Verily it is well for the world that it sees only the beauty of the completed work and not its origins nor the conditions whence it sprang; since knowledge of the artist’s inspiration might often but confuse and alarm and so prevent the full effect of its excellence.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice1
Few composers in history have more fully documented the ideas that lie behind their music – or, more accurately, the extra-musical ideas they regard as relevant to the audience of their works – than did Olivier Messiaen. A piece for organ bears the title ‘Les eaux de la grâce’. At its head are the words of Revelation 7:17: ‘L’Agneau, qui est au milieu du trône, conduira les élus aux sources des eaux de la vie’. It is the second movement of a cycle called Les corps glorieux, subtitled ‘Sept visions brèves de la vie des ressuscités’. All this is in the score. Elsewhere Messiaen says of the work that ‘The life of the resurrected is free, pure, luminous, colourful. The timbres of the organ will reflect these characteristics.’ He also tells us that the cycle was composed ‘in sight of the Lac de Laffrey and the mountain of the Grand Serre’, as if landscape too helped to shape his conception of the music, and the idea of that landscape might be useful to his audience.2 This is a great deal for us to address when confronting ‘Les eaux de la grâce’. Well might the listener be confused and alarmed.
The copious annotation of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’, the rich documentation of what Messiaen regarded as essential to its conception and its interpretation, is characteristic of the composer. Where Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach fashions his page and a half of choicest prose after the model of Tadzio’s beauty confident in the knowledge that the ‘strangely fruitful intercourse’ between external stimulus and the creator’s mind will be understood by the author alone and is irrelevant to the reader of the finished work, in ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ it was always Messiaen’s aim that his choice of musical sounds, inspired by a contemplation of the divine, would in turn be associated in the listener’s mind with the same extra-musical ideas. As a symbol of those ideas the music on its own is ambiguous, if comprehensible at all. To function in what might loosely be called a semantic fashion it must first be explained. All Messiaen’s organ works are surrounded by words. Titles, subtitles, quotations from the Bible and the Missal, references to the place of composition, analyses of the technical resources used in the piece and their intended symbolic meaning and psychological effect: these are the agents of exegesis, chosen to guide the listener through the music towards a deeper communion with the divine. There is no doubting the end that Messiaen had in mind:
a true music, that is to say, spiritual, a music which may be an act of faith; a music which may touch upon all subjects without ceasing to touch upon God; an original music, in short, whose language may open a few doors, take down some yet distant stars … To express with a lasting power our darkness struggling with the Holy Spirit, to raise upon the mountain the doors of our prison of flesh, to give to our century the spring water for which it thirsts, there shall have to be a great artist who will have to be both a great artisan and a great Christian.3
Messiaen’s organ music is so closely identified with the spiritual that it would be churlish to turn our backs entirely on that subject. Even if we pay no attention to the titles, to the attendant texts or to the composer’s explanations of his technical procedures and their symbolic function, it is hard to ignore the traditions of religious music on which the music so audibly draws, and even harder to disregard the knowledge that organs and the buildings in which many of them live are associated with the worship of God. But there is a point at which a discussion of Messiaen’s organ music in terms of the theology with which the composer allied it passes beyond the threshold of common experience of all listeners. Certainly it is possible to have some kind of rich communion with a piece such as ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ without knowing anything about the specific extra-musical ideas to which Messiaen draws our attention. The literature on Messiaen’s organ music abounds in studies that seek to evaluate it in the composer’s own terms, but we must face the fact that for many listeners the concepts used in those discussions will be incomprehensible and irrelevant.
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How else can we try to understand the effect it works upon us? Messiaen’s own writings offer another route of entry, one that has also been followed by many of his commentators. So methodically formulated and rigidly followed are the technical procedures of his ‘musical language’ that they can be described and evaluated in reassuringly concrete terms, at least in relation to the notated score. In the case of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ it is relatively easy to discuss the materials out of which it is made, the way in which they have been assembled into what seems to be a well-ordered piece, even to talk about the effects those materials and their morphology might have upon listeners reared in the tradition of Western tonal music.
