Hymne (au Saint-Sacrement)

The extraordinary thing about Messiaen is that, while his thinking and hearing were of a quite different order from those of just about everyone else, his music is for the most part immediately accessible to just about anyone who has the time to listen to it. His thinking was determined largely by his very personal but intensely felt version of the Catholic faith. His hearing – thanks to a (in his case) heaven-sent confusion of the senses known as synaesthesia – was also a matter of seeing, chords and melodies carrying precise colour associations in his mind’s eye.

The present orchestral work – which was first performed in Paris in 1933 as Hymne au Saint-Sacrement, lost in transit to Lyon during the War, reconstructed from memory and given the abbreviated title of Hymne in 1946 – is an early but entirely characteristic example. It is dedicated “to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist,” Messiaen wrote in defining the thinking behind it. “It attemps to depict the marvellous gifts of communion: the growth of love and grace, the force against evil, and the promise of eternal life.” Its sound, he said, “is characterised above all by its colour effects.” To the ordinary ear, on the other hand, it is an entirely logical single-movement construction based on two different sorts of material, a chordal first subject and a melodic second subject, which are developed and finally recapitulated.

The “gust of wind” the composer hears in the opening bars is, however, something we can hear too, even if we cannot see the colours of the brilliantly scored orchestral harmonies that follow. While he saw colours of a different kind in the modally derived lines quietly sustained by the strings in the longer second section, we can at least appreciate their shapely melodiousness. The dramatic development, which begins with loud interjections from the brass, is immensely colourful in a generalised sense, reminding us that Messiaen’s teacher at the Paris Conservatoire was Paul Dukas, composer of L’Apprenti sorcier. In a particular sense, according to Messiaen, there is a “mixture of gold and brown with orange striped with red, then orange and milky white with green and gold.” The sustained melodic lines of the second subject are recalled before a sudden burst of acitivity leads to the “red and gold” of the closing trumpet fanfares.

Gerald Larner © 2007