Olivier Messiaen
“I was born a believer.”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those close to him ⏳🌊
- FamilyCécile Sauvage
His mother, a poet, dedicated to him the collection she wrote while carrying him, and died when he was eighteen.
- InfluenceClaude Debussy
The score of Pelléas et Mélisande he was given at around the age of ten set him on the path to becoming a composer.
- TeacherPaul Dukas
His composition teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, who is said to have urged him to listen to the songs of birds.
- FamilyClaire Delbos
His first wife, a violinist and the subject of Poèmes pour Mi; she died in 1959 after a long illness.
- FamilyYvonne Loriod
His student and second wife, she premiered most of his piano works and put his posthumous works in order.
- StudentPierre Boulez
After studying in his harmony class, he led the postwar avant-garde, and as a conductor he brought his teacher's music to a wide audience.
I. The poet's son · 1908–1930 (age 0–22)
(Mother) He was born in December 1908 in Avignon, France. His father, Pierre Messiaen, was an English teacher and a translator of Shakespeare; his mother, Cécile Sauvage, was a poet. While she was carrying him, she wrote the poem cycle L'Âme en bourgeon and dedicated it to her unborn son. Messiaen later came to believe that these poems had foretold his destiny. In 1912 his brother Alain was born, and he too grew up to become a poet. (Grenoble) When the First World War broke out in 1914, his father enlisted, and his mother took the two boys to her family's home in Grenoble. In those years among the mountains and lakes of the Alps, the boy taught himself the piano and staged Shakespeare plays for his brother in a toy theater lit through cellophane. The mountain landscape remained the homeland of his heart for the rest of his life. (Pelléas) After the war the family lived for a time in Nantes. Around the age of ten, he was given a score of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande by Jehan de Gibon, a harmony teacher there, and Messiaen remembered the gift as a revelation that struck like lightning. When the family settled in Paris in 1919, he entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eleven. (Conservatoire) At the Conservatoire he studied organ and improvisation with Marcel Dupré, ancient Greek rhythm and music history with Maurice Emmanuel, and composition with Paul Dukas. Dukas is said to have been the teacher who urged him to listen to the birds. In 1927 his mother died of tuberculosis. The next year he wrote the organ piece Le Banquet céleste, and in 1929 he brought out his first published work, the piano Préludes. The first music he gave the world after losing his mother was a prayer that did not cry out but dwelt in stillness.
An organ piece written by a twenty-year-old student the year after he lost his mother. In this slow prayer of meditation on the Eucharist, his faith and his sense of time are already unmistakable.
- The score bears a direction meaning “very slow, ecstatic.” Performances range from just over 6 minutes to more than 9, so it is worth comparing recordings to hear how that extreme slowness lifts the sound into the air.
- The harmonies come from a scale in which semitones and whole tones alternate (Messiaen's mode 2). This is the source of its strange color, neither major nor minor.
- In the later section, the keyboard played by the feet (the pedals) lets fall short, clipped notes (staccato) one by one in a high register. The passage is often likened to drops of water.
- Rather than moving forward, the melody seems to stay in one place while only its colors slowly change. Follow the feeling of time standing still.
II. The organ of La Trinité · 1931–1939 (age 23–31)
(La Trinité) In 1931, at twenty-two, Messiaen became principal organist of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris. He kept the post for more than 60 years, until his death. He improvised at every Sunday Mass, and parishioners bewildered by the unfamiliar harmonies sometimes lodged complaints with the church. An organist's salary was meager, so he made his living by also teaching at the École Normale de Musique and the Schola Cantorum. (Mi) In 1932 he married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. He called his wife by the pet name “Mi,” and as a wedding present he wrote Thème et variations for violin and piano. The 1936 song cycle Poèmes pour Mi holds both his faith, which saw marriage as a sacrament (聖事), and his love for his wife. A son was born in 1937, and the following year's song cycle, Chants de terre et de ciel, includes a song about the baby. (Faith) For Messiaen, the Catholic faith was not a conclusion reached after long struggle but the ground he had stood on from the start. Organ cycles such as L'Ascension (1932–33) and La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) were meditations with Bible verses and theological commentary attached to the score. Around this time, drawing together modes of limited transposition, the ancient Indian rhythms known as tala, and nonretrogradable rhythms that read the same backward and forward, he refined a musical language all his own, one that does not count the beat evenly. (Circle) In 1936, with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, he formed a group called “La Jeune France.” Against light, mechanical music, they championed music that was human and spiritual. For the 1937 Paris Exposition he wrote Fête des belles eaux for six ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument. The instrument would go on to appear again and again in his major works.