Ex. 2.1 shows the first eight bars of the score. The eye will immediately notice three discrete layers of music. In the right hand there are phrases of three-note chords, the uppermost notes of which connect to form a melody. According to Messiaen’s own terminology, all the pitches in these right-hand chords belong to the second mode of limited transposition. Although the chords themselves are conventional triads, the building-blocks of all tonal music, they do not progress from one to another in the manner of traditional tonal harmony. Indeed it is difficult to relate them to any specific tonal centre; even the G major chords that regularly bring phrases to a close are relatively arbitrary points of repose, one possibility among several. The lowest layer of the score, the melodic line given to the pedals, is notated in the bass clef but assigned a registration that makes the notes sound an octave higher than written. It contains only the notes of the whole-tone scale, which too defies the gravitational pull of tonal functional harmony. Played together, the right-hand chords and the pedal melody allude to several tonal centres but never firmly settle on any one. Even the latent G major of the chordal phrases is regularly undermined by the whole-tone motion of the pedals.
EX. 2.1 Les corps glorieux 2 ‘Les eaux de la grâce’
From the score alone it is hard to imagine the sound of the semiquaver flow that the left hand plays, let alone the relationship it has with the other two layers. Although notated in the bass clef, this line sounds simultaneously in three registers: at written pitch, functioning as the true bass of the texture, and as two treble sonorities. In those upper registers the pitches that the listener hears are not those that are written in the score. Messiaen’s registration, ‘Nazard et Tierce’, will not produce quite the same effect on any two organs, but the general quality is of a bright triadic halo hovering over each notated pitch. In particular the Tierce will be audible, sounding at the interval of a major seventeenth above notated pitch; the opening note E, for example, will have a G# sounding two octaves and a third above it. This is what the ear hears. In terms of what the eye sees, however, the line largely consists of notes that are also used in the other two layers. Initially its pitch-classes are those of the right hand’s mode 2. In the second bar, a moment before figure B1, the left hand brings into play the pitches of A♮ and D#, which are foreign to the right hand’s mode but present in the pedal part’s whole-tone scale. Thus far, the pitches played by the left hand have a modal status of their own: this is Messiaen’s seventh mode of limited transposition, a ten-note mode which in this transposition contains all the notes of the chromatic scale other than F# and C♮ Messiaen subsequently allowed himself a few F#s; the fourth notes of figures C1 and C2, and note 26 of figure A2, strictly fall outside the mode. But (notated) C♮ is entirely absent from Ex. 2.1.
Judged from the score, there are places where the left-hand semiquavers consolidate the G major polarity of the right-hand chords (figures B1 and B2), and also places where they join with the pedals in obfuscating it (figures C1 and C2). But this is reckoning without the halo produced by the Tierce. In fact the upper resonances of the left-hand part are more likely to confuse the tonal focus than to clarify it, as Ex. 2.2 shows. At figures B1 and B2 the Tierce emphasizes not G major but rather the key a major third higher, B major; and the pitches it plays at those two points – F♮, A♮, E♭ and B♮ – all belong to the whole-tone scale played by the pedals. The left-hand thus produces a double focus, towards G major (in association with the right hand), and into the tonal no-man’s-land of the whole-tone scale (in association with the pedals). If there is any tonal gravitation to be felt from all this, then it is as much towards B as it is towards G. But even those attractions are weak, ambiguous ones. It is a characteristic outcome of what Messiaen called ‘polymodality’: a tonal stalemate in which the elements of traditional harmony largely float free of the forces that conventionally bond them together.
EX. 2.2 Les corps glorieux 2 ‘Les eaux de la grâce’
Returning to Ex. 2.1, it is clear that in relation to the music that surrounds it, figure B1 is a point of congruence, even of arrival; Messiaen re-used this material to bring ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ to a close. By comparison the right-hand music of A1 has the quality of a prolonged ornamental appoggiatura that achieves its resolution only with the G major triads of B1. Figure C1 consolidates that cadence, but is now accompanied by a rising chromatic line in the left hand that has a distinctive upbeat function. It leads into A2, a repeat of A1 with an additional flourish. B2 is its resolution; C2, a more extended upbeat than C1, serves as a transition into the middle section of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’. From the rest of the score we can see that this middle section of the work effectively flushes the modes of Ex. 2.1 out of the system, and brings prominently into play the one note that has been missing so far: C♮. Like the opening section it is made up of discrete phrases, some of them upbeat-like, some that are expanded by addition. The largest expansion of all exhausts the process, and at bar 19 the opening music returns, again with additions. Throughout his life Messiaen found satisfaction in simple ternary forms; ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ is a classic example. Three final observations should be made: the semiquaver flow of the left hand is relentless throughout the piece; the score contains no tempo markings other than the opening ‘Rêveur, bien modéré’ and the rallentando in the last bar; and the only adjustment to the dynamic markings of the opening is the decrescendo that accompanies the closing rallentando.
