Les Offrandes oubliées (Méditation symphonique)

The “symphonic meditation” Les Offrandes oubliées (The Forgotten Sacrifices), was written as long ago as 1930 when Messiaen had only just left the Paris Conservatoire and the composition class of Paul Dukas. Even so, and although several characteristics of his mature style were still to develop – not least his obsessive interest in birdsong – the composer of such monumental works as Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum and La Transfiguration de notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ is instantly recognisable in this his first orchestral work. As he once said, “I have the good fortune to be a Catholic; I was born a believer…That is the most important aspect of my music…perhaps the only one I shall not be ashamed of in the hour of death.”

Apart from the religious inspiration, there are several technical aspects of Les Offrandes oubliées which make it unmistakable Messiaen. One of these, as he had already demonstrated in his organ piece Le Banquet céleste, is his ability to extend a constantly developing melodic line at a tempo slower than most other composers would dare sustain for more than a few bars at a time. The slow progress of the melody quietly winding its way through the string textures in the outer sections of Les Offrandes oubliées is most effectively contrasted with the suddenly noisy stampede in the middle section. Messiaen’s characteristic use of modal harmonies is put to particularly expressive use in the final section where they are allied to a kind of halo effect secured by drawing the melodic line on first violins through an ethereal background of four solo violins and five solo violas.

The theological background of each of the three sections – identified respectively as “The Cross,” “Sin,” and “The Eucharist” - is elaborated in the composer’s own words in the score:

With arms extended on the tree of the Cross, sad unto death, you pour forth your blood. You love us, gentle Jesus; we had forgot.

Driven by folly and the sting of the serpent, we were in a breathless, frenzied, ceaseless descent into sin, as into a tomb.

Here is the pure altar, the source of charity, the banquet of the poor; here adorable Pity offers the bread of Life and of Love. You love us, gentle Jesus; we had forgot.

While there has probably never been a performance at which more than small proportion of the orchestra and the audience shared those precise sentiments, it is the sound rather than the thought behind it that counts. As Messiaen said after the first performance of Les Offrandes oubliées by the Straram Orchestra in Paris in 1931, “It is so much more beautiful than I thought. These musicians play it like champions.”