Music

Olivier Messiaen

1908–1992 · French

20th-century French modernism — mysticism, birdsong and modes of limited transposition

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist whose music fuses devout Catholic mysticism, transcribed birdsong, Hindu rhythms and a harmonic system of his own devising. He was organist of La Trinité in Paris for over sixty years, wrote his most famous work as a prisoner of war in a Silesian camp, and as a teacher at the Paris Conservatoire shaped Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and Grisey.

How to spot them

▸Birdsong, transcribed in the field and given to the piano or woodwind in sharp, unmetred bursts — he catalogued the songs of birds by region and species
▸Slow, rapt music with stacked added-sixth chords and a sweet, static radiance; the modes of limited transposition give the harmony its particular glow
▸Non-retrogradable rhythms — patterns that read the same backwards — and Hindu deçî-tâlas lifted from a 13th-century Sanskrit treatise
▸The ondes Martenot, the electronic keyboard instrument with a sliding ribbon, whose sound he made his own
▸He had synaesthesia, seeing colours in chords, and said so in his scores

Key works — listen

A quartet for violin, cello, clarinet and piano premiered in January 1941 in a German prison camp, before an audience of prisoners and guards (1941)

Quatuor pour la fin du temps, written and first performed at Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Silesia

A ten-movement symphony of 1948 on the Tristan legend, scored for a huge orchestra with solo piano and an ondes Martenot (1948)

Turangalîla-Symphonie — the central panel of his 'Tristan trilogy', commissioned by Koussevitzky

Twenty meditations for solo piano on the gaze of the Father, the star, the Virgin and the Church upon the infant Christ (1944)

Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus, written for Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife

A cycle of nine organ meditations on the Nativity, written at twenty-seven for the church where he was organist for sixty-one years (1935)

La Nativité du Seigneur, for the organ of La Trinité, Paris

Thirteen piano pieces in seven books, each named for a French bird and set in the landscape and light of its own region (1958)

Catalogue d'oiseaux — each piece a portrait of one species in its habitat

His only opera, over four hours long, in three acts on the life of a 13th-century Italian friar, including a sermon to the birds (1983)

Saint François d'Assise, premiered at the Paris Opéra under Seiji Ozawa

A 1974 orchestral work in twelve movements inspired by Utah's red rock country and by the Book of Revelation (1974)

Des canyons aux étoiles…, commissioned for the American bicentennial; a Utah peak was later named Mount Messiaen

A 1949 piano study whose total serialisation of pitch, duration, dynamic and attack was seized on by the next generation (1949)

Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, from Quatre études de rythme — a founding text of integral serialism

Key ideas

Modes of limited transposition — seven scales that can be transposed only a few times before repeating themselves, giving his harmony its characteristic ambiguity
Non-retrogradable rhythms — rhythmic palindromes, which he called a charm of impossibility, like the modes
Birdsong as the music of God's own musicians, transcribed from life and treated as thematic material rather than decoration
Synaesthetic colour: specific chords and modes seen as specific colours, sometimes annotated in the score

Quick-fire facts

•He was born in Avignon on 10 December 1908; his mother was the poet Cécile Sauvage and his father a translator of Shakespeare
•He entered the Paris Conservatoire at eleven and was appointed organist of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris in 1931, a post he held until his death in 1992
•Captured in 1940, he composed the Quatuor pour la fin du temps at Stalag VIII-A for the four instruments available and premiered it in the cold on 15 January 1941
•His title Quatuor pour la fin du temps puns on the end of time in Revelation and the end of metrical time in music
•In 1941 he became professor of harmony, and later of analysis and composition, at the Paris Conservatoire; his class included Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Grisey and Murail
•He travelled with notebooks to transcribe birdsong across France, Japan, Utah and New Caledonia
•His Technique de mon langage musical (1944) sets out the modes of limited transposition and non-retrogradable rhythms
•He married the violinist Claire Delbos; after her death he married the pianist Yvonne Loriod, for whom most of his piano music was written
•He won the Erasmus Prize in 1971 and the first Inamori Foundation Kyoto Prize for the arts in 1985
•A mountain in Utah was named Mount Messiaen in 1978 in honour of Des canyons aux étoiles…

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Sources

Paul Griffiths — Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time
Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press) — Messiaen, Olivier
Encyclopaedia Britannica — Olivier Messiaen