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Any one of Messiaen’s organ compositions could sustain a technical description as detailed as the one given above, and indeed many of them have been dissected in this way, some by Messiaen himself, others by those who have been beguiled by Messiaen’s world of self-discipline and the often paradoxically recondite sound-products thrown up by his technical procedures. Many fascinating hours can be had from the study of the scores. But there remain two questions. First, what relevance does a knowledge of the technical procedures used to generate the score have to the aural experience of the music? Second, how does a knowledge of the score, or the experience of hearing the music – or indeed both of these – tie in with Messiaen’s verbal glosses to the work: its title, its biblical head-quotation, and all the other information he provided both about ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ and the cycle of pieces to which it belongs?
To speak of ‘the aural experience’ of the work immediately raises formidable questions. We have already seen that the notated score is a form of tablature, a set of instructions to the player’s hands and feet, that only imprecisely represents the actual sound of the music. But clearly the sound of the music itself will depend upon the organ that is being used, and the organist’s choice of registrations. Play two different recordings of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ side by side and you will quickly understand why we are treading on slippery ground. Messiaen himself conceived and recorded the piece on a large nineteenth-century French organ, producing a sharply characterized result that we will have to consider in some detail. Other players have used similar organs, but with quite different outcomes, sometimes remote from Messiaen’s own. On organs built according to different national or technical traditions the piece takes on a multiplicity of appearances. There is not one ‘aural experience’ of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’, but many.
At first sight ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ seems to be scrupulously notated. As in everything Messiaen wrote, durations are specified down to the last demisemiquaver, and the organist is given detailed information about registration. It is those two components of the work, its rhythm and its timbre, that will give listeners their greatest shock when confronted with Messiaen’s own recorded performance, made on the organ at La Trinité in 1956. What appears from the page to be a steady stream of undifferentiated semiquavers played in a constant pulse is, in Messiaen’s own mind, nothing of the sort. He speeds up; he slows down; he compresses; he lingers; there are agogic accents and tiny moments of suspended motion all over the place; it is music of far greater rhythmic variety and life than one could possibly have imagined from the notation. The word ‘rubato’, so conspicuously missing from most of Messiaen’s scores, is clearly taken for granted by the composer. As for the sonority, it is utterly unexpected. Possibly the age and the engineering of the recording have something to answer for, but even so the result must at least partially reflect the reality. Of the three layers notated in the score, it is the left-hand music that immediately attracts the ear, not in its notated bass range (which is well nigh inaudible), nor in its Nazard register (which is largely submerged by the right-hand chords), but through the shrill presence of the Tierce. Since this is the line notated in constant semiquavers, its dizzy, drunken gait is all the more arresting. Around it there is a thick tangle of sound, discernible as right-hand chords and a whole-tone melody in the pedal when either one of them stands still or goes into a register unoccupied by the other, but otherwise densely matted together. A sense of polyphony, so clearly visible in the notation, certainly registers, but the overwhelming sensation is of the utter strangeness of the composite sound and its equally strange morphology as the piece progresses. It also becomes abundantly clear that the music of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ bears a close relationship to at least part of its title. In Messiaen’s hands and on Messiaen’s favourite instrument, ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ simulates the giddy sensation of drowning. A watery gurgle haloed in phantom squeaks and groans, it must surely rank as one of the oddest noises ever heard coming out of an organ.
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This excursion into Messiaen’s performance of his own music might at first seem to have cleared the path towards addressing one of the questions posed earlier – what relevant information the listener can hope to gain from studying or knowing about the technical procedures used to generate the score. Again, however, we must pause before answering. Does Messiaen’s 1956 recording, made on the organ whose registrations he specified in the notated score, possess any authority in determining the sonorous nature of the work? Might it have sounded different in 1939, when the organ at La Trinité was in a less precarious state of repair and the score of Les corps glorieux was still fresh from his pen? Might he have played it differently again in old age, on the renovated and enlarged organ? Would he have regarded as inferior any performance made on an instrument other than his own? Could anyone else play the music with equal or greater authority? What status does Messiaen’s 1956 recording have in defining the identity of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’?
