Modernist Enchantment

Olivier Messiaen:
A Critical Biography
by robert sholl
reaktion, 208 pages, $35

In May 1988, just under four years before his death, France’s greatest living composer made his only visit to Australia. Olivier Messiaen was 79 years old, and his journey, officially, was part of Australia’s bicentennial celebrations. But his real preoccupation—as always when he traveled—was with the music that he regarded as the sublimest in all Creation: birdsong. An Australian guide showed Messiaen and his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, around the Sherbrooke Forest outside Melbourne. Their hope, above all, was to see and hear the superb lyrebird. It’s one of the world’s largest songbirds, possessed of extraordinary vocal range, fluidity, and powers of invention. By 1988, only around seventy superb lyrebirds survived in Sherbrooke Forest.

Finally, they encountered one. “Messiaen’s concentration was absolute,” observed his guide:

Yvonne Loriod gave her husband his glasses, he took from his bag a book of five-line paper and wrote straight down in music the sounds of the amorous lyrebird. If someone spoke to him when he was listening, he didn’t hear.

The story of Messiaen and the lyrebird appears near the end of Robert Sholl’s concise new biography of the composer. It’s something of an outlier: a splash of anecdotal color in a book that concerns itself principally with the technicalities—musical, philosophical, theological—of Messiaen’s creative process. By his last decade, after the premiere in 1983 of his only opera, Saint François d’Assise, the musical world had come to view Messiaen as a Grand Old Man. Photographs often showed him wearing a beret, and the woolen scarf that Loriod had knitted for him in blue and orange—colors that Messiaen (who experienced synaesthesia) claimed to see in his music.

Messiaen, in 1988, presented an amiable, almost cuddly figure in the embattled world of late-twentieth-century European musical modernism. His lifelong preoccupation with birdsong could be laughed off, like his profound devotion to the Catholic Church, as an old man’s quirk. When he died in April 1992, the news was edged out of Anglophone headlines by the death the following day of the British artist Francis Bacon. As a single bemused newspaper columnist pointed out at the time, the nihilistic painter of screaming popes and tortured flesh seemed by far the more relevant figure, much closer to the spirit of the age.

Three decades on, something of that reputation still lingers in the musical world, even as Messiaen’s massive Turangalîla-Symphonie (once deemed all but unplayable) enters the repertoire of youth orchestras all over the globe, and audiences who usually shun contemporary music flock to performances of his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps and Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, often emerging (I’ve witnessed this myself) transformed and moved in ways they cannot explain. Sholl, a respected Messiaen scholar, and a pianist and organist who has performed many of Messiaen’s colossal devotional keyboard works, seeks to offer a corrective. The face that gazes confidently from the cover of Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography isn’t the kindly old man.

Instead, we see the dapper young intellectual of 1930: the self-assured future founder of Jeune France, a group of artists devoted to the spiritual rearmament of French music in an era of dance bands and divertissements. There are few divertissements in Sholl’s book. Out (with a few telling exceptions) go the standard anecdotes of Messiaen biography—the stories (and in some cases myths) surrounding the creation of the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps in a German POW camp; the long personal tragedy of Messiaen’s marriage to his first wife, Claire Delbos; the troubling moral complexities of his career under the Vichy régime. These are all pared back to the minimum required to illuminate the central, enduring fact of Messiaen’s life: his art, and the faith that shaped it.

It’s a valid and probably necessary approach. Messiaen aficionados, after all, will already possess Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone’s masterly, comprehensive, and very readable 2005 biography. Sholl is candid about his analytical intentions. “Recent biographies of Messiaen have chronicled the composer’s life through his diaries,” he writes in an introductory chapter, “but this book tells his story in a different way. My approach here moves between biographical, musical, theological, psychoanalytic and aesthetic thinking, and I have used sketches and archival material that often pose more questions than they answer.”

The results have more than a faint aroma of academia, and there’s no escaping the fact that some of Sholl’s analysis will be heavy going for anyone who is not a professional musicologist. “Messiaen’s modal harmonisations internalise the notion of colour-change implied in flat- and sharp-side notation (from common-practice tonality) and in the potential of enharmonicism,” he remarks at one point. Later, describing Messiaen’s 1963 ensemble work Couleurs de la Cité céleste, he writes of “a visually diegetic paradigm of ‘transitions, saturation [and] of crossing of thresholds’ that reveals the jouissance of this ‘dynamic morphology.’”

Well, as Messiaen himself put it (in the preface to Quatuor pour le fin du temps), “All this remains but a stammering attempt if the crushing grandeur of the subject is considered!” Complex subjects demand complex language, and these 208 pages contain a formidable concentration of bracing and often profound ideas. It’s an approach that mirrors its subject: Messiaen, after all, never shied away from embracing intense complexity in pursuit of artistic and spiritual truth. Sholl quotes him on the very first page:

After death, during the necessary purification that precedes the definitive vision of God, one cannot remember the joys and pains of this life. One remembers only the good and bad actions. At this moment I will be upset with all the evil that I have done. But I will also rejoice in all the good that I have been able to do, and this final memory permits me progressively to understand the invisible.

With regard to Messiaen’s music and its significance, Sholl’s analysis enables the reader to go through an analogous purification process. He wrestles vigorously (and sometimes fiercely) with difficulties but emerges, at the end, with a clear impression of an artist’s intellectual development and spiritual purpose—an enhanced understanding, if you like, of this supremely invisible art.

