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Olivier Messiaen was one of the major composers of the 20th century. Moreover, he was the creator of a startlingly original body of music. His work, more than that of any composer of comparable stature, stands outside the main currents of style and development that shaped the music of his time. Other leading composers of the last century created their art in the context of Western musical traditions—seeking to extend them, as did Schoenberg and his followers; to revisit them, as did Stravinsky and other neo-classicists; or to actively overthrow them, as did Cage and other avant-gardists. But Messiaen simply stepped away from the compositional forms and procedures of the past and of his own day. He embraced neither serialism nor neo-classicism when these approaches were in vogue, nor any other modernist styles or movements. Instead, Messiaen followed his own sensibilities with a single-mindedness that seems admirable, or naive—or both. Out of that pursuit of his own inclinations came a highly individual musical language whose elements included bird songs, synthetic scales of the composer’s own invention, rhythms derived from an ancient Hindu treatise, numerical symbols, and a strongly felt affinity between sound and color.
But independence from the general trends of 20th-century composition is only one quality that sets Messiaen’s music apart. Even more notable is its indifference to the humanistic spirit that finds such ample expression in mainstream modernism. Rather, Messiaen’s music reflects his visionary frame of mind. The composer’s concerns, as related through his work, were always with the suprahuman. The wit of Haydn or Prokofiev, the very human dramas and characters that Verdi etched with such clarity in his music, even the heartfelt but ultimately worldly joys and sorrows of Mozart, or Schubert, or Shostakovich—none of these find expression in Messiaen’s output. Instead, Messiaen gave us visions of the stupendous, the miraculous, and the transcendent. Quartet for the End of Time, Colors of the Celestial City, Visions de l’amen, From the Canyons to the Stars—the titles of his works alone indicate the rarified bent of Messiaen’s imagination and the magnitude of his true subjects.
Not surprisingly, Messiaen drew inspiration from unusual sources. Often his music articulated his very personal brand of Roman Catholicism. Messiaen’s faith was hardly orthodox. Its most striking feature was his literal acceptance of the miracles and revelations set forth in the scriptures, and his embrace of highly-charged imagery and symbolism found in certain other religious texts. Messiaen attributed his fascination with miracles, visions, and the world beyond our own to an “attraction of the marvelous.” That attraction accounts in no small way for the sense of mystery and violent majesty at the heart of his compositions, and not only his overtly religious ones.
Related to his religious faith, yet distinct from it, is the inspiration the composer drew from contemplation of the cosmos and the most vast and violent manifestations of nature. Myth, numerology, and ancient civilizations also fired Messiaen’s imagination.
Finally, there is Messiaen’s use of birdsong. The composer’s love and admiration of the singing of birds was unqualified. “It is probable,” he once said, “that in the artistic hierarchy, birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.” Messiaen became an authoritative ornithologist who spent many hours in the field transcribing birdsong into musical notation. Those songs then made their way into his compositions. Orchestrated bird calls play substantial and important roles in many of Messiaen’s works; while their presence is more limited in Turangalîla-Symphonie, it is by no means absent.
We see, then, that Messiaen’s thoughts were very much on matters remote from the mundane—or, for that matter, from most normal emotional concerns, no matter how keenly felt. Even the most patently human experience, that of romantic love, was conceived by Messiaen in mystical and mythic terms. Great love, according to the composer, is “a love that is fatal, irresistible, and which, as a rule, leads to death; a love which, to some extent, invokes death, for it transcends the body—even the limits of the mind—and extends on a cosmic scale.” It is a love that Messiaen found expressed most vividly in the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Not surprisingly, in view of this, the composer considered the central point of that legend to be what Wagner called Liebstod, or “love-death.”
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