Except for the mystery-opera Saint François d’Assise, La Transfiguration is its composer’s largest orchestral work, both in its length (at least an hour and a half) and the huge forces for which it is scored (a very big choir, with seven instrumental soloists, and a ‘très grande orchestre’). Yet in a characteristically Messiaenic sense it is an extraordinarily simple work – as perhaps it had to be, if it were to deal with so sublime a subject as ‘God’s Presence in Himself’. It embraces vast numbers of notes, in astonishingly varied sonorities, while its rhythms and metres are of mind-boggling complexity. Even so, a considerable proportion of the work is conceived monophonically or at most heterophonically, as befits the oneness of God; the densely sensuous harmonies, however incidentally dissonant, gravitate around and return to clearly defined tonal points; and even the elaborate rhythms tend to be simple in effect – in so far as they are affirmatory, in being either pre-ordained, or intentionally chaotic. ‘Difficult’ music, in European tradition, is so because it is concerned with growth through conflict, within the mind, as Beethoven’s music surpremely demonstrates. Messiaen’s music is never difficult in this inward, psychological sense, since it is preoccupied with elementals and eternities. It may of course be inapprehensible by people for whom such concepts seem untrustworthy; but that is a different story.
The work was commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation for their thirteenth festival at Lisbon, where it was performed in the Coliseum, on 7 June 1969, before an audience of 9000; Loriod and Rostropovich were among the seven instrumental soloists. The numbers involved, on both sides of the podium, inevitably imparted a ritualistic grandeur to the occasion; this was no mere concert, but an act of praise and hopefully of incarnation and transcendence, performed not in an orthodox church or temple, but before a world-gathering of ‘all sorts and conditions of men’. The Christian liturgy, as Messiaen envisages it, is indeed a global phenomenon and – as was noted in the general article on Messiaen’s mysticism and theology – the techniques he employs are not restricted to European precedents. Moreover, the polyethnicity of the notion is reinforced by the geographical locations of the innumerable birds that warble, chirrup, squeak and squawk throughout the score. Not only their names but also their geographical habitats are scrupulously specified.
The literary and dramatic form of the work is a cross between Christian Passion music with Gospel narration, and a celebratory oratorio, like an extended liturgical Eucharist. Messiaen tells us that he has evoked the mystery of Christ’s Transfiguration through a ‘mosaic’ of Latin texts, chosen to promote meditation and potential transcendence. They are taken from St Matthew’s Gospel (for the narrative sections), and from Genesis, the Psalms, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Epistles of St Paul, the Roman Missal, and the Summa Theologica of St Thomas Aquinas. The structure falls into two ‘septénaires’ – seven (magic) movements; each half comprises a percussive prelude leading to a ‘Récit évangélique’ followed by two meditations, this sequence being capped by another ‘Récit’ and another two meditations, rounded off by a final choral. The disposition of these many sections is elaborately planned, with multiple recurrences; but – as one would expect from Messiaen’s previous music – the musical structure, like the verbal, is essentially mosaic-like. There is no ‘development’, for the at once patent yet profound reason that the Divine Presence is ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end’.
We begin with preludial percussion, at first inarticulate and unpitched. Suspended cymbals, gongs and tam-tam reverberate in aweful solemnity, punctuated by temple blocks pinging in complex, pre-ordained metrical proportions. From a gradual crescendo pitched percussion emerges in the form of bells, clanging in the tritone (literally at the pitch of the medieval ‘si contra fa’) that had had so significant a function in Cinq rechants and Chronochromie. This tritone introduces the first ‘Récit évangélique’, sung by tenors in unison. The words, from Matthew 17: 1–2, tell of how Jesus went with Peter, James and John into ‘an high mountain apart’, and was ‘transfigured before them. His face did shine as the sun and his raiment was white as the light.’ The rhythms follow the natural declamation of the words, changing the time-signatures frequently, at a basic word-measure of semiquaver equals 112. Yet the narration is always lyrical, intermingling repeated notes with figures derived from Messiaen’s invented ‘second mode’, consisting of alternating tones and semitones. Much of the melodic and harmonic material of the entire work will be generated from these two motifs (see Ex. 15.1 and Ex. 15.2).
