Olivier Messiaen
Born December 10, 1908, Avignon, France.
Died April 27, 1992, Paris, France.
L'Ascension
From the beginning of his first published composition, Messiaen spoke with a voice new to music. Le banquet céleste, a work for organ, opens with a single chord that lasts seven seconds. The whole piece is only twenty-five measures long, yet at Messiaen's extreme and deliberate tempo it takes six minutes to play. Messiaen calls Le banquet céleste a meditation; it allows not only for contemplation and reflection, but it suggests that distinct, otherworldly sensation of time standing still. In this and the pieces which followed over the next sixty years, Messiaen established himself, as Paul Griffiths wrote, as “the first great composer whose works exist entirely after, and to a large degree apart from, the great Western tradition.”
There are several elements in Messiaen's life that gave him a special affinity for a non-Western understanding of music, starting with his mother's unusual and prophetic assertion, made in a cycle of poems she wrote during her pregnancy: “I carry within me the love of mysterious and marvelous things.” As a child, Messiaen was fascinated with the rhythmic shapes of Sanskrit characters he found in the Lavignac encyclopedia. Much later, after he had begun to write music, he was bowled over by hearing Indonesian gamelan music—played by an ensemble primarily of gongs, chimes, and drums—at the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris.
Messiaen also absorbed much of the great Western tradition—at eight, his favorite Christmas presents were the scores of The Damnation of Faust and Don Giovanni from his parents, and, two years later, when his teacher handed him a copy of Debussy's Pelleas and Melisande, it was, in the composer's words, “a real bombshell . . . probably the most decisive influence of my life.” His fascination with the exotic and his love of the classics merged to form a sensibility unique in modern music. Messiaen composed in a language all his own, even after he took on students and inspired disciples. It's difficult to think of another figure so out of sync with his own century and yet so influential in determining its future.
Messiaen wrote Le banquet céleste in 1928, during his student days at the Paris Conservatory. It was the earliest of his compositions he cared to acknowledge. In 1930, Messiaen left the conservatory to take the post of organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris (it houses one of the great Cavaillé-Coll instruments). During the thirties, he became known as an organist-composer, and at the same time he began a series of works, culminating with L'Ascension, which expresses his devout theology through the voice of the orchestra. “I have had the good fortune to be a Catholic,” he later wrote.
I was born a believer. . . . A number of my works are dedicated to shedding light on the theological truths of the Catholic faith. That is the most important aspect of my music . . . perhaps the only one I shall not be ashamed of in the hour of death.
The subject of L'Ascension (The Ascension, the Catholic feast which celebrates Christ's ascent into heaven) is eternity and human destiny, a theme to which he would often return, even as late as his final large-scale work, Éclairs sur l'au-Delà (Reflections on the hereafter), completed only six months before his death in 1992. There's a remarkable consistency to Messiaen's outlook throughout his career. As he told The New York Times in an interview in 1988:
No, I am not like Samuel Beckett, who says, “Oh my God, I was such an idiot in that period, and I wrote such nonsense at the other time.” I always hear what I have written as part of myself given sincerely, and it remains a part of me because it is a place where I have lived.
L'Ascension begins with a prayer from the world as we know it and ends with a slow ascension into the hereafter. There are four, strongly characterized, diverse movements. Like many of Messiaen's works, L'Ascension is marked by the contrast between extremely slow passages, with seemingly unending melodies and stationary harmonies, and music of brilliant exuberance. The first movement is solemn outdoor music—resounding chords scored for winds and brass, carried by a bold trumpet theme. In the second movement, long, fluid, unaccompanied melodies played by the winds—the earliest influence of plainsong in Messiaen's music—alternate with delicate trios. The third movement is a dance of joy. The last of the four meditations is scored for a small group of strings. With its extremely slow pace and waves of gradually rising chords, it gives a sense of ascending into eternity. The final harmony—a sustained, open-ended, unresolved seventh chord played fff—makes the everlasting startlingly concrete (on Messiaen's own recording it lasts nearly a minute).
Each of the four movements is prefaced by a text relating to the feast of the Ascension:
1. Majesty of Christ Asking Glory from his Father: “Father, the hour has come; give glory to your Son, that your Son may give glory to you” (Gospel according to John)
2. Serene Alleluias of a Soul Desiring Heaven: “Nous vous en supplions, o Dieu, . . . faites que nous habitions aux cieux en esprit” (We beseech you, O Lord, . . . let us dwell in spirit in the heavens) (Mass for Ascension Day)
3. Alleluia on the Trumpet, Alleluia on the Cymbal: “La Seigneur est monté au son de la trompette . . . Nations, frappez toutes des mains; célébrez Dieu par des cris d'allegresse!” (The Lord mounts [his throne] amid trumpet blasts . . . . All you peoples, clap your hands, shout to God with cries of gladness) (Psalm 46/47)
4. Christ's Prayer Rising to his Father: “Father, . . . I have made your name known to those you gave me out of the world. . . . I am in the world no more, but these are in the world, as I come to you.” (Gospel according to John)
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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