OLIVIER MESSIAEN (1908–1992)
A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
By NIGEL SIMEONE

Even before his birth, Messiaen’s artistic gifts and his love of nature were celebrated in the poems his mother Cécile Sauvage wrote during her pregnancy, entitled L’âme en bourgeon (The soul in bud). As a child during World War One, Messiaen would sit in a park in Grenoble reading the scores of operas by Mozart and Wagner, and at the age of ten he was given a copy of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, a work that made a profound impression. His father Pierre taught English and was appointed to a school in Paris in 1919. The following year, Messiaen enrolled as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was to be a student for the next decade, winning a clutch of prizes. His teachers included Paul Dukas for composition, Maurice Emmanuel for music history, and Marcel Dupré for the organ—an instrument Messiaen only took up during the last couple of years of his studies, after previously concentrating on the piano. Dukas encouraged his publisher Durand to take on his young protégé, and the firm published Messiaen (including the Trois mélodies and the Préludes) even before he graduated. Marcel Dupré took a leading role in securing the appointment of his star pupil to the post of organist at the church of La Trinité in 1931—a position Messiaen was to hold for more than sixty years. The Parish Priest was anxious that Messiaen’s improvisations might be too daring, but Dupré was able to reassure him that the young Messiaen would be sensitive to the needs of the parishioners. The following year, Messiaen married Claire Delbos, a composer and violinist, and during the early 1930s Messiaen’s career blossomed, with regular performances of his early orchestral and chamber music. In 1936 the couple spent their first summer at a small house in Petichet, nestling by the Lac de Laffrey, facing the mountains of the Dauphiné in South-East France. During that summer, Messiaen composed the Poèmes pour Mi—an intensely personal song-cycle that celebrates the sacrament of marriage: specifically the marriage of Messiaen and “Mi,” his pet name for Claire. Messiaen was generally a very private man, but in the Poèmes pour Mi, we are privileged to be given a wonderful glimpse into a world that he usually keep secret. A year later, on Bastille Day 1937, their only son, Pascal, was born, celebrated as “Le Bébé-Pilule” in Messiaen’s next song cycle, Chants de Terre et de Ciel.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 saw Messiaen enlisting in the French Army. He was hopelessly unsuited to military life, but in the summer of 1940—just as the authorities in Paris were about to find a posting more suited to his talents—he was one of the many thousands of French soldiers captured by the Germans in the East of France. He was taken to Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp at Görlitz in Silesia, where he was to remain until early 1941. Seldom have such trying circumstances produced a work as profoundly moving as the Quartet for the End of Time, written for the players at his disposal in the camp, and first performed there in a makeshift theatre, to an audience of a few hundred prisoner-soldiers, on January 15, 1941.

On his return to France that spring, Messiaen was appointed to teach harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was to work until 1978. One of the students in his first class, in May 1941, was the young Yvonne Loriod, who was to inspire an extraordinary series of piano works, beginning with Visions de l’Amen (1943) for two pianos, and the mighty Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (1944).

By the end of World War II, Messiaen’s first wife, Claire, was already starting to show signs of the mental illness that was to send her into a slow decline. Was it perhaps this tragedy that led Messiaen to turn to the myth of Tristan and Isolde, with its central themes of love and death? One of Messiaen’s most powerful and personal masterpieces, the song-cycle Harawi was completed during the summer of 1945, the first of a trilogy of Tristan-inspired works.