The second of them appears when the tenors have been joined by sopranos in a cadential tritone, B to F. Sopranos and tenors wing together in a seraphic cantillation pivoting on both tritones and major thirds. The voices are now doubled by bells; altos and basses join in unison octaves as the transfigured Jesus ‘shines’ in glory.
EX. 15.1 La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ 1 ‘Récit évangélique’
EX. 15.2 La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus Christ l ‘Récit évangélique’
The words of the first meditation are from St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, prophesying how Christ may, if we let him, make our ‘vile body’ shine, too. Nature, God’s earthly manifestation, has a share in this, for woodwind and strings, interspersed with barks on brass, emulate an exotic African bird, at whose savage, rather than seraphic, summons the chorus is encouraged to extol eternal light. Appropriately, this bird is known as the great indicator: its function here seems to be analogous to that of the angel of the Apocalypse in Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Many other wild birds join in the hubbub, personified by piano and the other ‘gamelan’ instruments, with help from strings and woodwind. The chorus, still in octave unisons, expands the lyrically flowing, tritone-oscillating theme as they chant another text (from the Wisdom of Solomon 7: 26) about ‘the brightness of the everlasting light’. This fades again into a tritone and appears to be dismissed by the raucous great indicator, whose squawk is identically repeated. At the recitation of Christ’s name, however, a complementary theme riddled with euphonious major thirds renders the visionary excitation more stable; and although the meditation alternates in ‘mosaic’ between these undeveloping blocks of material, consummation is hinted at when the choir, doubled by woodwind and strings, sways in slow, level crotchets, gradually defining the tonality of E major. Throughout the work, E major is to be the key of paradise: as for that matter it had traditionally been in European music, at least since the Baroque era, probably because it was the sharpest, (‘highest’) major key in common use. Although nature’s discordant chaos is by no means silenced, E major has the last word (chord), if garlanded with multiple added notes.
The second meditation is constructed on the same principle, and is heralded by an even savager bird, the chuck-will’s widow. The savagery is appropriate, for the light here celebrated invokes terror as well as glory. The words, from Psalm 77, relate how ‘the lightnings lightened the world; the earth trembled and shook’; but they are rendered affirmative by a postscript from Hebrews, aligning the brightness of the Son (and sun) to that of the Father. All the birds audibly rampant here come from harsher northern climes in the mountains; they exhort the choir (mankind, and us) to a ferociously dissonant climax on the word ‘illuxerunt’, although climax – as usual with Messiaen – does not imply progression. Indeed the squawky ‘illuxerunt’ leads into a richly harmonized, more relaxed chorale-like section, again gravitating towards E major; and the rest of the movement consists of a mosaic of all the non-developing facets. Awe accrues from the contrast between the hectic bird-chitterings on marimba and xylorimba and the bellow of contrabass tuba, which threatens to open fissures in the turning earth. At the end, the ‘brightness of the Father’s glory’ wins through, abetted by a hooting of barred owls on horns. We are told that Messiaen notated all his bird-calls ‘in the field’, catching them, as it were, in the act; we do not know, however, on what principles he allocates one creature rather than another to a given situation – unless there is an allegorical dimension, as in the case of the great indicator. Maybe it matters in this present context that owls are traditionally associated with wisdom.
Another interlude, repeating the hierarchical percussion-motif of the work’s opening, ends once more with the pitched tritone on bells. This introduces the next Gospel narration from Matthew, recounting the meeting of Jesus and Peter with the prophets Moses and Elias, and their decision to build three tabernacles in the holy mountain, one for Christ, and one each for the prophets. This recitative is again sung by tenors in unison, soon joined by sopranos and bells, and then by altos and basses. Basically, the theme is unchanged: though on repetition we are perhaps more responsive to a curious – one might almost say marvellous – quality of Messiaen’s recitative’, which is that although the line embraces intervals (such as tritones, sevenths and ninths) that might be expected to generate stress, it sounds ineffably calm, floating in time and space.