The signature work of the years when he was newly married and working as organist at La Trinité. It unfolds the mystery of Christmas in nine meditations, and in its preface he set out his rhythms and modes systematically for the first time.
- The final piece, “Dieu parmi nous,” opens with a theme in the pedals that drops step by step from high to low (descending). It is widely heard as God coming down to dwell among people.
- The second half of the same piece races into a fast piece of relentless fingerwork (toccata) and ends on a huge chord, as if every stop on the organ had been pulled. It is the best place to hear the grandeur of a church organ.
- In “Les Anges,” fast, glittering figures in the high register depict angels giddy with joy.
- In pieces with an uneven beat, like “Les Bergers,” listen for a rhythm that keeps stumbling as a single short note is added or taken away. It is a technique Messiaen took from Indian rhythm.
III. The end of time · 1939–1941 (age 31–33)
(Conscription) When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Messiaen was drafted as a medical orderly and stationed near Verdun. There, standing dawn watch with the clarinetist Henri Akoka and the cellist Étienne Pasquier, he listened to the birds waking. The solo clarinet piece he wrote for Akoka later became “Abîme des oiseaux.” (Captivity) In June 1940 he was captured by the German army and sent to Stalag VIII-A, the prisoner-of-war camp at Görlitz. When he met the violinist Jean Le Boulaire there as well, he began writing for the clarinet·violin·cello·piano that chance had gathered in one place. Karl-Albert Brüll, a German guard who had trained as a lawyer, found him music paper and pencils and gave him a quiet place to compose. (Premiere) On January 15, 1941, in a freezing barracks, the Quartet for the End of Time was premiered before an audience of prisoners and guards. Messiaen played a battered piano whose keys would not go down properly. He later recalled that his music had never been listened to with such attention and understanding. (Apocalypse) The work took its starting point from chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, the scene in which an angel crowned with a rainbow proclaims that there shall be time no longer. Messiaen said it was not music depicting life in captivity but a meditation on an eternity beyond time. Yet this song of eternity, written amid hunger, cold, and confinement with no end in sight, is steeped in the desperation of those days. He was released in the spring of 1941 and returned to Paris.
Written for four players brought together by chance in the Görlitz prison camp and premiered in its barracks. In time held captive, it sang of the eternity beyond time.
- In movement 1, “Liturgie de cristal,” the clarinet imitates a blackbird and the violin a nightingale. Beneath them, the piano repeats 29 chords and 17 durations out of step with each other, creating a time like endlessly turning gears.
- Movement 3, “Abîme des oiseaux,” is for clarinet alone. The passage in which a single long note swells from a nearly inaudible whisper to a very loud sound (crescendo) is counted among the great showpieces of a clarinetist's breath and control.
- Movement 5 is a prayer in which the cello sings “infinitely slow, ecstatic.” Listen for whether the cello's long line carries on unbroken above the piano's quiet chords.
- In movement 6, “Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes,” all four instruments play the very same melody from beginning to end in one voice (unison). Its uneven beat has made it notorious as a movement that is hard for the players to keep together.
- In movement 8, the last, the violin climbs very slowly to ever higher notes and ends as if fading away. Messiaen described it as humanity ascending toward God.