At this point fact gives way to opinion. Jennifer Bate recalls her first experience of playing Messiaen’s music to the composer, on a Harrison and Harrison organ in a north London church:
Messiaen’s initial reaction to my performance was not encouraging. ‘Well, I suppose you have my records?’ Embarrassed, I had to confess otherwise. The point was pursued inexorably until, in desperation, I promised next day to buy everything he had ever recorded. This brought a shout of laughter – ‘But that is how I play it on my records, and no one plays Messiaen like that.’4
It is a splendid anecdote, and it will give organists much to ponder. Many recordings of Messiaen’s organ music have been made partially or substantially under Messiaen’s artistic supervision, on instruments that are generically related to the organ at La Trinité. In general they come much closer to his own interpretations than do the performances made from the score alone, using organs built according to different traditions. They do not replicate Messiaen’s own solutions, but they do broadly adhere to what we might call his manner of realization. The scores do not say so, but Messiaen seems to have taken a certain style of performance practice and range of sonorities for granted, and when asked for advice by other organists would guide them towards those solutions. As far as the sonic realization of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ is concerned, this is as close as we can come to evaluating the status of Messiaen’s 1956 recording. It will be interesting to see what influence it and other Messiaen recordings have on his music’s interpretation in the future.
With those thoughts in mind, we can begin to compare the experience of the analyst’s eye with that of the hearer’s ear. The clear separation of the score into three layers, each with a discrete modality, is interesting in theory but less obviously relevant to the listener, who hears largely an amalgam of sounds, and by no means all the pitches that the score would lead us to expect. Only the whole-tone scale of the pedals emerges with clear integrity, largely because of the prevailing stepwise motion. The left-hand semiquavers, sounding predominantly in their Tierce registration a seventeenth above the notated line, do nothing to reinforce the latent G major tonal centre of the right-hand chords, and if anything they side more with the whole-tone scale of the pedal, with which they share so many notes. Moments when the whole-tone scale is heavy in the air, such as at figures B1 and B2 of Ex. 2.1, do indeed seem to be moments of repose, precisely because the number of pitch-classes is relatively restricted. When the modes change in the middle of the piece, the whole character of the music changes with them, but it would take both a sharp ear to work out which new modes have come into play, and an eloquent argument to convince most listeners that it is strictly necessary to know by name the modes that are being used in each layer. What the listener will discover, however, are the following points. First, the whole-tone scale, so securely present in the outer sections of the piece, all but disappears in the middle section. Second, in the outer sections the whole-tone scale, in partnership with the predominantly major triads that the right hand plays, lays particular stress on the interval of the major third (or its inversion, the minor sixth), certainly more than do the modes of the more densely chromatic middle section. Third, the hierarchical relationship that exists between the three layers, seemingly so stable in the score, is in fact materially affected by the movement of those three layers through their available registers. In particular the penetrating shrillness of the Tierce increasingly demands attention the higher it ventures into its upper regions. In sum, not everything the reader sees in the score will matter to the listener, and not everything that attracts the listener’s attention will stand out to the analyst of the score.
What of the title and the attendant texts? Clearly the word ‘eaux’ is hard to ignore, but nothing else is so obviously invoked. As we listen to ‘Les eaux de la grâce’ we may, if we so choose, keep in our minds the idea of the Lamb in the midst of the throne leading the chosen ones to the living fountains of water, or the idea that ‘the life of the resurrected is free, pure, luminous, colourful’ and the possibility that ‘the timbres of the organ will reflect these characteristics’. We might even construct a mental image of the Lac de Laffrey and the mountain of the Grand Serre. We can bring all those ideas to the music, but it would be difficult to argue that they actually reside within it or could have been deduced from it, any more than the reader of Aschenbach’s page and a half of choicest prose would have sensed Tadzio’s presence in them. We might agree that the music could just as appropriately have been attended by a different title and prefatory text, or that title and text might have engendered completely different music. Relatively easy as it is to define and describe the technique of Messiaen’s ‘musical language’, the extent to which it genuinely operates as a musical ‘language’, expressive both of the concrete and the spiritual, and independent of the verbal exegeses that Messiaen provided, remains a moot point.