The sequent meditation on the Three Tabernacles finds its texts in Psalm 84 and the Wisdom of Solomon, ‘for wisdom is the brightness of the everlasting light’. This is really a slow movement, though the birds are as spasmodically violent as usual, with corybantic flutterings, mostly in parallel seconds, from a white-cheeked honeyeater. The lyrical nature of the movement is established by a solo cello, flowing in aspiring arches, in dialogue with the chorus and with prickly commentaries from the birds. The form is again sectionally non-progressive; but not even the jittery antics of an Australian Willie wagtail (on piano solo) can dampen the ardour of the chorus, let alone the cello’s soulful ecstasy. Chorus and divided strings close on a long sustained second inversion of an E major triad, with chromatic added notes. The only bird surviving, in the silence of the night, is the dulcetly amorous nightingale.
The sixth movement – the second meditation of this group – depicts ‘For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness’, the words again being from the Wisdom of Solomon. Women’s voices declaim the text in unison, haloed by a veritable babel of birds of many sorts and sizes, insouciantly unconcerned to accommodate themselves to the human voices, or to anything else. Their unconcern is their innocence, or what seems like innocence to Messiaen: they assert not nature’s contrariety, but her necessary coexistence; that their chaos is an affirmation of independent life and lives. This must be why the lovesick solo cello remains audible throughout the hubbub, and is why the whirligig textures sound lucently beautiful. Allied to this miracle is the fact that although Messiaen’s sundry ‘devices’ recur again and again throughout the long work, they do not stale. If they do not grow more exciting, and are not intended to, they retain their pristine vernality: for they are, again, ‘as it was in the beginning’. The musical manifestation of this lies in the fact that the textures, however densely exacerbated, are controlled metrically by age-old Indian deçî-tâla patterns involving successive augmentation and diminution; and harmonically by Messiaen’s personally codified ‘modal harmonic colours’, which are systematic if without scientific backing. Of course one does not ‘register’ this consciously, while it is happening; and the hurly-burly simply stops, in medias res. It finds an approach to consummation, however, in the choral that ends the first septénaire: an extravagantly slow piece (quaver equals 30), scored in massive homophony for ten part chorus, the voices doubled by full orchestra. But the dynamics are fairly soft, and the quaver pulse inexorable: so that the psalmist’s words, praising God ‘in the mountain of His Holiness’, evoke awe and wonder. Despite the chromatic added notes, E major is unambiguously established; and the first septénaire fades out on a protracted E major triad, without even the radiant adulteration of an added sixth!
La Transfiguration is already, in its first septénaire, a substantial work. That Messiaen should add a second septénaire, even more massive and constructed on exactly the same plan, might seem supernumenary, were it not that cyclical recurrence is the heart of the divine mystery. We get the point when the second part begins with the familiar rhythm-prelude for percussion, leading to another ‘Récit évangélique’. Once more, the prelude ends with the pitched tritone, B–F, on bells. This gives the pitch to the tenors who proclaim the Gospel words ‘out of the cloud’, announcing that ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’. The tenor theme is unchanged, but this time its clauses are separated by chains of glissandos on multiply-divided strings, magically incarnating the luminous cloud. As before, sopranos join the tenors in the final falling tritone, after which the cloud quivers in multiply-divided trills and harmonics on strings, tingled by triangle and cymbals. The cloud-music is sustained through an immense crescendo while the full chorus rounds off the recitative, ending a further tone lower on unison Cs.