IV. Love and death · 1941–1949 (age 33–41)
(Classroom) In 1941 he became professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. His class soon turned into a forum for discussion that went far beyond the set curriculum. He analyzed Mozart's rhythmic accents, Debussy's harmonies, the rhythms of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and Alban Berg's Lyric Suite. In 1944 he published Technique de mon langage musical, a summary of his methods. Around this time the young Pierre Boulez joined his harmony class. (Yvonne) In 1943 the nineteen-year-old pianist Yvonne Loriod began attending his class. Her overwhelming technique and memory transformed Messiaen's piano music. He wrote Visions de l'Amen (1943) for two pianos, to be played by himself and Loriod, and then the piano cycle Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (1944), which runs to two hours. (Shadow) A shadow fell over his home. Claire Delbos's health began to fail in the late 1940s, and after an operation she slowly lost her memory. Messiaen taught and composed while caring for his ailing wife and young son. Meanwhile his heart turned toward Loriod, but he is known not to have acted on his feelings while his wife was alive. (Tristan) This conflict flowed into three works singing of love and death, the so-called “Tristan trilogy”: the song cycle Harawi (1945), which draws on Peruvian folk song; the Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–48), commissioned by Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and the choral work Cinq rechants (1948). As in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, their common theme was a love that transcends death. Turangalîla was premiered in Boston in 1949 under Leonard Bernstein, with Loriod as piano soloist.
A two-hour piano cycle written with the technique of his student Yvonne Loriod in mind. Loriod premiered it in 1945, and here their musical partnership began in earnest.
- In the first piece, “Regard du Père,” the “Theme of God,” presented in low, slow chords, returns transformed in many of the other pieces. Listen for where the theme comes back, and the map of the two-hour cycle falls into place.
- No. 10, “Contemplation of the Spirit of joy,” is a wild, ecstatic dance. Pianists count its passages, where both hands leap from one end of the keyboard to the other, among the most demanding stretches of the whole cycle.
- No. 15, “The kiss of the Infant Jesus,” rocks gently like a lullaby. Listen for how different its color is from the violent pieces in the same cycle.
- No. 6, “Through Him all things were made,” is built as a fugue in which several voices pursue a single subject in turn, so that it sounds like the vast process of a world taking shape out of chaos.
The heart of the “Tristan trilogy,” written while he was torn between his wife's illness and his feelings for Loriod. It unfolds the joy of love and death across ten movements.
- The title is Sanskrit: Messiaen explained “turanga” as flowing time and movement, and “lîla” as divine play and love. It helps to listen with its double meaning in mind, as both a song of love and a play of time.
- The electronic ondes Martenot floats above the orchestra, sustaining long, quivering high notes. Listen for the moments when this timbre, somewhere between a human voice and a siren, sings the love theme.
- The “statue theme,” pressed down heavily by trombones and tuba, and the “flower theme,” sung softly by two clarinets, recur throughout the piece. The contrast between the two is its backbone.
- Movement 5, “Joy of the blood of the stars,” is a frenzied dance for the full orchestra. In Movement 6 that follows, “Garden of the sleep of love,” the strings and ondes unfold the love theme very slowly while the piano scatters birdsong above them.
- The solo piano part is so large and difficult that it is almost a concerto. Comparing the recordings of Loriod, the pianist at the premiere, with those of later pianists is one of the pleasures of devotees.
