A portrait of Olivier Messiaen

Text: Albrecht Selge, 23 April 2024

Translation: Clive Williams

One of the most peaceful compositions in music history is actually a child of war. The premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s »Quatuor pour la fin du temps» is one of the great legends of 20th century music. Though its legendary status already signals that one or two details should be taken with a pinch of salt. Or allegorically.

The »Quartet for the End of Time« was played for the first time on 15 January 1941 in a barrack at the Stalag VIII A prisoner of war camp near Görlitz in Silesia. When Messiaen later recalled that there were 5,000 listeners at this performance, it is worth remembering what we learnt at school about the symbolism of biblical numbers. More specifically: about the »feeding of the 5,000«, which is described in all the Gospels. It is not about a divine miracle canteen or about exactly how many people got something to eat, but about the higher, spiritual feeding of many, potentially all people. Messiaen’s glorification of the audience’s response, a colourful mix of people ranging from labourers to clergymen, should be understood in the same higher sense: »Never again have people listened to me with such attention and understanding as they did back then.«
 

Programme highlights to close the season: in this edition of the five-week festival, the great Hamburg orchestras and star guests explore the theme of »War and Peace«.

All this despite a very real hunger, which also had an effect on the creation of the work itself, as Messiaen described: »During my imprisonment, the food shortage caused me to have colourful dreams: I saw the rainbow of the angel and a strange circling of colours.« It must also have been bitterly cold in the miserable barracks of the prisoner-of-war camp, surroundings admittedly more bearable than the Nazi death camps. In purely musical terms, some listeners may have been perplexed by the strange sounds they were confronted with. But on another level, many were certainly satisfied – not by five loaves and two fish, but by four rather damaged instruments, which brought about a miraculous improvement in the state of suffering hearts. (And I believe that this sense of inner satisfaction is an ideal to be kept in mind when sitting in a well-heated concert hall, an ideal we can approach at the best moments of the concert experience.)

The strange line-up of the »Quatuor pour la fin du temps« was born of coincidence: the clarinettist Henri Akoka was one of thousands of captured French soldiers with whom the 31-year-old Messiaen, who had been called up for national defence, was waiting six months earlier west of Nancy to be transported to German prison camps. There, in the open field, Akoka had already played a solo composition Messiaen had written for him to his fellow prisoners. How different this piece, »Abîme des oiseaux« (»Abyss of the Birds«), will have sounded in a French summer compared to the harsh German winter, the oppressive circumstances notwithstanding. It forms the fascinating centrepiece of the eight-movement »Quatuor«, which Messiaen later wrote in Stalag VIII A around the Abyss, incorporating parts of some older compositions from memory. An art-loving German officer actually set up a composing corner for him, complete with paper and pens. And as a violinist and a cellist had been captured alongside the clarinettist Akoka, and Messiaen himself was an excellent pianist, the instrumentation of the quartet was a natural product of the circumstances.

New York music critic Alex Ross published a very readable book on 20th century music in 2007 entitled »The Rest is Noise«, where we learn that »the era of the avant-garde began on that cold winter night in 1941«. A legendary claim in the style of good American story-telling, this is overstated at the least. First-time listeners to the »Quatuor« who expect the avant-garde may be irritated by the recurrent sweetness of the fifth and eighth movements, with beguiling praise of eternity and the immortality of Jesus that comes close to kitsch. (Which of course shouldn’t bother us as undogmatic listeners in 2024!) It’s beautiful music, to be sure; but the transfiguring E major finale would have driven a  progressive composer like Pierre Boulez or Luigi Nono up the wall!

Just as they emphatically rejected Messiaen’s greatest success, the postwar »Turangalîla Symphony«, with all its ecstatic exuberance. – In stark contrast to the general concertgoing public, it must be said, which is intoxicated to this day by Messiaen’s colossal delirium of love where the stars bleed with joy. When conductor Simon Rattle was asked on TV whether there was a piece from this period that simply sweeps listeners away without the need for any prior knowledge, he named the fifth movement, »Joie du Sang des Étoiles«.

