OlivierMessiaen

Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon at midnight on 10 December 1908, and his grandfather marked the birth by singing the old carol Il est né, le divin enfant. His mother, Cécile Sauvage, had written L’Âme en bourgeon while she was expecting him. He later said there had been “only one influence in my life, and it happened before I was born”. At seven and a half, in wartime Grenoble, he sat on a bench in the town park reading the vocal score of Gluck’s Orphée and realised he could hear it in his head. “So, I was a musician,” he recalled. He also staged Shakespeare for his brother Alain, using cardboard figures and coloured cellophane from sweet boxes, with sunlight to light the theatre. Their father, an English teacher and Shakespeare translator, was away at the front. Olivier taught himself the piano. At ten, in Nantes, his teacher Jean de Gibon gave him Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and he played and sang it until he knew it by heart. Writing about himself in 1970, he said that the mountains of the Dauphiné “are his true home”.

1919–⁠39Organist of La Trinité

He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, studying composition with Paul Dukas, music history with Maurice Emmanuel, and organ with Marcel Dupré. In 1931, aged twenty-two, he became organist of La Trinité. He kept the job for the rest of his life. The church divided his Sundays between plainchant, older concert music and his own compositions. At vespers he improvised, because the short intervals in the service left no room for complete pieces.

In 1932 he married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. They gave recitals together, and he wrote Thème et variations for her. She was the Mi of Poèmes pour Mi; their son Pascal was born in 1937. Messiaen also joined Jolivet, Daniel-⁠Lesur and Baudrier in La Jeune France, founded in 1936. In 1944 he published Technique de mon langage musical, an account of his own musical methods with examples of his unusual scales and rhythms.

1940–⁠41Quatuor pour la fin du temps, Stalag VIII-A

After his capture in 1940, Messiaen met the clarinettist Henri Akoka and the cellist Étienne Pasquier in a makeshift camp near Nancy. By July they were in Stalag VIII-A near Görlitz. With the violinist Jean Le Boulaire, they rehearsed a trio in the camp washrooms. A piano was found, and a guard supplied manuscript paper. Messiaen built seven more movements around the trio. The slow melody for cello came from an earlier piece for six ondes Martenot.

1941–⁠49Yvonne Loriod and Turangalîla

Back in occupied Paris in 1941, he began teaching harmony at the Conservatoire. Seventeen-year-old Yvonne Loriod was among his pupils. In Visions de l’Amen (1943), which they played together, he gave her the fast first-piano part and kept the principal themes for himself. The following year he wrote Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-⁠Jésus. Loriod played all twenty at the Salle Gaveau on 26 March 1945, with Messiaen explaining each piece. Critics quarrelled over his theology and the extravagance of the piano writing.

At home, Claire was becoming seriously ill. Messiaen took over the domestic chores and got Pascal ready for school; eventually she needed institutional care. She died in 1959. During those years Messiaen and Loriod came to love each other, though his marriage and their Catholic faith held them back. Speaking to Michael White in The Independent on 10 January 1999, Loriod recalled: “I never called him by his first name.” To her he was Messiaen, or maître.

Love and death are the subjects of Harawi, Turangalîla-⁠Symphonie and Cinq Rechants, his three works on the Tristan myth. “This work is a love song,” he wrote in the programme for Turangalîla’s Boston première on 2 December 1949. He explained the Sanskrit title. Lila is play and love, and turanga is time, “the time which runs like a galloping horse”. Koussevitzky’s commission had grown into ten movements, with a large piano part and the sliding electronic tone of the ondes Martenot. The first movement sets two themes against each other. Trombones in thirds play the “statue” theme, which Messiaen compared to “the heavy, terrifying brutality of old Mexican monuments”; two clarinets answer with the “flower” theme, “like two eyes reflecting each other”. Leonard Bernstein conducted; Loriod played the piano and Ginette Martenot the ondes. In the sixth movement the strings play a slow melody beneath the piano’s birdsong.

The classroom and the fieldsTeaching, birdsong and Loriod

In the 1949 piano study Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, drawn from thirty-six pitches, twenty-four durations, twelve attacks and seven dynamic levels, each note always keeps its own duration, loudness and manner of attack. Boulez and Stockhausen took up the experiment. Messiaen continued his work on rhythm in Livre d’orgue (1951), in which birdsong interrupts the rhythmic calculations. His pupils at the Conservatoire also included Xenakis, Grisey, Murail and George Benjamin. After years of teaching harmony and analysis, he became professor of composition in 1966 and held the post until he retired in 1978.

In the field, the ornithologist Jacques Delamain helped him to recognise birds by ear. Loriod drove, ran the tape recorder and came on the early-morning outings; Messiaen filled notebooks. Réveil des oiseaux follows a woodland from night into morning. Oiseaux exotiques brings together Asian and American species that are never found in the same place. The thirteen piano pieces of Catalogue d’oiseaux place each bird among its neighbours at a particular hour. Messiaen and Loriod married in 1961. At home she checked his proofs, and the vocal score of Saint François d’Assise took her two years to make.

1972–⁠92From Utah to the Paris Opéra

In April 1972 Messiaen and Loriod went to Utah. Alice Tully had commissioned a work for the American bicentenary, and he wanted to see Bryce Canyon and hear its birds. At Cedar Breaks he wrote “immense solitude” in his notebook. Des canyons aux étoiles… names Bryce, Cedar Breaks and Zion, and its title moves from the canyons to the stars. “Heaven is symbolized by Zion Park and the star Aldebaran,” Messiaen wrote. The piano has whole movements to itself. So does the horn, which plays alone in Appel interstellaire, with silences between its calls. Elsewhere a wind machine and a sand-filled geophone join the percussion.

Saint François d’Assise occupied him from 1975 to 1983. He wrote the libretto himself, taking Francis through the encounter with a leper, the Angel’s music, the sermon to the birds and death. The very large orchestra included three ondes Martenot. At the première at the Paris Opéra in November 1983, Seiji Ozawa conducted, José van Dam sang Francis and Christiane Eda-⁠Pierre the Angel.

He returned to the organ in Livre du Saint Sacrement (1984), then to glass and birds in Un vitrail et des oiseaux. The New York Philharmonic commissioned Éclairs sur l’Au-⁠Delà… for its 150th anniversary. A superb lyrebird, which Messiaen heard on an Australian tour for his eightieth birthday, led him to revise the plan of the work, and it has a movement to itself. In an interview a few months before his death he said he had imagined himself “in front of a curtain, in darkness, apprehensive about what lay beyond: Resurrection, Eternity, the other life.” The work ends with the strings playing a melody above quietly struck triangles. Messiaen died on 27 April 1992, before the première; he had been looking forward to rehearsing it with Zubin Mehta. Loriod edited his treatise on rhythm, colour and birdsong. She also kept a cupboard of tapes of the improvisations she had recorded beside him at La Trinité.