Messiaen had strong connections with the United States, going back to 1936 when Serge Koussevitzky gave Messiaen’s Les offrandes oubliées with his Boston Symphony Orchestra. A decade later, it was Koussevitzky who was the first person to offer Messiaen a major international commission. In June 1945, he wrote to Messiaen asking for “a composition for symphony orchestra” and three years later the result was the composer’s largest work to date: the Turangalîla-Symphonie. The one pervasive feature of Messiaen’s life and music that is missing from Turangalîla is religion: instead the Symphony is described by him as “a song of love”—the centrepiece of his Tristan and Isolde trilogy (the third work is the Cinq rechants for twelve voices). The world première of Turangalîla took place in Symphony Hall, Boston, on December 2nd, 1949, with Loriod as solo pianist, Ginette Martenot (Ondes Martenot), and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Turangalîla was to be followed by the start of an important new phase in Messiaen’s creative development. His researches in rhythm led quickly to the daring Quatre études de rythme and the irrepressible Cantéyodjayâ (both for solo piano). In 1952, Messiaen made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. He had always loved birdsong, and had been observing birds since his childhood, but now he embarked on a serious and methodical study of ornithology. He spent some time at the home of Jacques Delamain, near the town of Cognac. A brandy-maker by profession, Delamain was also one of France’s leading ornithologists. Under his guidance, Messiaen became more scientific about the study of birds—creatures that also had a deep religious significance, as he considered them to be the “songsters of Creation.” Given his extremely acute musical ear, Messiaen was able to perfect his notation of their songs—as can been seen from the extraordinary series of more than two hundred notebooks of birdsong transcriptions that he started at this time. Réveil des Oiseaux for piano and orchestra (1953) was his first major work to feature a large cast of birds, and it was quickly followed by Oiseaux exotiques (1955–56). For this dazzling piece, Messiaen needed to transcribe the songs of birds that were not native to France, so he visited bird exhibitions and made use of gramophone records as sources for the magnificent songs of the Virginia Cardinal, the Indian Shama, the Golden Oriole and some forty other birds, transformed by Messiaen into a spectacular display of musical virtuosity in which the birds of the East and West come together in a work for solo piano, woodwind, brass and percussion. It was written in 1955–56 at the request of Messiaen’s former pupil Pierre Boulez, for the Domaine musical.

The second half of the 1950s was devoted almost entirely to Messiaen’s largest work for solo piano, the Catalogue d’oiseaux. Despite the forbidding title, this is a series of highly evocative tone-poems for piano, celebrating not only the songs of birds, but also their habitats, from the Alps in the South-East of France, and a warm summer’s day by a sun-drenched Mediterranean, to the bleak austerity of Finistère, the country’s most westerly point, on the wild Atlantic coast. The first complete performance of the Catalogue was given by Yvonne Loriod on April 15, 1959. Exactly one week later Claire Delbos died after years of distressing mental and physical decline.

The 1960s began with Chronochromie for orchestra (1960), drawing on two of Messiaen’s other fascinations: time and colour. In 1961 Messiaen and Loriod married, and the couple went for their honeymoon the next year to Japan. The landscape and culture of the country made a deep impact on Messiaen—and on a lighter note so, too, did the food. In 1965 the monumental Et exspecto resurrectionem was written as a commission for the French government and first performed in the Sainte-Chapelle, surrounded by the stained glass that represented for Messiaen the perfect fusion of divinely-created light and human craftsmanship. This was followed by a majestic choral-orchestral work, La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Both these pieces marked an unequivocal return—after a twenty-year gap—to explicitly religious inspiration for Messiaen. His largest project from the early 1970s drew together his love of nature and his profound faith; composed at the request of Mrs Alice Tully, Des canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars) is a dazzling celebration of the landscapes and nature of Utah and Arizona, and of the glories of Creation they exemplify.

Though Messiaen had first mentioned writing an opera as early as 1948, it wasn’t until the 1970s that he finally turned to composing a stage work. It was an epic undertaking: after nearly a decade spent composing and orchestrating, Saint François d’Assise was given its première at the Paris Opéra in November 1983. The life of St Francis of Assisi inspired Messiaen to produce his grandest summation of theology and the ornithology. After Saint François, the composer was exhausted and almost gave up composition, but after a few months’ respite, he began the Livre du Saint Sacrement for organ, the last and longest of the great organ cycles that Messiaen had started in the 1930s. Despite growing infirmity and frequent illness, Messiaen turned to a number of new projects during his eighties, culimnating in Éclairs sur l’Au-delà (Glimpses of the Beyond), composed for the New York Philharmonic.

Messiaen was a complex character: humble, but always aware of his own worth; fiercely private, but unable to resist the urge to explain his motivation; modest and restrained in his lifestyle, but brilliant and opulent in his music; an inventor of elaborate and highly original theories and systems, but a devoted and kindly teacher who never imposed these on his students. Here was a man of astonishing imagination, but also humilty and charm, and his centenary gives us much to celebrate.

Nigel Simeone holds the Chair of Historical Musicology at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He is the author of several books on Messiaen, including two co-authored with Peter Hill: Messiaen (Yale University Press, 2005) and Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques (Ashgate, 2007).