Olivier Messiaen seems to have entered the post-war avant-garde by chance more than anything else. Hardly any book on serialism would fail to mention that Messiaen’s piano piece »Mode des valeurs et d’intensités« was of immense importance for the idea of (pseudo)scientifically determining the construction of music. While Schönberg’s twelve-tone method merely determined the possible sequences of a series of the same twelve tones, Messiaen’s piece transferred such consistent strictness to other »parameters« of music such as tone durations, or (only a Frenchman could come up with this) tone colours. Messiaen’s performance of his »Mode des valeurs et d’intensités« at the Darmstadt Summer Course in 1952, virtually the Jerusalem of musical progress, was a revelatory experience for Karlheinz Stockhausen: »Musical material fully constructed in all its characteristics!« Instead of tone poetry, a kind of tonal engineering that seemed (and still seems) very unmusical to some. For several years, Stockhausen and Boulez were dogged Grand Inquisitors of the new method.

But Messiaen was not trying to establish a new »scientific« religion of music: perhaps he just wanted to try something out. He later remarked: »I was very disturbed by the exaggerated importance attached to a small work no more than three pages long (...) on the pretext that it marked the beginning of the serial division of touch, duration and colour intensity, in short, of all musical parameters. This music may have been prophetic, historically significant, but in musical terms it is nothing, nothing at all.«

In terms of temperament too Messiaen, born in 1908, differed noticeably from the drivers of progress 20 years his junior. He later said of his conservatoire student Boulez: »He was like a lion skinned alive, he was terrible.« Conversely, Boulez and Iannis Xenakis later agreed that their teacher was »generous«. And Stockhausen of all people, who according to Ligeti always wanted to gather »disciples« around him, wrote as early as 1958: »Messiaen didn’t try to convince me. That’s why he was a good teacher.«

It was probably more thanks to his pupils, whom he inspired but didn’t direct, if some contemporaries regarded Messiaen as the leader of the wicked subversives. In a letter to Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc wrote of a »fanatical sect«< that he called »Messiaenists«. Yet in 1945, Messiaen was already recommending that his radical students exercise »a little heavenly gentleness«. Basically, what he had and three other young composers had formulated ten years earlier still applied to him: it was about »using new means to open up a new and bold world of expression, and to disseminate works that are youthful, free and as far removed from revolutionary slogans as they are from academic ones«. In the fanatical heyday of serialism, he devoted himself to recording and cataloguing bird calls, systematically and sometimes with a touch of mania.

In later years, Messiaen summed up his relationship to the radical avant-garde of the 1950s in these words: »I had human plans – I am a human being after all. I also followed the fashions of my time; I composed serially at a certain point, I also composed modally, but all that is a mistake. The only real thing is resonance and its equivalent in colour.«

Resonance and colour: the latter was not a metaphor for Messiaen, but just as factual as physical sound itself. As a synaesthete, colours were inseparable from sound for him; the E major in which the »Quatuor « ends, for example, is undoubtedly red.

But even if he meant »colour« literally, Messiaen had a penchant for flowery, poetic descriptions of his music, which are particularly striking against the backdrop of an analytical, objective zeitgeist: he called his own works »unknown fragrance« or »bird without sleep«. That sounds more like aestheticism than rationalism, and the many different stimuli united in Messiaen’s music have a similar rainbow effect. The Harenberg Opera Guide’s attempt to list his formative influences is nothing if not humorous: »In addition, he was privately interested in Greek and Indian rhythms, the rhythms of the stars and the human body, and in exotic music and birdsong.«

The fact that this eclectic music manages not to disintegrate into its individual parts is also due to the unity that Messiaen’s personality created: down-to-earth and human at all times, yet full of faith and a longing for heaven. For him, God was present in everything, yet as a devout Catholic he always had one foot outside space and time. When changing rhythms dissolve every unit of time in the »Quatuor«, Messiaen not only follows impulses from Stravinsky’s »Sacre du printemps«, Ancient Greek metrics and the scales of Indian ragas, but above all triggers something in the listener: a sense of the end of time.