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What Messiaen’s organ music can achieve, and indeed does achieve with astonishing success, is a sense of the bizarre, the irrational, the unexplained, the surreal, the mysterious, the erotic, even the sublime. That it can achieve those effects by using compositional techniques that are orderly and systematic is one of its central paradoxes. But it must be said that those techniques are not wholly or principally responsible for the effect the music has upon the listener. Repetition and invariance are two of the more potent agents through which Messiaen evokes the spiritual. This is true of all his music, for whatever medium. Specific to his organ works are slow motion, easily achieved by the instrument’s inexhaustable lungs, strangeness of timbre and, where necessary, awesome intensity of sound. From his earliest organ composition, Le banquet céleste (1928), right up to the Livre du Saint Sacrement, completed in 1984, Messiaen was aware of those special qualities the organ had to offer, and he never tired of exploring them. Tempting as it might be to survey the organ works with reference to their titles and attendant texts, or to the specific technical procedures used in them, there is in fact a good deal to be gained by simply listening to the sounds themselves, and paying close attention to their most obvious outward qualities: their virtuosity or their stillness; their density or their simplicity; their noise or their silence; and often the strangeness of their timbres.
In no organist’s hands have these works sounded stranger than they do in Messiaen’s own. Others have learnt to match his famously long-drawn-out playing of the slow, soft movements, and in the loud works it takes little imagination to discover how to strike awe into the minds of an audience. But even in those extreme pieces, and more obviously still in ones that border neither on the ethereal nor the terrible, there are more brilliant colours on Messiaen’s palette than those of his followers, and he makes ingenious use of them. His choice of timbre is fascinating even in Le banquet céleste, a piece that all too easily sounds like improvisatory time-killing before a church service. In his 1956 recording, Messiaen’s registration has a thick, throaty texture that energizes those long-held chords, so pregnant with potential harmonic movement yet so frozen in time. This audacious early work also introduces his most baffling organ sonority, the ‘staccato bref, à la goutte d’eau’, an uncanny dripping sound that turns up in several later organ scores. What this texture is meant to signify in a piece called Le banquet céleste Messiaen never explained, yet its oddness somehow seems justified in music that asks us to ponder the unfathomable.
Not even Messiaen’s own performance can make the Diptyque of 1930 seem an interesting piece, and his later imaginative rescoring of its second panel as the violin-piano duet at the end of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps suggests that even the composer questioned its effectiveness as organ music. Its successor, however, shows no such hesitancy in exploring the unique properties of the medium. Anyone who doubts the significance of Apparition de l’église éternelle of 1932 – and it has always been overshadowed by the more popular Le banquet céleste – will have them dispelled by the sound of Messiaen playing the piece. It represents a major step forward. Where Le banquet céleste and the Diptyque might effectively have been orchestrated, and the next organ work, L’Ascension, actually began life in an orchestral version, Apparition is unimaginable in any other instrumental state, and unforgettable in the rasping throat of the machine at La Trinité. Rarely before had the timbre of an organ been used in such a sculptural fashion. Messiaen’s himself spoke of the work in physical terms – ‘monolithic’ on one occasion,5 ‘granite-like’ on another6 – and clearly he calculated his choice of menacing harmonies and heavy-treading rhythm in conjunction with the relentlessly sustained growl of the organ. Few of Messiaen’s early titles refer to concrete, inanimate objects, or dreamlike images of them. In this weird attempt to evoke the sense of imagined vision, Messiaen gave music one of its most startlingly surreal works. Later in life he developed the concept more extensively; ‘Les langues de feu’ from the Messe de la Pentecôte and ‘Les mains de l’abîme’ from the Livre d’orgue come to mind as startlingly vivid ‘sound-images’.
