Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), French composer and organist, born in Avignon, and trained at the Paris Conservatoire. He studied composition and organ, respectively, with the French musicians Paul Dukas and Marcel Dupré. In 1931, shortly after he became organist of the Trinity Church in Paris, his first major work, the symphonic poem Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings), was performed. In 1942 he began to teach at the Paris Conservatoire. Among his works are numerous compositions for organ; Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time, 1941), a chamber work composed and first performed while Messiaen was in a prisoner-of-war camp; Visions de l'amen (1943), a seven-part work for two pianos; Turangalîla (1946-1948), a ten-movement symphony incorporating a wide range of exotic percussion instruments; and La Transfiguration (1965-1969), an oratorio for chorus, instrumental soloists, and orchestra.

Historically, Messiaen is also important in the history of post-war European music as a teacher. From the late 1940s his pupils have included many of the leaders of the European avant-garde, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis. Boulez in particular influenced Messiaen in his turn, and both of them for a while in the early 1950s produced integral-serialist works that developed the technique of Anton Webern, who of all the Second Viennese School composers had taken the twelve-tone system furthest. After the mid-1950s Messiaen's path diverged from his pupils, but his continued influence can perhaps be seen in the shimmering orchestral sound of Boulez and the spiritual subject-matter of Stockhausen.

From the early 1930s, Messiaen developed a uniquely distinctive harmonic language (explained in his book, The Technique of my Musical Language, 1950) which came from his systematic use of “modes of limited transposition”—modes which could only be transposed a limited number of times before repeating themselves (unlike, say, a major scale, which unfolds a unique series of notes on each degree of the chromatic scale). This produced harmony which contained powerful dissonance within an overall framework that was strongly tonal in flavour. He took rhythmic inspiration from Indian and Greek sources among others, and from the 1940s onwards his most constant source of melodic influence was from birdsong—he travelled the world observing and transcribing the songs of hundreds of birds—which he wove into his work in many different contexts, from the intense examination in the seven-volume Catalogue d'Oiseaux (1956-1958) for piano, to the decorative filigree of Jardin du sommeil d'amour from the Turangalîla Symphony and the “dawn chorus” for 18 strings in the Epôde section of Chronocromie (1960).

These technical resources enabled Messiaen to maintain an independent path at a time when most European composers were choosing either a Neo-Classical or a Twelve-tone approach; another factor also underlining his independence was the spiritual, and specifically Roman Catholic, motivation and subject-matter of his work. These threads come together most clearly in his opera, Saint François d'Assise (1975-1983), which combines birdsong and the austere life of the saint with a grand summary of Messiaen's musical techniques, and crowns one of the most consistently impressive bodies of work of any 20th-century composer.