Trois mélodies (1930)

Pourquoi?

Le sourire

La fiancée perdue

Of Messiaen’s 30 mélodies – issued in four sets (Trois mélodies, Poèmes pour Mi, Chants de terre et de ciel and Harawi) between 1930 and 1945 – all but one are settings of the composer’s own words. The exception, the central song of the Trois Mélodies, was inspired by the six lines of Le sourire from Primevère by his mother Cécile Sauvage – “the leading woman poet of our time,” as she was authoritatively described. Although her death in 1927 produced no immediate musical result, the Trois mélodies written three years later were surely intended as a memoria. In fact, Messiaen hadn’t yet found his voice as a composer in 1927 and it was only three years later, when he left the Paris Conservatoire, that he started composing music mature enough to interest a publisher and, like Les offrandes oubliées for orchestra and the Trois mélodies, to retain a place in the repertoire today.

Pourquoi? and La fiancée perdue were written, according to the composer, to “frame” Le sourire. The first of them is immediately recognisable as Messiaen, partly because of the relationship of its line and harmonies to a scale (his so-called “2nd mode of limited transposition”) which was to be a recurring feature of his music and partly because of the brilliantly expressive piano scoring between the final repetitions of “pourquoi.” Le sourire, though coloured by the same sort of harmonies, is set with a gentle simplicity worthy of the poem itself. La fiancée perdue is essential Messiaen too, not only because of its religiosity but also because of the refulgent piano harmonies of the first part of the song and the fervently sustained line of the prayer for blessing in the second part.