Its third movement excepted, L’Ascension (1933–4) is a transcription of orchestrally conceived music, and for that reason its use of the organ locks less tightly with the musical argument than does Apparition de l’église éternelle. In particular Messiaen took pains to replicate the instrumental sonorities of the second movement, ‘Alléluias sereins’; his 1956 recording occasionally goes against the letter of the organ score in its attempt to simulate the original orchestral sound. The two outer movements gain more from the adaptation. Magnificent though it is on brass and woodwind, the opening ‘Majesté du Christ’ benefits from the elasticity of the long-breathed organ; and the rapt fourth movement, originally for string orchestra, sheds at least some of its gratuitous sentimentality in its arranged form. ‘Transports de joie’, the celebrated new third movement, is pure organ music, but of a kind that Messiaen had learnt from generations of organ-composers before him. It is a startling work, but not a telling indicator of the direction Messiaen was about to take. In his two major organ cycles of the later 1930s, La Nativité du Seigneur and Les corps glorieux, the dazzling rhetoric and virtuosic bravura of ‘Transports de joie’ is only rarely to be heard.
Messiaen regarded La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) as something of a breakthrough. Later in life he was more modest about its achievement,7 but to judge from the long preface to the score and the cycle’s frequent citation in Technique de mon langage musical, at the time it was the work in which Messiaen reckoned himself to have come of age. Although the extended preface opens with theological exegesis and soon turns to a detailed discussion of technical procedures, it also includes an important paragraph in which the medium of the organ itself comes under scrutiny:
Chaque pièce traitée en larges plans. Economie des timbres par des tutti de couleur et de densité differentes: anches avec peu de fonds, fonds sans gambes ni flûtes, etc. La pédale sort de son rôle de basse. Rarement registrée 16, 8, souvent 4 pieds et mixtures sans 8, elle chante en soprano (8e pièce) ou enguirlande les mains de légers carillons (1re pièce). Quelques effets d’exception: flûte 4 et nazard seuls (2e pièce), basson 16 seul (7e pièce), gambe et voix céleste opposées aux mixtures (1re et 8e pièces): opposer n’est pas mélanger.8
Timbre has now become a matter of central concern. With the rich resources of the Trinité organ at his fingertips, Messiaen could manipulate sounds such as no orchestra could produce. There is only one movement of La Nativité that reworks an existing orchestral piece, and significantly it does so not by mimicking the sound-world of its prototype but by rejecting it. The model in question is the finale of Les offrandes oubliées, a slow movement delicately scored for high violins and violas. For its reincarnation as ‘Desseins éternels’ Messiaen retained the opening chord-sequence and generously expanded the melodic line; Ex. 2.3 shows how the rewriting was done. The radiant warmth of its shimmering string sonority, however, is abandoned. Instead Messiaen substituted a throbbing fog of low sound, dominated by 16’ registrations that explore the lower half of the organ’s voice. It is a dense, subdued and inscrutable sound, inconceivable in orchestral terms. This is Messiaen’s new sonorous metaphor for the mystery of the divine.
EX. 2.3 (a) Les offrandes oubliées
La Nativité is full of such surprises. Led by the eye, most discussions of the work concentrate on melody, rhythm and harmony, but in Messiaen’s own recorded performance it is often timbre that commands the attention and lingers in the mind as a startling and memorable attribute of the music. On paper, the two-part counterpoint of ‘Les anges’ can be read as a study in ametrical rhythms and cellular expansions and contractions, fleshed out with pitches generated by the modes of limited transposition. In Messiaen’s impulsive performance, most of that detail is subsumed into flashes of colour and light; the notated score becomes in effect a set of instructions designed to kindle the organ’s shrillest pipework into an astonishing display of fireworks. ‘Les mages’, realized by some organists as a dutiful plod of a piece, proves to be made from ghostly, disembodied sounds; it is a forerunner of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’, with which it shares much of its registration. In ‘Jésus accepte la souffrance’ we get an early foretaste of the cavernous staccatos and the snarling solo Basson that haunt the organ pieces of the 1950s, most obviously the Offertoire of the Messe de la Pentecôte. In ‘Desseins éternels’ Messiaen specifies for the first time the 32’ Bourdon, a stop which speaks with truly sepulchral hush on the organ at La Trinité. It is a tentative first step; by Les corps glorieux its solo status has become fully established, most spectacularly in the concluding ‘Le mystère de la Sainte Trinité’.