V. Songs of the birds · 1949–1961 (age 41–53)
(Experiment) At the 1949 summer courses in Darmstadt, Germany, he wrote a short piano piece, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, which bound pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre into a single system. The piece opened the way to total serialism for Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen attended his classes in Paris in 1952. Rather than make Iannis Xenakis, then working as an architect, study harmony all over again, he urged him to put mathematics and architecture to use in his music. (Turn) Yet Messiaen himself did not linger long on that path. In the early 1950s, an era overflowing with systems and experiments, he felt he had reached a dead end, and he found his answer in the birds. With the ornithologist Jacques Delamain and others, he roamed the forests, marshes and seashores of France, noting down birdsong in his notebooks. He called himself “an ornithologist and a rhythmician.” (Catalogue) The orchestral works Réveil des oiseaux (1953) and Oiseaux exotiques (1956) were followed by the piano cycle Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–58). Each of its thirteen pieces holds a single species of bird together with the cliffs, marshes or sea where it lives, and Loriod gave the premiere. Around this time he came to regard birdsong as a rhythm freer than any system made by human beings. (Farewell) Meanwhile Claire's illness had deepened, and from the early 1950s she lived in a care home. Messiaen visited her often. Claire died in April 1959. The following year he unveiled Chronochromie, an orchestral work weaving together birdsong and the colors of time, and in July 1961 he quietly married Yvonne Loriod. The long years of caregiving were over, and he had found a companion with whom to share both music and life.
The fruit of the years when, at the dead end of experiment, he sought his answers from the birds. Birdsong noted down in forests and marshes is set, together with its landscapes, in thirteen piano pieces.
- Each score carries written descriptions of the bird's habitat, the time of day and the landscape. The first piece, “The Alpine chough,” opens not with birdsong but with heavy chords that paint a vast cliff. Try listening to the bird and its setting separately.
- In the second piece, “The golden oriole,” the bird's French name, “loriot,” echoes the surname of the cycle's first performer, Yvonne Loriod. The oriole's clear, flutelike call rings out over a summer wood.
- “The reed warbler,” the longest piece at over 30 minutes, follows the hours of a single day passing over a marsh. Listen with a feel for the flow of time, noticing how the bustle of day gives way to the stillness of night.
- Real birdsong is too fast and too high for a human to play, so Messiaen slowed it down and lowered its pitch as he transcribed it. As a result, it sounds less like an exact copy of birdsong than like birdsong examined under a magnifying glass.
VI. Colors and canyons · 1962–1978 (age 54–70)
(Japan) In 1962 he traveled to Japan with Loriod and set his impressions down in Sept haïkaï. The resonance of gagaku court music, the birds of Japan and the scenery of its shrines and gardens were sketched in a series of short pieces. From this period on, the couple traveled the world together collecting birdsong, and Loriod served as both the first performer and the chronicler of Messiaen's works. (Color) Messiaen saw colors in sound. He said he had a synesthesia in which each chord called up its own particular color, and he sometimes wrote the names of colors into his scores. Couleurs de la cité céleste (1963) put that sense front and center. He followed it with the oratorio-scale La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1965–69). (Remembrance) In 1964 the minister of culture, André Malraux, commissioned a work to honor the dead of the two world wars. Scored only for winds and metal percussion, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum was first performed in 1965 at the Sainte-Chapelle, and then at Chartres Cathedral in the presence of President de Gaulle. For a man who had come back alive from a prison camp, the commission held a special meaning. In 1966 he became professor of composition at the Conservatoire. (Canyon) In 1972, for a work commissioned by the American patron Alice Tully, he visited Bryce Canyon in Utah. Its red rocks and its birds became Des canyons aux étoiles... (1971–74), and in 1978 the state of Utah named one of its peaks “Mount Messiaen.” Major honors such as the Erasmus Prize (1971) and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1975) also freed him from the tight finances of his younger days. In 1978 he retired from the Conservatoire.
A work commissioned by the state to honor the dead of the two world wars. A composer who had returned from a prisoner-of-war camp sang of the resurrection that lies beyond death in war.
- It has no strings at all, scored only for woodwinds, brass and metal percussion such as bells, gongs and tam-tams. Messiaen said he had in mind music that would ring out in cathedrals, in the open air and on high mountains.
- The third movement contains the song of the uirapuru, a bird of the Amazon. The woodwinds take that birdsong; listen for the contrast of light birdcalls heard between the heavy brass.
- In the final movement, huge gongs and tam-tams swell gradually from the faintest sound to an overwhelming roar (crescendo). Live, the resonance is so great you feel it in your body, so even on a recording it is best to leave the volume generous.
