Olivier Messiaen: a profile — Olivier Messiaen | The Gerald Larner Programme Note Archive

After Les Offrandes…

If I don’t like birdsong and I’m not religious what is there in Messiaen for me?

Well, there’s a whole lot else in Messiaen’s music. But to take the birds first, the fact is that the most enthusiastic ornithologist would have little advantage over anyone else in getting to know Messiaen’s feathered friends. It is true that he made precise notations of hundreds of species of birdsong but – with one or two exceptions that musicians have always been aware of – the process of transcribing it for instrumental use transforms it into something else. No bird would recognise it. Whatever Messiaen thought he was doing, in most of his works from Quatuor pour la fin du temps onwards he was using birdsong as a way of generating a new kind of musical material.

And the religion?

This is a more fundamental question. Just about everything in Messiaen’s music, from the “symphonic meditation” of Les Offrandes oubliées by way of the erotic excesses of Turangalîla to the evocations of space and landscape in Des Canyons aux étoiles, is an expression of his religious faith. But, the situation here is much the same as with the birdsong: there are aspects of Messiaen’s mysticism that the most devout Roman Catholic would not recognise or even understand. It’s a source of inspiration comparable to, say, Bach’s Lutheranism and certainly no less valid than Beethoven’s faith in humanity or Wagner’s belief in himself. What is important is not so much the nature of the inspiration as its intensity.

What about this business of seeing colours and perceiving them as sounds?

Again, it doesn’t matter if you don’t experience in listening to Messiaen’s music what he experienced in composing it. In Des Canyons aux étoiles you might not see the red, orange and violet rocks of Bryce Canyon but - whether you have synaesthesia or not - you will hear some of the most vividly colourful music ever written. Incidentally, one of those pinnacles is now called Mount Messiaen, which is a nice tribute to his genius in translating visual stimuli into musical terms.

Er…what was that you said about erotic excesses in Turangalîla?

Messiaen once declared that the most important things in his life and work were “God, love, and nature.” But it wasn’t always in that order and “love” didn’t always mean the same thing. There was his love for his first wife, the violinist Claire Delbos, which is presented as a reflection of divine love in Poèmes pour Mi; and there was his love for his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who came into his life in the early 1940s and inspired the unquestionably physical passion expressed in the central movements of Turangalîla.

What were the other formative experiences?

His mother, Cécile Sauvage, was a poet and his father was a Shakespearian scholar. So he had no ordinary childhood. Indeed, he was introduced to Pelléas et Mélisande when he was only ten and Debussy remained a major influence, more important even than Wagner (through Tristan) and Stravinsky (through The Rite of Spring). Then there was his training at the Paris Conservatoire, his kinship as a great church organist with Franck and Fauré, his discovery of Greek metres and Hindu rhythms, his contact with pupils like Boulez and Stockhausen…

And his influence on others?

Partly through his teaching but mainly through the expressive power of his music it has been greater than that of any composer since Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Gerald Larner©