It would be easy to extend this catalogue of innovations. Admittedly not everything in La Nativité de Seigneur is remarkable for its novel choice of registration. ‘Dieu parmi nous’, for example, is more a study in velocity and mass of sound than in special effects; it brings the cycle to a close in a traditionally upbeat, affirmatory manner. Neither the gentle opening cameo, ‘La Vierge et l’Enfant’, nor its good-humoured successor, ‘Les bergers’, aims to perplex the ear with strangeness of sound; the deliberate naivety of these pieces is calculated to underscore the human aspect of the Nativity rather than the mystical. A few years later Messiaen might have aimed for something less sweet and conventionally euphonious for the long, hushed ending of ‘Le Verbe’; its successor in ‘Combat de la mort et de la vie’, the central movement of Les corps glorieux, shows far greater sophistication in the handling of timbre as well as of melody and harmony. Arguably the popular success of La Nativité du Seigneur owes more to these accessible movements than to their less orthodox, oddly textured and obscurely titled counterparts, of which ‘Desseins éternels’ is the most extreme. For Messiaen, however, it was the bizarre rather than the traditional in La Nativité that suggested the way forward. His next cycle, Les corps glorieux of 1939, is noticeably more ruthless in its pursuit of the arcane. From here it would be a small step to the esoteric sound-worlds of the Messe de la Pentecôte (1949–50) and the Livre d’orgue (1951).
Its overtly programmatic central movement apart, Les corps glorieux is unremittingly cryptic. For all that Messiaen insisted on the word ‘theological’ to describe his music, ‘mystical’ seems altogether more suited to this particular cycle. Its opening movement, ‘Subtilité des corps glorieux’, sets the tone: what are we to make of this uncompromising monody, with its echoes of plainchant, ample motivic development and shawm-like cornet registrations, music that unfolds with self-controlled moderation only to coil back at the end into its inscrutable shell? It is followed by another enigma, ‘Les eaux de la grâce’. The third movement, ‘L’ange aux parfums’, audaciously begins as another unaccompanied melody, this time of a more assertive and oriental character. When the melody repeats a little later, it has acquired an accompaniment of quietly juddering chords. Two other ideas are introduced into the piece. One is a three-layered counterpoint (Bien modéré) of imiscible components and sonorities, whose labyrinthine musical argument denies it the chance of making any actual progress. The second, a curious bubbling sound (Presque très vif), is technically a two-part canonic development of the opening melody, but it would take a sharp ear to hear it as such; its most striking quality is its liquid sonority, more of a gush than the wallowing of ‘Les eaux de la grâce’. For all that the music beguiles and delights, it is also music calculated to confuse, beckoning us as it does into a world peopled by ghostly presences and disconcerting unfamiliarity.
The curtains part on ‘Combat de la mort et de la vie’, and suddenly we are plunged into drama. Where the first three movements of Les corps glorieux play upon circularity of motion and invariance of idea, in this piece we know from the start that such mighty turmoil must reach some kind of denouement. Its toccata-like opening, more awesome than anything in ‘Transports de joie’ or ‘Dieu parmi nous’, at first uses the resources of the organ with masterful economy, the weight of sound achieved more by the density and dissonance of the chording than by volume alone. As the texture thickens and the register rises, so more stops come into play. The climax is terrifying. To analyse such music only in terms of the technical resources it uses – its modes and rhythms, for example – is to risk underestimating the sheer physical impact of its accumulating noise and confusion. In the vast span of slow music that follows, Messiaen builds wisely upon earlier experience: compared with equivalent sections of the Diptyque and ‘Le Verbe’, the melody here is strangely angular and resistant to resolution; its accompanying harmonies deftly side-step any expected motion, at least until the closing stages; and its bass-line lures the ear downwards towards the threshold of inaudibility.
Just as three pieces precede ‘Combat de la mort et de la vie’, so a further three follow it. Messiaen returned to the medium of pure melody in ‘Force et agilité des corps glorieux’, but this time it is monody of a newly athletic and garrulous kind. By scoring the melodic line for the two hands playing in octaves, a new and special depth of sonority is achieved. (Messiaen subsequently developed the effect to even more spectacular ends in the unison ‘Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes’ from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps.) ‘Joie et clarté des corps glorieux’, the sixth movement, is the only piece in Les corps glorieux that might just as easily have been part of La Nativité du Seigneur. With its bright fanfares, solid tonality and uncomplicated developmental structure, it seems the stuff of a triumphant finale, a role Messiaen might have assigned it earlier in his career. Instead it serves to clear the air in preparation for the true close, a movement that ends the cycle as inscrutably as it began.
