Olivier Messiaen

French composer

• Born: December 10, 1908
• Birthplace: Avignon, France
• Died: April 27, 1992
• Place of death: Clichy, France

Messiaen was the most important French composer of the second half of the twentieth century. His catalog of compositions (which numbers more than seventy works) includes pieces for solo keyboard, chamber ensemble, electronic media, orchestra, oratorio, art song, and opera. He was the most significant composer for the organ since Johann Sebastian Bach.

Early Life

Olivier Messiaen (ah-lee-vyay mehs-yahn) was born to parents well known in French literary circles. His mother was the poet Cécile Sauvage, and his father, Pierre, was an English teacher respected for his critical translations of Shakespeare. Recognizing the young Messiaen’s musical gifts (by eight he had taught himself piano), Pierre encouraged him with gifts of scores to Hector Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni. After a move to Nantes in 1918, Messiaen, now ten years old, began formal studies in harmony with the local teacher Jehan de Gibon. Soon after the boy began his studies, Gibon presented Messiaen with the score to Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Later, the mature composer described that gift as “a real bombshell . . . probably the most decisive influence of my life.”

In 1919, the family moved to Grenoble. In the fall of that year, Messiaen was enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied under France’s leading musicians (Maurice Dupré taught him organ, and Paul Dukas tutored him in composition). The student flourished. In 1926, Messiaen took first prize in fugue and in 1928 first prize in piano accompaniment. Firsts in music history and composition followed in 1929 and 1930. The year of his prize in fugue also saw the appearance of his first publication, the organ work Le Banquet céleste (the heavenly banquet). In 1929, Messiaen’s final complete year at the Conservatoire, he published a set of eight preludes for piano. While the preludes particularly showed the influence of Debussy, in both of these early publications the characteristics of Messiaen’s mature style were present. Both used chromatic scales (or “modes”) of the composer’s own invention (as opposed to culturally received scales, such as G minor or D major). Both used nontraditional rhythms, Messiaen stretching note values in Le Banquet céleste to the point at which meter was lost within the six-minute (but only twenty-five-measure) piece. In both works, much of their interest and significance lay in Messiaen’s musical exploitation of instrumental color. Finally, and here the preludes were somewhat atypical, aspects of Christianity sparked Messiaen’s imagination and served as programmatic titles.

Life’s Work

Messiaen left the Conservatoire in 1930, having won twice as many “firsts” as Debussy and with two publications already before the public. He was appointed principal organist at the Church of La Trinité (one of Paris’s most important liturgical positions) in 1931. Teaching responsibilities at the École Normale Supérieure and at the Schola Cantorum were added five years later. In 1936, he married the violinist Claire Delbos (the dedicatee of his first song cycle, Poèmes pour Mi). A year later their son Pascal was born. Through these years, Messiaen composed for organ as well as for chamber ensembles and even for a new electronic instrument, the ondes martenot.

All of this work was broken off by World War II. Although thirty-one (and therefore beyond the reach of general conscription), Messiaen volunteered for the army, serving as a hospital attendant. Overtaken by the Germans near Nancy in June, 1940, the composer was imprisoned in a prisoner of war camp near Görlitz in Silesia. There in the prison camp, Messiaen wrote what was universally to be regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable works, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (quartet for the end of time). Finding a clarinetist, violinist, and cellist among his fellow prisoners, Messiaen wrote the piece for himself and this ensemble, premiering it before the five-thousand-member camp on January 15, 1941.

The quartet began the fully mature period of Messiaen’s work. A highly evocative series of meditations on the Apocalypse (its title has a double meaning, referring both to Revelations 10:5-6 and to Messiaen’s own new rhythmic character), Messiaen here made extensive use of bird calls for the first time (the quartet’s first movement, “Liturgie de Cristal,” opens with the calls of a blackbird on the clarinet and the nightingale on the flute). Herein Messiaen first used “nonretrogradable” rhythms, or complex rhythmic patterns that whether read from left to right or right to left remain the same. This kind of rhythmic device (and others derived from his studies of Hindu ragam) continued Messiaen’s movement toward completely nonmetric rhythm first seen in Le Banquet céleste.

Repatriated in 1942, Messiaen returned to Paris, where he was appointed professor of harmony at the Conservatoire. During the next decades, he began to be seen as a leader of the avant-garde, some of the next generation’s leading composers seeking out his teaching in Paris and elsewhere (both Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen were his students). He continued to compose in the manner established in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps.

Those characteristics, however, began to burden many of Messiaen’s listeners. The lengths of his works and their almost hyper-baroque textures offended musicians increasingly influenced by Anton von Webern’s terse severity. The Christian themes and unabashed emotionalism of Messiaen’s works seemed both hopelessly naïve and out of step with postwar materialism. For the first time since the brouhaha that had greeted Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, the Parisians rioted at the premiere of Messiaen’s Trois Petites Liturgies on April 21, 1945. The press followed the performance with a sustained, critical barrage.

While surprised by the critics’ ferocity (one writer later called it a “dance of glory and death around Messiaen”), the composer appeared undisturbed. He followed Trois Petites Liturgies with even more challenging works, between 1944 and 1948 completing major pieces for piano, voice, and orchestra. A symphony was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony and was premiered by Leonard Bernstein on December 2, 1949. In this symphony, entitled Turangalîla , Messiaen continued his interest in Hindu music, both constructing its title from two Hindi words (“Lîla,” meaning game, and “Turanga,” meaning time) and employing again Hindu and symmetric rhythms. Messiaen was at his most adventurous in his 1949 piano work Mode de valeurs et d’intensités . Here he systematically ordered thirty-six pitches, twenty-four note values, twelve kinds of articulation, and seven dynamic levels. This kind of “total serialization,” while only experimental for Messiaen, was to have a profound impact on younger composers.

