Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a French composer, organist, teacher, ornithologist, and synaesthete. Although he has yet to enter the mainstream, among musicians his reputation soars higher than the upper register of his instrument. And a year-long festival of his music, held in 2008 in venues across London to mark the centenary of his birth, at last earned him some popular recognition.
Messiaen is the only major composer in history whose style has never been closely imitated. One reason for this is the curious tonality of his music. Like most of his avant-garde contemporaries, Messiaen generally did not compose in major and minor keys. Yet unlike them, he chose not to join Arnold Schoenberg’s then-fashionable school of atonal “serialism”. He instead devised his own “modes of limited transposition”: jarring, luminous scales that had no harmonic precedent in Western music, and which he all but trademarked.
These scales are one of the features behind the “colourfulness” of Messiaen’s music. As a synaesthete, Messiaen “experienced” colours (though he emphasised that he did not perceive them visually) upon hearing certain harmonies, and cited Mozart, Wagner and Stravinsky as particularly “colourful” composers. By associating each of his modes with a different hue, he effectively “painted” his music. And often on gigantic canvases. Just listen to the skyscraping opening theme of the Turangalîla-Symphonie (1948), or to La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1969), a piece scored for one hundred and eighteen instruments and a ten-part choir.
Though a devout Roman Catholic, Messiaen did not write conventional liturgical music. Instead, he studied Japanese gagaku, Indonesian gamelan, and Hindu and ancient Greek rhythms, and was inspired by the unusual colours and birdsongs of Bryce Canyon in Utah to compose his orchestral piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles (1974). Encouraged by his teacher (the composer Paul Dukas) to “listen to the birds”, Messiaen would embark on solitary nature walks, transcribing birdsong as he went. These strolls resulted in the Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1958) for solo piano, a collection of thirteen tone poems based on the songs of thirteen different birds. Even when writing religious music, he overlooked all the doom and gloom in the Christian tradition in favour of extolling with messianic joy the figure of Christ. Typical is the title of the organ piece Transports de Joie d’une Âme devant la Gloire du Christ qui est la Sienne (1933), which translates as “Ecstasies of a Soul before the Glory of Christ, which is its own Glory”.
One of Messiaen’s works stands apart from the others. Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941), the “Quartet for the End of Time”, is remarkable for the circumstances of its composition. Working as a medic in the French army during World War II, Messiaen was captured by the Germans and imprisoned at the camp Stalag VIII-A. Among his fellow prisoners he found a clarinettist, a cellist and a violinist; with himself as pianist, he assembled an unconventional quartet and composed the Quatuor. The premiere was given on a freezing January day in 1941, before an audience of prisoners and guards, and the piano which Messiaen had received from the Nazis was out of tune and missing keys. The composer later recalled of the occasion, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”
Throughout his later career, Messiaen supplemented his composer’s income by teaching and serving as the organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris. Yet – drawing inspiration from his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod – he continued to compose. Of his late works, the oddly static Saint François d’Assise (1983) is notable for being his longest and calmest work as well as his only opera. It is a fitting coda to a totally unpredictable career, which ended in 1992 with Messiaen’s death by very old age.