The first meditation of the second septénaire has the longest and most theologically abstract text thus far, taken from Question 45, Article 4, of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. This ‘question’ concerns the conformity of image between God the Father and God the Son, achieved by the imperfect conformity of Christ as ‘wayfarer’ and pilgrim, capped by the perfect conformity of the Father’s glory. For us, imperfect conformity is attained through baptism, while the glory to come is foreshadowed in the Transfiguration. Unsurprisingly, the music of this movement is the most awesome so far, giving utterance to what Messiaen calls ‘the heights and depths of the Mystery’. The metrical proportions are rigid; the harmonies are harshly percussive; cavernous gongs and tam-tam reverberate; the choric basses pretend to be superhuman Tibetan priests. Indeed the ‘mountain’ becomes a Tibetan temple, in and out of which flock raucously exotic birds in full pelt. But the harsh, statically tritonal chords of the movement’s opening recur at regular intervals, always unchanged, like God himself. The penetrating Tibetan basses are answered by terrifying deep pedal notes on trombones, saxhorn, tuba and contrabass tuba: extravagant orchestral demands justified by extravagent effect. Against this holy horror, a lyrical theme for unisonal chorus flowers from the second-mode figurations; and once more leaping tritones and ninths do not disturb devotional serenity. Tonality wavers around G rather than E major: an effect that may, in the context of the horrendous saxhorns and tubas, be described as benedictory, as ‘European’ G major traditionally was. Even so, there is throughout this vast movement no development or modulation in the orthodox sense. The violently contrarious episodes recur in their mosaic-patterns, flowing through harmonies that are, according to Messiaen, ‘blue striped with green to black spotted with red and gold, by way of a diamond, emerald, purplish-blue, with a dominant pool of orange studied with milky white’. We know this only because Messiaen tells us so, though his colour symbolism is not a frivolous game but an (admittedly non-scientific) attempt to relate nature’s colour spectrum to the acoustical prism of the harmonic series. All Messiaen’s technical-symbolic devices are called on: cadenzas for a tipsy posse of Mexican birds; three percussion rhythms using various Greek metres superimposed on the already ‘pre-ordained’ rhythms of the chorus; and Indian deçî-tâla patterns in retrograde movement. At intervals, a baritone solo, helpfully given his pitch by pizzicato cello, continues St Thomas’s narration, chanted on a single note that slowly droops. After the lyrical refrain has recurred, it cadences from its G majorish root on to a second inversion of the ‘paradisal’ E major triad. A cello solo, still active in this movement, sings no human love-song but the more ravaged cries of a Mexican saltator grisâtre, who nonetheless presumably stands as surrogate for us. It sweeps the immense movement into unisons or heterophonies for the entire choral and orchestral forces on – as Messiaen puts it – ‘the terrible words; perfectae genetationis’. The ultimate unisons are on C.
The meditation paired with this shattering movement takes its text from a prayer for the Feast of the Transfiguration, appealing to God to make us co-heirs with Him who is King of Glory, and concluding in ceremonial alleluias. The solo cello returns to its human role as an agent of love and harbinger of the peaceable kingdom, seemingly carrying man closer to God, as he contemplates the visible, aural and tactile beauties of the world. But the movement, if less scarifying, is no less complex than the previous one, as a multiplicity of birds (widely ranging from France, Spain and Greece, to Africa and North America) yell a paean of created nature through the choral invocations and the iridescently coloured chord-clusters. Again, the wildly varied ‘material’ rotates sequentially, going nowhere, like nature itself. But the solo cello, singing in wide-ranging arabesques, provides a thread through the labyrinth, until the ripe E majorish harmonies of the final alleluias attain a momentary triumph, if not a final resolution. The babbling birds, non-if not exactly a-tonal, manage, however, to have the last non-word.
Messiaen’s church is identified with the solitudinous mountain, so that his Christian theology and his pantheistic mysticism are one. The divine vision awaits us, as the percussive prelude to the final ‘Récit évangélique’ returns unchanged, as is the beginning of the tenors’ declamation. The line is, however, extended, for the Gospel narrative is longer, describing the disciples’ awe at the spectacle of the transfigured Christ, who warns them to ‘tell the vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead’. Sopranos, and then the other choric voices, join the tenors as before, doubled by bells and haloed by unpitched percussion.
