Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist. One of the major composers of the 20th century, he was also an outstanding teacher of composition and musical analysis.
Messiaen entered the Conservatoire de Paris at age 11 and studied with Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré, among others. He was appointed organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, in 1931, a post he held for 61 years, until his death. He taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris during the 1930s. After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his (Quartet for the End of Time) for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards. Soon after his release in 1941, Messiaen was appointed professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1966, he was appointed professor of composition there, and he held both positions until retiring in 1978. His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, Mikis Theodorakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Jacques Hétu, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Kurtág, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.
Messiaen perceived colours when he heard certain musical chords (a phenomenon known as chromaesthesia); according to him, combinations of these colours were important in his compositional process. He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. His style absorbed many global musical influences, such as Indonesian gamelan (tuned percussion often features prominently in his orchestral works). He found birdsong fascinating, notating bird songs worldwide and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music.
Messiaen's music is rhythmically complex. Harmonically and melodically, he employed a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material his early compositions and improvisations generated. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime. For a short period he experimented with the parametrisation associated with "total serialism", in which field he is often cited as an innovator. His innovative use of colour, his conception of the relationship between time and music, and his use of birdsong are among the features that make Messiaen's music distinctive.
Biography Youth and studies
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France, into a literary family.Dingle (2007), p. 3 He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and , a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-SudVisions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen, Stephen Schloesser who also translated William Shakespeare's plays into French.Hill & Simeone (2005), pp. 10–14. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, (The Budding Soul), the last chapter of (As the Earth Turns), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career.Messiaen & Samuel (1994), p. 15 His brother , four years his junior, became a poet.
At the outbreak of World War I, Pierre enlisted and Cécile took their two boys to live with her brother in Grenoble. There Messiaen became fascinated with drama, reciting Shakespeare to his brother. Their homemade toy theatre had translucent backdrops made of cellophane wrappers.Messiaen & Samuel (1994), p. 41 At this time he also adopted the Roman Catholic faith. Later, Messiaen felt most at home in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he had a house built south of Grenoble. He composed most of his music there.Hill (1995), pp. 300–301.
Messiaen took piano lessons, having already taught himself to play. His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents.Messiaen & Samuel (1994), p. 109. He also saved to buy scores, including Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody".Christopher Dingle, The Life of Messiaen (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7. Around this time he began to compose.
In 1918 his father returned from the war and the family moved to Nantes. Messiaen continued music lessons; one of his teachers, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy's opera , which Messiaen called "a thunderbolt" and "probably the most decisive influence on me".Messiaen & Samuel (1994), p. 110. The next year, his father gained a teaching post at Sorbonne University in Paris. Olivier entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919, aged 11.Hill & Simeone (2005), p. 16.
Messiaen made excellent academic progress at the Conservatoire. In 1924, aged 15, he was awarded second prize in harmony, having been taught in that subject by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925, he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926 he gained first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he was awarded second prize for the history of music in 1928.Hill & Simeone (2005), pp. 16–17. Emmanuel's example engendered an interest in ancient Greek rhythms and exotic modes.Sherlaw Johnson (1975), p. 10. After showing improvisational skills on the piano, Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré.Bannister (2013), p. 171. He won first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, in autumn 1927 he entered the class of the newly appointed Paul Dukas. Messiaen's mother died of tuberculosis shortly before the class began.Hill & Simeone (2005), p. 20. Despite his grief, he resumed his studies, and in 1930 Messiaen won first prize in composition.
While a student he composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (the earlier Le Banquet céleste for organ was published subsequently). These exhibit Messiaen's use of his modes of limited transposition and palindromic rhythms (Messiaen called these non-retrogradable rhythms). His official début came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year he first heard a gamelan group, sparking his interest in the use of tuned percussion.For further discussion of Messiaen's youth, see, generally, Hill & Simeone (2005).
La Trinité, La jeune France, and Messiaen's war
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré's organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ console, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained and demonstrated the instrument, and then came back a week later to play Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasia in C minor to an impressive standard.Hill & Simeone (2005), p. 22. From 1929, Messiaen regularly deputised at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité for the ailing Charles Quef. The post became vacant in 1931 when Quef died, and Dupré, Charles Tournemire and Widor among others supported Messiaen's candidacy. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. The appointment was confirmed in 1931,Hill & Simeone (2005), pp. 34–37. and he remained the organist at the church for more than 60 years.Heller (2010), p. 68. He also assumed a post at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s.Dingle (2007), p. 45. In 1932, he composed the Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.Gillock (2009), p. 32.
He also married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos) that year. Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937. Mi was Messiaen's affectionate nickname for his wife.Sherlaw Johnson (1975), pp. 56–57. On 14 July 1937, the Messiaens' son, Pascal Emmanuel, was born; Messiaen celebrated the occasion by writing Chants de Terre et de Ciel.Gillock (2009), p. 381. The marriage turned tragic when Delbos lost her memory after an operation toward the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.Yvonne Loriod, in Hill (1995), p. 294.
During this period he composed several multi-movement organ works. He arranged his orchestral suite L'Ascension for organ, replacing the orchestral version's third movement with an entirely new movement, Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne (Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own).Benitez (2008), p. 288. He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of the Lord) and Les Corps glorieux (The glorious bodies).Hill & Simeone (2005), p. 115.
In 1936, along with André Jolivet, Daniel Lesur and Yves Baudrier, Messiaen formed the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto implicitly attacked the frivolity predominant in contemporary Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau's 1918 Le coq et l'arlequin in favour of a "living music, having the impetus of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscientiousness".From the programme for the opening concert of La jeune France, quoted in Griffiths (1985), p. 72. Messiaen's career soon departed from this polemical phase.
In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fête des belles eaux for an ensemble of six.Hill & Simeone (2005), pp. 73–75. He included a part for the instrument in several of his subsequent compositions.Dingle (2013), p. 34.
At the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Due to poor eyesight, he was enlisted as a medical auxiliary rather than an active combatant.Griffiths (1985), p. 139. He was captured at Verdun, where he befriended clarinettist Henri Akoka; they were taken to Görlitz in May 1940, and imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A. He met a cellist (Étienne Pasquier) and a violinist () among his fellow prisoners. He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into a more expansive new work, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). With the help of a friendly German guard, , he acquired manuscript paper and pencils. The work was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards, with the composer playing a poorly maintained upright piano in freezing conditions and the trio playing third-hand unkempt instruments.Rischin (2003), p. 5. The enforced introspection and reflection of camp life bore fruit in one of 20th-century classical music's acknowledged masterpieces. The title's "end of time" alludes to the Book of Revelation, and also to the way that Messiaen, through rhythm and harmony, used time in a manner completely different from his predecessors and contemporaries.See extended discussion in Griffiths (1985), Chapter 6: A Technique for the End of Time, particularly pp. 104–106
The idea of a European Centre of Education and Culture "Meeting Point Music Messiaen" on the site of Stalag VIII-A, for children and youth, artists, musicians and everyone in the region emerged in December 2004, was developed with the involvement of Messiaen's widow as a joint project between the council districts in Germany and Poland, and was completed in 2014.
Tristan and serialism