series of works such as the Quatre études de Rhythme and the Livre d’Orgue (1950 and ‘51 respectively) were acclaimed by the younger generation and put Messiaen in the forefront of the avant-garde. However, he seems to have felt this alley to have been a dead end and, although he did return to this more abstract style with vehemence in the orchestral Chronochromie (1960), he later came to regret some of these works, especially the Mode de Valeurs et d’Intensitiés, which the younger generation had hailed as the progenitor of total serialism.

The chief source of Messiaen’s harmonic and melodic material for the rest of his life was birdsong. Always a keen ornithologist, Messiaen now set about transcribing the songs in meticulous detail, going on expeditions at all hours of the day and night, and incorporating not only the birdsongs but the landscapes he encountered into the massive Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1956–58). Messiaen admitted that birdsong was a refuge for him, ‘in my darkest hours, when my uselessness is brutally revealed to me’; and it may be that the sheer frenzy with which he plunged into the task was not unrelated to the unfortunate and prolonged illness of his first wife, who died in 1959 having spent the last 12 years of her life in hospital. Whatever the causes for this sudden change of direction, it probably created more controversy than anything else in his career; whether or not ornithologists are able to relate the birdsongs to Messiaen’s transcriptions, a musically intelligent listener should have little trouble in relating the two, or in enjoying the exuberantly colourful results in Messiaen’s music. He himself remarked that he saw nothing unusual in a composer composing from nature just as painters paint from nature.

In 1962, Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod were married and Messiaen entered upon the final phase of his creative life, in which he attempted ever grander and more monumental summa of his entire musical vocabulary. The first fruits of this grander manner were Couleurs de la Cité Célèste (1964) and Et Expecto Ressurectionem Mortuorem (1966), both scored for large groups of wind and percussion and dealing with subject matter from the Apocalypse. There followed what many consider to be his finest work, the oratorio La Transfiguration (1966–69), and the 12-movement instrumental work, Des Canyons Aux Etoiles (1971–74), both featuring long solo parts for Yvonne Loriod and re-embracing his early harmonic vocabulary with a frankness which has delighted some and annoyed others. The juxtaposition of static blocks of music became ever more fundamental to Messiaen from now on, and whatever attempts he may have occasionally made to smooth over this tendency disappeared. Of his own works, he claimed these to be his favourites, and was especially proud of the huge opera, Saint François d’Assise (1975–85), a massive sonic fresco celebrating the Saint’s love of birds, angels and mankind with a chorus and orchestra of several hundred (including three ondes Martenot). It has not often been revived since its first performance at the Paris Opera in 1983, although there was a performance to celebrate Messiaen’s 80th birthday at the Royal Festival Hall, and a new production by Peter Sellars is featured at this year’s Salzburg Festival. Far from pausing for breath after this work, Messiaen spent the next two years composing his largest organ work, the 18-movement Livre du Saint Sacrament (1986). A group of smaller pieces followed, such as Un Vitrail et des Oiseaux, for piano and ensemble, before Messiaen embarked on his last work, the eleven-movement orchestral work entitled Regards sur l’Au-Delà, completed last January, due for performance in November and said to be scored for as large an orchestra as the opera. Opinions differ over these late pieces: whilst they are undeniably effective and at times very moving, it could be argued that Messiaen never quite recaptured the freshness and exuberance of a work like La Transfiguration; and there are few technical novelties (for those who want them), save for the superimposition of birdsongs at unrelated tempi in the ‘Preaching to the Birds’ scene of the opera.

Messiaen’s position in 20th-century music is equivocal. He was unquestionably one of this century’s greatest composers and probably this century’s most influential teacher; yet his music continues to puzzle those who like to put composers in neat categories. The many separate elements of which his music is compounded seem to be incompatible, and yet together they constitute an instantly recognisable style, whose clichés have long been amongst the most widely used resources of contemporary music. It is frequently said of Messiaen that the serenity and profound religious faith at the heart of his music make him untypical of our own century. Maybe; but I suspect that, in his brave attempt to bring together in his work all his various tastes and loves, whether from the natural world or the human, from the Far East to Guillaume de Machaut, he may come to be seen as an archetypal 20th-century composer.

Musical Times, September 1992