- Each movement takes a verse from the Bible as its title. Reading the titles before you listen makes it easier to follow what each movement contemplates.
VII. The saint of Assisi · 1975–1992 (age 67–84)
(Opera) He had long said he would never write an opera, but after repeated urging from Rolf Liebermann, director of the Paris Opéra, he changed his mind when President Pompidou asked him in person at a dinner at the Élysée Palace. In 1975 he set to work on Saint François d'Assise. He wrote the libretto himself as well. The work took 8 years, and exhausted and in failing health, he believed it would be his last. (The saint) The figure he chose was the saint said to have preached to the birds. Joy in poverty, a love that embraces the leper, a faith that accepts suffering: these touched on everything Messiaen had spent his life trying to say in music. He regarded Francis as the man who most resembled Christ. The opera premiered at the Paris Opéra in November 1983, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. (Late years) Contrary to his expectation that it would be his last, he kept on writing. The organ cycle Livre du Saint-Sacrement (1984) appeared, and for the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic he wrote the large orchestral work Éclairs sur l'au-delà... (1987–91). In summers he composed at his house on the shore of Lake Petichet, in the foothills of the Alps, close to the mountains he had gazed at as a child in Grenoble. (Death) On April 27, 1992, he died at 83 in a hospital in Clichy, outside Paris. Éclairs sur l'au-delà... was not premiered until November of that year, so he never heard it. The unfinished Concert à quatre was completed by Loriod and fellow musicians. He was buried in the village cemetery of Saint-Théoffrey, to which Petichet belongs, and Loriod, who died in 2010, was laid to rest beside him.
His only opera, 8 years in the making, with a libretto he wrote himself. Faith and birdsong, color and rhythm, the musical language of a lifetime all come together on this four-hour stage.
- In Scene 3, “The kiss to the leper,” the music suddenly bursts into light at the moment Francis embraces the leper. Listen for the instant when revulsion turns to love, heard as a change in the orchestra's colors.
- In Scene 5, “The angel musician,” the heavenly music the angel plays is given to three ondes Martenot. Francis faints on hearing it, and the quivering timbre of the electronic instruments sounds as if it were not of this world.
- Scene 6, “The sermon to the birds,” is the most famous scene in the opera. Birdsong Messiaen gathered in many countries bursts out at once from every corner of the orchestra.
- The final scene, “Death and new life,” ends with a vast chorus holding a long, majestic C-major chord. A composer who wrote complex harmonies all his life brings it to a close with the simplest chord of all.
Lesser-known stories
(Legend) Recalling the premiere in the camp, Messiaen used to say the audience numbered 5,000 and the cello had only three strings. For years the story was reprinted unchanged in liner notes and concert programs. But a book published in 2003 by the clarinetist Rebecca Rischin, based on interviews with surviving performers and others involved, showed that the cello had all four strings and that the audience numbered only in the hundreds. Because the story came from the composer himself, it long went unquestioned. (The guard) The same research also brought to light the role of a German guard, Karl-Albert Brüll. He is said not only to have found music paper and arranged a space for composing, but also to have helped secure Messiaen's release. In the tale of “a masterpiece born in an enemy prison camp,” Germans who helped in this way long remained confined to the footnotes. (Diaries) Messiaen was long portrayed as a mystic untouched by worldly troubles. What changed that impression were his diaries and letters, which Loriod allowed to be made public. The biography that Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone published in 2005 on the basis of these papers showed in concrete detail the anguish he suffered between his wife's illness and his feelings for Loriod, and the straitened finances that had him shuttling between several schools to make a living. These sources also made clearer why the “Tristan trilogy,” with its songs of love and death, emerged at that particular time.
