Composer
Olivier Messiaen
The composer of birdsong, color, and faith - who wrote a masterpiece in a prison camp.
Olivier Messiaen was one of the most original composers of the 20th century, a deeply Catholic musician whose music was inspired by his faith, by birdsong, and by the colors he saw when he heard sound. His Quartet for the End of Time, written and first performed in a prisoner-of-war camp, is one of the most extraordinary stories in music.
Life in brief
Messiaen was born in Avignon in 1908. His mother was a poet and his father a teacher of English, and he taught himself the piano as a small child. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eleven, studying organ with Marcel Dupré and composition with Paul Dukas. In 1931, aged just twenty-two, he became organist of the Church of the Holy Trinity (La Trinité) in Paris, a post he held for more than sixty years.
When the Second World War began he was called up, and in 1940 he was captured by the German army and held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, in what is now Poland. Among his fellow prisoners were a clarinetist, a violinist, and a cellist, and for them and himself at the piano he wrote the Quartet for the End of Time. They gave its premiere in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and guards, on battered instruments in the bitter cold.
Released later that year, he returned to Paris and became a professor at the Conservatoire, where he taught for more than thirty years. His second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, was the great interpreter of his piano music. He traveled the world to notate birdsong, and in his seventies completed a vast opera about St. Francis of Assisi. He died in 1992, aged eighty-three.
Music and style
Messiaen's music sounds like no one else's. He experienced synesthesia, seeing specific colors when he heard particular chords, and he built his harmony from his own "modes of limited transposition," scales that give his music its glowing, stained-glass richness. He drew rhythms from ancient Greek meters and Indian music, and spent decades transcribing birdsong, which he considered the true music of nature and wove into many of his works. Above all, almost everything he wrote was an expression of his Catholic faith and sense of wonder.
Key works
- Quartet for the End of Time (1941) - eight movements for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, inspired by the Book of Revelation. See chamber music.
- Turangalîla-Symphonie (1946–1948) - a huge, ecstatic love song in ten movements for orchestra, solo piano, and the electronic ondes Martenot, premiered in Boston under Leonard Bernstein.
- Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (1944) - twenty meditations on the infant Jesus for piano.
- La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) - nine meditations on the birth of Christ for organ, his best-known organ cycle.
- Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–1958) - thirteen piano pieces portraying French birds and their landscapes.
- Saint François d'Assise (1975–1983) - his only opera, more than four hours long.
Legacy
Messiaen was one of the century's most influential teachers: his pupils included Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and George Benjamin. His ideas about rhythm and modes helped shape postwar modernism, yet his own music remains warm, colorful, and direct in its joy. See also the 20th century.
Where to start listening: the fifth movement of the Quartet for the End of Time, "Praise to the Eternity of Jesus," a long, slow song for cello and piano. Then try the fifth movement of Turangalîla, "Joy of the Blood of the Stars."