In 1943, when Messiaen had been privately teaching a class in analysis and composition, he met Yvonne Loriod. Impressed by her virtuosity, Messiaen wrote his major piano works of the period Visions de l’amen (1943), Reveil des oiseaux (1953), and Catalogue des oiseaux (1958) for her. Loriod and Messiaen were married in 1962, his first wife, Claire, having died three years earlier after a ten-year illness.

Messiaen’s energies in the years 1960 to 1980 were channeled primarily into the creation of six huge ensemble compositions: Chronochromie (1961), Couleurs de la cité céleste (1963), Et exspecto resurrectionem (1964), La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ (1969), Des canyons aux étoiles (1974), and Saint François d’Assie (1983). Chronochromie (literally “time-color”) was a sixty-minute, seven-movement work for full orchestra with a greatly enlarged percussion section. Its sixth movement (“Epôde”) was remarkable for its evocation of birdsong performed by solo strings in eighteen individual parts. Couleurs de la cité céleste was premiered by Boulez in 1963, three years after Chronochromie’s completion. It was another hour-long work but for an ensemble reduced from the earlier piece’s heroic dimensions (thirteen winds and seven percussionists).

In 1964, Messiaen fulfulled a commission from the French government for a work memorializing the two world wars’ dead with Et exspecto resurrectionem. This composition for large woodwind, brass, and percussion ensemble (the composer even required three different sets of gongs) was premiered the following year in Paris’s St. Chappelle, with repeated performances throughout France. La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ was begun in 1965 and premiered in Lisbon four years later. For the first time since the 1945 Trois Petites Liturgies, Messiaen returned to writing for chorus and solo singers. For the fourteen-movement oratorio, he drew texts from the Bible, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa, and from the Roman rite for the Feast of the Transfiguration. After a visit to Utah in 1970, Messiaen completed a twelve-movement orchestral piece, Des canyons aux étoiles (premiered in New York on November 20, 1974).

Saint François d’Assie is Messiaen’s only dramatic work. Commissioned by the Paris Opéra in 1975, Messiaen himself composed both the libretto and the score in a labor that lasted eight uninterrupted years. The resulting opera, although not without its detractors, was perhaps his masterpiece. A synopsis of his entire creative life, requiring extraordinary forces (a two-hundred-member chorus, three antiphonal ondes martenots, a huge orchestra, and a length of four and a half hours), it has received repeated performances since its Paris premiere in 1983.

Significance

Although his work itself is not at all traditional, Olivier Messiaen’s view of himself as a Roman Catholic artist placed him firmly within the tradition of Christians whose art served primarily theological and propagandistic purposes. Thus the anonymous sculptors of Chartres, Michelangelo, Heinrich Schütz, Bach, and Dante, are all Messiaen’s forebears. Indeed, of nineteenth century composers, the one Messiaen most closely resembles is Anton Bruckner, although without that Austrian’s provincialisms.

As a youth Messiaen did not participate in the cynical witticisms of Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. Interested in Indian music, he became neither an ethnomusicologist nor an Eastern mystic. Although his work was crucial to the development of totally serialized music, Messiaen’s work was never an exercise in the cerebral. One of the era’s most important teachers, he founded no “school,” nor were his students united by any particular characteristic. Thus, while his aesthetic can be seen as a continuation of at least a fifteen-hundred-year-old tradition, within the twentieth century Messiaen was unique. Stylistically, his work stands apart from any of the movements that characterized (and polarized) modern music.

Bibliography

Dingle, Christopher, and Nigel Simone, eds. Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art, and Literature. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Collection of essays analyzing Messiaen’s musical compositions.

Griffiths, Paul. Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. A significant and highly detailed study of Messiaen largely intended for the specialist but useful also to the general reader.

Hill, Peter, and Nigel Simone. Messiaen. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. Traces the origin of many of Messiaen’s compositions and places them within the context of his life.

Hold, Thomas. “Messiaen’s Birds.” Music and Letters 3 (1971): 113. An important essay on the composer’s quotation and employment of bird calls.

Johnson, Robert Sherlaw. Messiaen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. A thorough but dated study of Messiaen’s work. Johnson includes charts that are helpful in untangling the relationships in some of Messiaen’s larger compositions.

Machlis, Joseph. Introduction to Contemporary Music. 2d ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Machlis is one of his generation’s best writers on music. A man of broad cultural understanding (he is the translator of at least sixteen operas), he is able to clearly draw the twentieth century’s significant lines of musical changes. Helpful also is his concluding “dictionary,” which presents brief biographies of several hundred contemporary composers, including Messiaen.

Messiaen, Olivier. The Technique of My Musical Language. Translated by John Satterfield. Reprint. New York: American Biographical Service, 1987. Any study of Messiaen should begin with this apologia for his musical style. Messiaen’s frequently poetic descriptions of his ideas are of particular interest to the nonspecialist reader.

Nichols, Roger. Messiaen. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. The best introduction to the composer in English. Highly readable and sympathetic to Messiaen’s work, Nichols provides a vivid portrait of the artist and his art in his eighty-seven-page text.