Messiaen, for example, is generally acknowledged to have been one of the twentieth century’s finest organists. He had trained in a French Catholic organ tradition defined by late-Romantic masters such as César Franck, Marcel Dupré, and Messiaen’s one-time mentor, Charles Tournemire. Conventional modernist narratives present Messiaen’s career as a process of emancipation from what is presumed (by some secular observers) to have been a conservative artistic and spiritual milieu. By tracing the intellectual traditions of these artists and Messiaen’s indebtedness to (and occasional conflict) with them, Sholl reveals Messiaen’s early training and spirituality not as shackles, but as roots—a lifelong source of creative nourishment.

Messiaen could have been one of the supreme concert organists of the century. Instead, he poured his energies as a performer into his role as organist of the Eglise de Sainte-Trinité in Paris, performing weekly at services from 1929 until the end of his life. At the age of eighty-two he was still playing for two Masses each Sunday (though not for Vespers, for Sholl notes that by then “it was his custom to pray before the service”). In any case, the traditional task of the church organist—in particular, the process of improvisation, devising wordless, liturgically inspired music to aid the congregation in their devotions—proved vital in forming Messiaen’s musical language. It didn’t always go smoothly, as Sholl explains:

It is not every parishioner arriving for Mass on Sunday morning who desires to be confronted by dissonant organ music expressing “the shock of lights and colours,” as Messiaen described the apocalypse, or making present the “unheard violence” of psalm texts.

Messiaen was obliged to apologize for shocking the “old ladies” with the zeal and fire of his improvisations. The point remains, though, that the wellspring of his creativity was a regular, active artistic participation in worship. From that sprang his command of musical imagery and color, his almost theatrical sonic daring, and the thrilling immediacy and urgency of his musical language—as Sholl puts it, “a form of modernist enchantment.”

“Music was therefore a form of proclamation that represented a desire to realise something of Christ’s eternal kingdom now,” Sholl observes, “. . . doing the work of the Church in its musical provision of wordless messages of hope, praise, supplication and redemption.” Early critics compared Messiaen’s music to stained glass: vast, luminous panels of sacred truth, to be apprehended through the heart and soul as well as the ears, and blazing with color—an irresistible metaphor to a synaesthete like Messiaen. The Jeune France manifesto, which Messiaen signed in 1936, called for “a living music” with an “élan of sincerity, generosity and artistic conscience.”

This book illuminates Messiaen’s engagement with the Surrealists, and the postwar cas Messiaen—one of those very French artistic scandals, in part a reaction by more classically inclined (and secular) composers and critics against what they saw as Messiaen’s troubling postwar popularity with the concert-going public. Sholl interprets the mighty musical cenotaph of Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964) as a direct rebuke to the liturgical reforms then sweeping through the Catholic Church, in particular the practice of singing Gregorian chant in languages other than Latin—a move that, in Messiaen’s view, destroyed the chant’s “majesty and dreamlike quality.”

But Sholl also clarifies the process by which Messiaen emerged as a truly central figure for the postwar generation of European composers: uniting artists as different as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Henri Dutilleux, Tristan Murail, Harrison Birtwistle, James MacMillan, George Benjamin, and even the iconoclast Pierre Boulez. Religious belief was by no means universal in this generation of composers; nonetheless, the creative spirit unlocked and channeled by Messiaen’s faith opened up the countless paths that these artists and their pupils have followed and continue to follow.

Stravinsky mocked the Turangalîla-Symphonie—“Little more can be required to write such things than a plentiful supply of ink”—but in the twenty-first century the British composer Julian Anderson told me that he had come to place Turangalîla on a par with Le Sacre du printemps as one of twentieth-century music’s supreme liberating moments: a revelation of a new universe of rhythm, harmony, and instrumental color. Sholl seems to me unduly pessimistic about the current standing of Messiaen’s own work. The perspective of a scholar and performer will, I suppose, differ from that of an audience member or concert promoter.

But Messiaen’s story is far from over, and it was far from over even when he encountered that lyrebird and scribbled in his birdsong notebook that “it dances and sings!!!” (those three exclamation points speak volumes). Much of Messiaen’s work could be described as a dance before the Lord, and even as his own thoughts drew closer to the beyond, he could still summon the strength for a final shout of praise and joy. The lyrebird’s song appears in the third movement of his final great orchestral work Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà . . . , which he completed in 1991 and never heard performed, in this world at least.

Messiaen pours all the iridescent colors of a colossal orchestra into that single, dancing line of birdsong. There’s something simultaneously gorgeous and gleeful in witnessing one hundred–plus virtuoso musicians deploying all their skill to remake the leaping, trilling melody of a bird that is simply, spontaneously behaving as its Creator intended. Messiaen saw no incongruity. He linked the lyrebird’s song, in his music, to the apocalypse, and a vision of the Celestial City adorned as a bride.

“At the heart of Messiaen’s music is the capacity for him to embrace God,” Sholl concludes: “to see and understand his own agency in this embrace, and to create a music that communicates not only the resurrected life (to come) but to impart that God is here for humanity now.” The difficulty of that task (at least with mortal tools) never deterred Olivier Messiaen, and the challenge of describing it doesn’t deter Robert Sholl, either. You needn’t let it deter you.

Richard Bratby writes from Lichfield, England.

Image by Studio Harcourt, public domain. Image cropped.