It is hard to ignore the presence of symbolism in ‘Le mystère de la Sainte Trinité’. Most analyses of the piece follow Messiaen’s lead by focusing upon the identity and interpretation of those symbols – not only the trinity of melodic strands, one ninefold in its phrase-structure, the second sevenfold, the third fivefold, but also the melodic cross-references to earlier movements, the oblique citation of plainchant melody, and the three literally-quoted Hindu rhythms that control the motion of the bass line. Never before had Messiaen conceived anything so tightly rational and meaning-laden as this, more amply stocked with extra-musical ideas for us to hold in the mind and use to enrich the aural experience of the work. Yet even without their aid ‘Le mystère de la Sainte Trinité’ performs its magic on us. More fundamentally communicative than its symbolic content is the music’s fantastical serenity, achieved through a breathtaking selection of organ timbres, the most audacious Messiaen had devised up to this date. The left-hand melody, placed in the foreground with a dynamic marking of piano, is assigned a simple 8’ Flûte registration. In the right hand, marked ppp, a quiet 16’ registration is coupled with the tiny 2’ Octavin, producing parallel motion separated by three octaves, a truly uncanny effect. The pedal line latches on to the right-hand registration, and adds to it the 32’ Bourdon, a rank so low that its bottom register is barely audible, rather felt by the body as vibration. As the pedal line sinks into its depths, so the right hand’s Octavin ascends to giddy heights at which specific pitch gives way to unquantifiable sibilation. Each of the three melodic strands proceeds according to its own logic, following a course of strict or modified repetition. Variation is achieved only by their changing alignment. There is no direction, no climax, no resolution. At the end the music simply loses its breath and becomes silence.
*
In Messiaen’s music there is a fascination with timbre and sonority that places it firmly within a French tradition of innovation. Although the composer’s own writings lay greater stress on his music’s theological mission and on technical aspects of its construction, we should not lose sight of the fact that in purely sonorous terms it breaks new ground, and that Messiaen was fully aware of the fact. No less than Debussy and Varèse, Messiaen’s exploration of new sound-worlds profoundly influenced a younger generation of composers, not least among them the pioneers of musique concrète and electronic music. It is arguable that, in his organ works, the path along which Messiaen proceeded was not essentially different from the one that was followed by composers whose medium was magnetic tape. In both there is an urge to escape from conventions of instrumental and orchestral colour, to discover sounds that had never been heard before, to investigate registral extremities, to suspend time through musical motionlessness; above all, to dislocate the listener through unfamiliarity, and evoke the unknown or unknowable. In his early organ works, Messiaen progressed only so far along this path. For his most radical experiments we have to turn to his two great cycles of the early 1950s: the Messe de la Pentecôte and, above all, the Livre d’orgue. It comes as no surprise to find that Messiaen’s single contribution to the field of musique concrète – a piece that the composer promptly withdrew, but which has recently resurfaced in notated form – is contemporary with the Livre d’orgue, and in many ways turns out to be its spiritual heir.9
Notes
1 Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, 1928).
2 Insert booklet to EMI CZS 7 67400 2, pp. 14–15.
3 Olivier Messiaen: Technique de mon langage musical, 2 volumes (Paris, Leduc, 1944); volume 1 translated by John Satterfield as The Technique of My Musical Language, (Paris, 1956), p. 8.
4 Obituary, The Independent (29 April 1992).
5 Claude Samuel: Entretiens avec Olivier Messiaen (Paris, Belfond, 1967); translated by Felix Aprahamian as Conversations with Olivier Messiaen (London, 1976), p. 77.
6 Note for EMI 2C 153 16291/6.
7 Samuel, op. cit., p. 77.
8 Messiaen, Author’s Note, La Nativité du Seigneur (Paris, 1936).
9 The pencil autograph score of Timbres-durées is now in private possession in England. For an extract of the score, edited for realization on four-track tape by Pierre Henry, see Erhard Karkoschka: Das Schriftbild der neuen Musik (Celle, 1966), p. 166.