Un sourire

Un sourire

Un sourire was one of Messiaen’s last works. Not to be confused with Le sourire (The smile), an early song-setting, Un sourire (A smile) was written in response to a request from Marek Janowski, then Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, for a piece to mark the centenary of Mozart’s death. It is also one of the shortest works by a composer celebrated for his command of large-scale structures and one of the most modestly scored of his often extravagantly colourful orchestral works (it calls for three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and cor anglais, three clarinets, three bassoons, four horns, two percussionists playing xylophone and xylorimba and strings excluding double basses).

Un sourire is not, however, uncharacteristic of Messiaen. As he said, “I love and admire Mozart. I didn’t try in my homage to imitate his style, which would have been idiotic.” The style –    its slow moving melody for violins and woodwind in his own unmistakably distinctive modes alternating with an instrumental transcription of bird song (identified as that of the South-African white-browed robin-chat) – couldn’t be attributed to anyone else. Progressively longer with each entry, the melody occurs four times, the vividly contrasting bird song three times.

According to the composer’s programme note, Un sourire “continuously alternates a very simple melody for violins and an exotic bird song repeated by xylophones, woodwind and horns. In spite of bereavements, suffering, hunger and cold, misunderstanding and the proximity of death, Mozart always smiled. His music always smiled too. That’s why I have allowed myself, in all humility to call my homage Un sourire.”

Commissioned a few years in advance by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Un Sourire was written in draft in 1989 and first performed under Janowski’s direction on 5 December 1991, the 200th anniversary to the day of Mozart’s death. Messiaen died less than a year later.

Gerald Larner © 2017