The ensuing meditation has a multiple text from Psalm 104, Aquinas, St Luke, the Ordinary of the Mass, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Genesis. These fragmentary verses revolve around identity between the inner and outer light; and Messiaen offers an autobiographical gloss in telling us that, while looking at Mont Blanc and at Alpine glaciers in bright clear weather, he was ‘suddenly struck by the difference between the small splendour of snow and the great splendour of the sun – that is where I could also imagine the extent to which the site of the Transfiguration was awesome’. As so often in Messiaen’s music, ‘naive’ physical depiction becomes visionary: trills and clusters grumbling and groaning on bottom strings fuse with sepulchral pedal notes on the deepest brass instruments, evoking awe, while majestically fearsome birds like eagles and falcons screech in abandon. Stratospheric strings in trills and harmonics combine with a gamelan of bells, crotales and piano to quiver in the white light of snow and sun: through which the chorus, always in octave unisons, swells ecstatically from the original ‘second mode’ recitatives. The identification in this movement of metaphysical qualities with pictorial physicality bears on the fact that its structure is even more episodic than that of the previous movements: the vision is glimpsed in flashes, ‘even in the twinkling of an eye’. The acceptance of nature’s abundance seems, however, to bring rewards, for the movement ends with a thrilling passage of choral vocalise, whirling in twenty real parts, with an extra one for the solo cello, making twenty-one (the magic three times seven) in all. The lines rock between the familiar perfect and imperfect fourths and fifths, while divided string harmonics, trills and glissandos auralize the sheen of snow and sun. The last word, ‘terribilis’, is set to a diminished fourth followed by rising tritone, the voices reinforced by brass and punctuated by tolling bells and gongs.
Purely aural sublimity – as distinct from any presumptive psychological ‘content’ – could hardly be carried beyond this scalp-prickling moment. But Messiaen, never scared of excess, manages to make the second meditation – the penultimate movement of the whole work – consummatory, at least in size and scope. It is cast in three chorally liturgical sections, framed by a massive orchestral prelude, interlude and postlude. In the orchestral prelude real bells and gongs are interspersed with normal orchestral instruments that simulate them, to awe-inspiring effect. The first choral episode combines resplendent alleluias with an invocation of light from Psalm 43. Other texts come from the Vespers of the Transfiguration and from St Thomas Aquinas, recounting the miracle of the Trinity as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are simultaneously manifest in the ‘bright cloud’. The quasi-liturgical vocal sections are again in octave unisons, in the mysterious second mode whereby tritonal melodic-harmonic tension is transmuted into timeless radiance. The instrumental ritornellos involve a stupendous descent through fourths perfect and imperfect: a passage that freezes nerves and sinews. If this movement approaches an epiphany, it may be because the mosaic sections tend to be more sustained than in previous movements, while the chaotic birds excite themselves to orgiastic frenzy only at a comparatively late stage in the divine-human ritual. Then, however, they are the more enraptured: nature seems no less multifarious, but more directed towards a (humanly apprehensible?) goal of praise and glory. Slightly more conventional musical behaviour operates during the passage from Aquinas that names in sequence the three persons of the Trinity, in massive chords that, still stemming from the ambiguous second mode, move inexorably towards an unambiguous E major. Each monolithic chord, resonating on full orchestra and festooned with pulsating added notes, echoes through the mountains, obliterating the distance between earth and heaven.
This is really the End: except that an end to atemporal experience is a paradox. So Messiaen appends a choral dedicated to the glory of light in words, from Psalm 26, that equate the Divine Presence with the mountain and tabernacle wherein ‘thine honour dwelleth’. The music adds nothing to the end of the previous movement since there is nothing to add; but it reinforces glory by returning to the choral that had ended the first septénaire, moving in immensely slow, solemn procession at quaver equals 30, but now in very loud homophony for chorus in eight or ten parts, all massively doubled by full orchestra. The whole edifice rests on the bellowing bass of those trombones, saxhorns and tubas; and the tonality, for all its coruscating chromatics, restores the E major blaze of the end of the previous movement. Occasional silences allow the ‘transcendent’ sonorities to echo through the mountain; but the very last chord, in ten choric parts with first sopranos on high B, is unsullied E major. If there is a paradox in Messiaen’s equating ultimate metaphysical bliss with such obstreperous physicality, one recognizes that such has been the burden of his art from his early years. The message is here writ (very) large, and one has to admit that the unabashed nature of the utterance is part of its potency. Some people find it foolhardy, even to the point of embarrassment; others find it genuinely Apocalyptic and epiphanic. Even those who, like this writer, cannot share its convictions may be dazzled by its bravery, which may make us simultaneously laugh and cry. One might risk saying that to Messiaen’s music no one can be indifferent. There are not many artists of whom as much can be said.