Première communion de la Vierge

(fromVingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus )

César Franck and Olivier Messiaen had much in common, including the inspiration they found in the Catholic faith and their extraordinary fidelity as organists to their respective churches in Paris: Franck retained his post at Sainte Clotilde for no fewer than thirty years, Messiaen his at La Trinité for more than forty. On the other hand, although the organist in Franck all to often intrudes on the pianist in him - not least in the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue - Messiaen wrote for the piano as knowingly and as imaginatively as any of his contemporaries. Obviously, as the successor to Fauré, Debussy and Ravel, Messiaen had the historical advantage: Franck had no such national tradition to inform his piano style. Less obviously, Messiaen also had the advantage of a long-term association with one of the leading pianists of her generation, Yvonne Loriod, whom he married in 1962 but whose influence on his music goes back not far short of twenty years before that.

The Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, one of the great monuments of twentieth century piano music, was written in what was surely the most inspired period of Messiaen’s career, directly between Quatuor pour la fin du temps and the Turangalîla Symphony. First performed by Yvonne Loriod in Paris in 1945, it is one of his (in a very real sense) visionary masterpieces, a series of contemplations of the baby Jesus from different mystic points of view - from the Father, the Virgin, the Cross, the Angels… Some of them, like today’s example, seem to be based on pictorial works of art of some kind. The composer describes Première communion de la Vierge (First Communion of the Virgin) as “a picture in which the Virgin is represented kneeling, bending forwards - a bright halo hovers over her womb. With closed eyes, she worships the fruit hidden within her. This happens between the Annunciation and Nativity: it is the first and the greatest of all communions… After the Annunciation, Mary worships Jesus within her… my God, my son, my Magnificat! - my love spoken without words…”

The piece is based on a variant of one of the principal musical images of the work, the “Theme of God.” In the très lent opening section it is manifested as a sequence of four chords quietly repeated in the left hand and overlaid in the right hand by a variety of decorative but also meaningful figurations, including the Virgin’s tender “internal embrace” of her unborn child and a characteristic display of bird song at one point. The Virgin’s “Magnificat” in the middle section is presented as a vigorous dance with a compressed and syncopated variant of the Theme of God again in the left hand set against “panting” expressions of physical exhilaration in the right. It leads to a dramatic litany of chords shared by the two hands, an extraordinary passage of quietly drummed low Fs representing the beating of the child’s heart and a brief recall of the opening très lent material, the Theme of God dying away at the end.