Olivier Messiaen

French composer Olivier Messiaen said himself that the most important aspect of his music was theological: how it supported and illuminated the beliefs of the Catholic Church. After that, he prioritized his rhythmic innovations (which sometimes draw on Asian or African practices) and imitations of bird songs with instruments. His biggest work was Saint-François d’Assise (1975–83), an opera depicting the life of the saint who preaches to birds. Many other compositions concern events from the Gospels or eternal life in Paradise. This penchant for religious subjects made Messiaen an outlier in a largely secular age, but  his conviction shines through his music in its colorful harmony, its dynamism, and its timeless floating.

Two other strands in Messiaen’s life were important. He served his church locally as an organist and produced several major sequences of organ pieces. He was also a great mentor whose students, including Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, were imbued with his spirit of adventure.

Early Years: A Self-Made Composer

Messiaen’s mother, Cécile Sauvage, was a poet who addressed a collection of poems to him during her pregnancy. Thus feeling predestined to be an artist, he entered the Paris Conservatoire when he was 10. He graduated in 1930, having studied composition with Paul Dukas and organ with Paul Dupré. However, the music he began writing as a student was immediately his own in its gorgeous melodies and rich harmonies, which came from a system of unusual scales that defined his voice for the rest of his life. Very slow tempos, as in his organ piece Le Banquet céleste (The Heavenly Banquet, 1928), also remained characteristic as his musical depiction of eternity.

In 1931, Messiaen married fellow composer Claire Delbos, with whom he had a son. Song cycles on marital love and family life—which, for him, reflected divine love—followed in 1936–38. During that same period, Messiaen joined other composers of his generation to promote newer French music as a founder of the organization La Jeune France. After his conscription in 1940, he was captured and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, where in the winter of 1940–41 he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time).

Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

Middle Period: Music of Birds, Colors, and Numbers 

With Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Messiaen established the foundations of his musical language: in birdsong, in harmonies that, for him, evoked swirling colors, and in patterns of numbers that might govern rhythmic figures or a whole form. Released from the camp in 1941, he began teaching at the Paris Conservatoire the next year. Among his early pupils was a startlingly gifted pianist, Yvonne Loriod, for whom he started writing works, including Vingts Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Glimpses of the Child Jesus, 1944). With his wife Delbos’s health in decline, Loriod became the center also of Messiaen’s emotional life, and there followed a set of three dissimilar compositions that conveyed the experience of overwhelming love: the song cycle Harawi (1945); the rapturous and strange Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–48), named after a rhythmic formula from a musical treatise of pre-Mughal India; and Cinq Rechants, for a small chorus (1949).

In his subsequent works, Messiaen turned away from emotional expression to find his musical material in the sounds of birds. His next work, Réveil des oiseaux (Awakening of the Birds, 1953), for orchestra and solo piano, is composed entirely of birdsong transcriptions he made in nature. Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–58) for solo piano is a set of portraits depicting individual species from across France, each heard in its habitat.

Birdsong permeates the rest of Messiaen’s output, rejoined from the 1960s onward with other sources: images of Japan and Japanese music in Sept Haïkaï (Seven Haikus, 1962) and brilliant chords to suggest the precious foundation stones of Heavenly Jerusalem in Couleurs de la Cité Céleste (Colors of the Celestial City, 1963). Both these pieces are scored for a reduced orchestra and a solo piano part for Loriod, who had become the composer’s second wife (and constant travel companion) in 1961, following the death of Delbos in 1959.

Late Period: Monuments

Couleurs de la Cité Céleste was Messiaen’s first concert work with a religious theme since the Vingt Regards of almost 20 years before. It prompted a return to religious subject matter in larger orchestral scores that restored the exuberance of his earlier music within the sculpted lines his compositions had more recently acquired. The oratorio La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 1965–69) was followed by Des Canyons aux étoiles… (From the Canyons to the Stars…, 1971–75) for piano and orchestra—which drew on a visit to the canyons of southern Utah and on the theology of desert, abyss, and glory—the St. Francis opera, Saint François d’Assise (1975–1983), and Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà (Illuminations of the Beyond, 1988–92) for very large orchestra.

Legacy

As a religious artist, whose visions were driven into vivid sound, Messiaen had no equal in his time or later—one reason his music has kept a firm place in the living repertory. Though his themes, and to some extent his musical atmospheres, derive from Catholic tradition, his underlying espousal of love, hope, and faith—his feeling for wonder, whether in art or nature—is universal. His legacy continues, too, in the music of his pupils.

Watching and Listening

Although Messiaen wrote very little chamber music, the Chamber Music Society, as always, takes a broad view of the genre. The Digital Archive includes Visions de l’Amen (Visions of the Amen, 1943)—visions, that is, of divine assent. Scored for two pianos, this work was the first written for Loriod, whose part for first piano calls for brilliance and agility. The slower, simpler part for second piano (written for Messiaen himself) calls for solidity and calm. These two parts must lock together rhythmically and complement one another.

Discover a beautifully clear and poised, yet lively, performance of Quatuor pour la fin du temps—Messiaen’s masterwork of chamber music—in which Anthony McGill offers a sensitive rendition of “Abîme des oiseaux” (Abyss of the Birds), a movement for solo clarinet. The finale, “Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus” (Praise to the Immortality of Jesus), with magnificent cinematography by Tristan Cook and the superb playing of Chad Hoopes and Anne-Marie McDermott, is brilliantly lit from the back. The musicians’ faces are largely thrust into shadow while their hands and instruments dazzle.

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