The French composer and teacher Olivier Messiaen, one of the most original composers and musical thinkers of his time, had a strong influence on many of the important composers of the following generation.
Background
Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France on December 10, 1908. His mother, Marie Sauvage, was a poet, and his father was a well-known translator of Shakespeare's plays into French. They encouraged their musically precocious son, who composed little pieces when he was only 7. The boy heard a performance of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande when he was 10, and it made such a strong impression that he decided to become a composer.
Education
He entered the Paris Conservatory the next year and remained there for 11 years, studying theory, organ, piano, improvisation, history, esthetics of music, and composition. He was a brilliant student in all of these fields, and each played a part in his later activities.
Career
In 1931 Messiaen became organist at the Church of the Trinity in Paris, a post he held for many years and where his brilliant organ improvisations attracted much attention. He served in the French army during World War II and spent 2 years as a prisoner of war. In 1942 he started teaching at the Paris Conservatory, and the theories he expounded in his classes in analysis and rhythm were highly stimulating to his students. They are described in his Technique of My Musical Language (1950). He also taught at Tanglewood in the United States and at the highly influential International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany.
Messiaen was an exceptional 20th-century French composer in that he was not influenced by the classicism of Igor Stravinsky, which was the predominant musical style. Messiaen believed that music was a highly expressive, romantic art. Instead of restricting the tonal resources of music, he tremendously expanded them. Drawing on his vast erudition, he found inspiration and new sounds in Japanese, Indian, and ancient Greek music as well as in the sounds of nature, particularly bird calls. This interest is shown in such pieces as Turangalila (1949), Catalogue des oiseaux (1959; Catalog of Birds), and Seven Hai-kai (1962). Another of the bases of Messiaen's music was his mystical Catholicism, evidenced in large-scale compositions such as Les Corps glorieux: Sept visions brèves de la vie des ressuscités (1939; Radiant Bodies: Seven Short Visions of the Life of the Resurrected) and Vingt regards sur l'enfant lesus (1944; Twenty Gazes on the Child Jesus).
It was not Messiaen's concept of programmatic music that influenced his pupils so much as his compositional techniques. For instance, he devised new scales and was one of the first to divorce rhythm from melody, usually thought to be inseparable. Messiaen conceived patterns of durations that could be manipulated and reversed in much the same way that Arnold Schoenberg manipulated tones in his twelve-tone works. Extending the idea, Messiaen saw the possibility of "serializing" dynamics (the degrees of loudness) and attacks (legato, portato, staccato), normally subservient to melody, to pursue patterns of their own. A piece for piano, Mode de valeur et d'intensité (1950; Modes of Duration and Loudness), consists of arrangements of 36 pitches, 24 durations, 7 attacks, and 7 degrees of loudness. This piece was a landmark of "totally controlled" composition, an important musical idea of the postwar period.
Messiaen composed another piece based on bird songs in 1972, titled La Fauvette des jardins (The Garden Warbler). In 1983 he saw his first opera, St. François d'Assise, produced at the Paris Opera. He died on April 27, 1992 in Paris. The New York Philharmonic later that year performed a posthumously published work, Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà (Illuminations of the Beyond).
((Editions Durand). For Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano.)
Views
Quotations:
"I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none. "
"No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone. "
"The human being is flesh and consciousness, body and soul; his heart is an abyss which can only be filled by that which is godly. "
Membership
Member of the Institut de France (1967)
Associate Member of the Royal Academy of Science, Literature and Art of Belgium (1975)
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"I find him interesting, especially when played by Yvonne Loriod. The works of his i've heard often start magnificantly, but their initial promise is never realized, and you get these sugar-water climaxes that I can't stand. Splendid ideas, then suddenly Gershwin, cloying sweetness! Having said that, I like Gershwin a lot. He's excellent in his own field, and less sentimental than Messiaen. "
Sviatoslav Richter, in Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations
Connections
He married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos also in 1932. In 1937 their son Pascal was born. The marriage turned to tragedy when Delbos lost her memory after an operation and spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
Messiaen's first wife died in 1959 after a long illness, and in 1961 he married Loriod.