Glossary 📚🔎
Modes of limited transposition
(Meaning of the word) Seonbeop (旋法) means the method (法) of making a melody (旋), that is, a rule governing which notes are chosen and used. (In music) These are special scales that Messiaen catalogued himself. An ordinary do-re-mi scale yields twelve different scales as you move its starting note, but these modes return to exactly the same notes after only a few shifts. That is why they give off a mysterious color, neither major nor minor, leaning in no direction at all. A chessboard makes it easy to picture. Shift a chessboard by one square and its pattern changes, but shift it by two and you have the original pattern again — these modes, too, come back to the same shape after only a small shift.
Non-retrogradable rhythms
(Meaning of the word) Gayeok (可逆) means 'able (可) to be turned backward (逆)', and bigayeok (非可逆) means that it cannot be. Messiaen's French name for it means ‘a rhythm that cannot be turned backward’. (In music) This is a rhythm that is the same whether read from the front or from the back, a rhythm symmetrical on either side of its center. Because it stays the same when reversed, you cannot obtain a ‘new rhythm made by reversal’, and that is how it got its name. Messiaen regarded it as a symbol of eternity, whose beginning and end are the same. Think of words like gireogi ('wild goose') or tomato ('tomato'), which read the same backward and forward in Korean — it is, in effect, a palindrome made of rhythm.
Tala
(Meaning of the word) Tala (tāla) comes from a Sanskrit word for a handclap or the palm of the hand. From the practice of counting beats by clapping, it became the name for a unit of rhythm. (In music) In traditional Indian music, it is a rhythmic framework of fixed length that repeats. Messiaen read a list of 120 talas, compiled by a 13th-century Indian scholar, in a French music encyclopedia and was deeply influenced by it. Rather than dividing a measure evenly as Western music does, it strings short and long notes together irregularly. It is like a jump-rope game in which you skip not evenly to ‘one, two, three’ but in a set pattern such as ‘short, short, long’.
Ondes Martenot
(Meaning of the word) Ondes is French for 'waves' or 'radio waves', and Martenot is the name of Maurice Martenot, who built the instrument in 1928. The name means ‘Martenot's waves’. (In music) It is an early electronic instrument that produces sound from electrical signals. It can be played from a keyboard, or, by sliding a wire attached to a ring worn on the finger, glide seamlessly from one pitch to another. This gives it a mysterious sound that trembles and flows like a human voice. Messiaen gave the instrument important roles in the Turangalîla-Symphonie and Saint François d'Assise. Think of the gliding ‘woooo’ sound heard in horror or science-fiction films and you have something close.
Total serialism
(Meaning of the word) Chongnyeol (總列) means lining up (列) everything (總). It means arranging not only pitch but every element of the music according to a fixed order. (In music) Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique fixed in advance only the order of pitches, but total serialism arranges the duration, dynamics and even timbre of notes according to predetermined lists. Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités first demonstrated this idea, and Boulez and Stockhausen developed it further. It is like a game in which, instead of choosing a character's height, speed, strength and color yourself, you let each be set automatically, one by one, from a table drawn up in advance.
Synesthesia
(Meaning of the word) Gonggamgak (共感覺) means several senses arising together (共). The English name, synesthesia, likewise comes from Greek for ‘feeling together’. (In music) It is a phenomenon in which a stimulus to one sense is automatically accompanied by another, as when hearing a sound makes one see a color. Messiaen said that he saw colors when he heard chords, and he sometimes wrote color names such as ‘blue-orange’ into his scores. For him, composing was something like making stained glass out of sound. If you have ever felt your mouth water at the mere mention of a lemon, or had a certain song call up a particular color, you have felt something a little like it.
Improvisation
(Meaning of the word) Jeukheung (卽興) means doing something at once (卽), just as inspiration (興) arises. (In music) It is composing and performing music on the spot, without a score written in advance. French church organists had a tradition of improvising to follow the flow of the Mass, and Messiaen improvised every week at the Église de la Trinité for more than 60 years. Many of the ideas born there later found their way into his works. It is like an ‘impromptu speech’ at a speaking contest, where instead of reading a prepared text you are given a topic on the spot and start talking right away. (Elsewhere) In theater, it can also mean improv, in which actors create scenes on the spot without a script.