Two Preludes

La colombe

Chant d’extase dans un paysage triste

The title of Messiaen’s earliest published piano work - the Préludes he wrote when he was still a pupil of Dukas at the Paris Conservatoire in 1928 - inevitably calls Debussy to mind. So do some of the evocative titles attached to the eight pieces included in the collection, like Les sons implacables du rêve or Un reflet dans le vent. So too does much of the music itself. At the same time, however, there is far more Messiaen here than Debussy or anyone else, not least because his own personal modes are already fully operational in determining the nature of the harmony and the colour of the sound.

There is even, although Messiaen’s feathered friends were not make their formal entry into his music until some time later, an ornithological element in the Préludes. The first of them, La colombe (“The dove”) - which is based on the second of Messiaen’s “modes of limited transposition” associated in his synaesthetic perception with orange and violet - might have been inspired by one of the more colourful members of the dove family. And do the harmonies hovering above the slow moving melodic line at the start of the piece convey just a hint of the sound of the bird? Constructed in two short sections, La colombe ends on the delicately calculated sonority of a melodic fragment refracted to an exquisitely dissonant parallel line just over two octaves above.

The second of the Préludes, Chant d’extase dans un paysage triste (“Song of ecstasy in a sad landscape”) is a more complex construction in three main parts each of which itself is in three parts. The background presence here is that of Oiseaux tristes in Ravel’s Miroirs, although in this case it is the landscape that is sad rather than the birds. The central song of ecstasy, set between comparatively bleak and uneventful outer sections, is surely a birdsong allusion. Although it is more conventional birdsong than the minutely notated examples that were to be such fruitful material for Messiaen’s piano music from the Vingt Regards onwards, the quiet trills and repeated figurations high in the right hand are clearly diagnostic.

Gerald Larner©