This firm belief also spans Messiaen’s work from beginning to end: it begins with early orchestral pieces from the 1930s such as »Les Offrandes oubliées« or »L’Ascension«, which is based on organ meditations and which music critic Jan Brachmann once described in the Frankfurter Allgemeuine Zeitung with such pretty terms as »Muschebubu« or »cuddly and cloudy«. Messiaen himself characteristically likened the sprinkling of flowing major triads with overflowing dissonances to bees poking around in flowers ... And it ends in the 1980s with his dreaded last major work, the opera »Saint François d’Assise«. As a monument to both unconditional piety and complex birdsong, it is an absolutely stringent, all-encompassing highlight in Messiaen’s oeuvre.

»Saint François« is certainly not just a dramatic stage thriller, rather it’s a meditative Christian mystery play whose plot and dialogues are easy to follow. Moreover, it’s no longer than a Wagner opera. And it is by no means the sole 20th century opera with a religious subject (Debussy’s »Martyre de Saint Sébastian« comes to mind, Honegger’s »Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher« and Schönberg’s »Moses und Aron«). The fact that it is so rarely performed is partly because the score calls for three ondes Martenot, Messiaen’s favourite forerunner of the synthesiser, a transcendent, howling instrument that can only be played by some 15 musicians worldwide. At least, that was the estimate of someone in the know when the work was performed at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2002 in a Daniel Libeskind production. He had never done anything so complicated before, said the acclaimed conductor Marc Albrecht about the complex score. Producer Antje Kaiser, however, described the four-hour work as one single »crescendo of joy«.

The fact that Messiaen led »a rather uninteresting life« from 1908 to 1991, as Alex Ross claims, cannot be accepted, at least not in connection with the circumstances under which the »Quatuor« came to be written and performed in the PoW camp. But Ross does narrate this amusing anecdote: »When conductor Kent Nagano, who worked closely with Messiaen in his final years, was once pressed to tell a less flattering or revealing story about his mentor, he could only relate how Messiaen and [his wife Yvonne] Loriod had once eaten a whole pear tart with their coffee.«

Messiaen spent sixty years of his life as the organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where he regularly played on Sundays and also performed magnificent improvisations. (These, as Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone explain in their tedious reference biography of Messiaen’s life, he prepared thoroughly.) This can be seen as a completely different kind of radicalism, even more blatant than pear tart. As with birds or stars, you can’t talk about Messiaen’s art without mentioning his organ music. The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, recognised Messiaen’s religious but non-liturgical organ compositions as »a new genre, since his works for organ are like a place that has suddenly been occupied within Catholic worship by music alone; this music doesn’t take the place of worship, however, but adds a new dimension to it«. In this sense, Cardinal Lustiger compared their significance with that of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas in Protestant services.

Like the Bach cantatas, Messiaen’s organ works can also be performed in concert, such as his substantial late piece »Livre du Saint Sacrement». And just as Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists or atheists can benefit from listening to Bach, so non-organists can of course also listen to this eighteen-part opus ultimum – even though it was premiered in Detroit in 1986 before an audience of 2,000 professionals, members of the American Guild of Organists.

So how did Olivier Messiaen himself see his life? There is no despair in it, but rather a peaceful and gently smiling resignation when he said as an old man that his life as a musician had basically been four tragedies: as a believer, an ornithologist, a listener to colours and also as a »rhythmist«; but unfortunately no listener could understand him, as his music lay outside all regular time values. Is this true? The enduring presence of Messiaen’s music in the concert repertoire suggests that even among hopeless ignoramuses like ourselves, there are some who want music to move them out of time and take them beyond it, who want to track down colours and birds and faith.

This article appeared in the Elbphilharmonie magazine (issue 2/24).