Griffiths Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28730-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Olivier Messiaen was one of the outstanding creative artists of his time. The strength of his appeal, to listeners as well as to composers, is a measure of the individuality of his music, which draws on a vast range of sources: rhythms of twentieth-century Europe and thirteenth-century India, ripe romantic harmony and brittle birdsong, the sounds of Indonesian percussion and modern electronic instruments. What binds all these together is, on one level, his unswerving devotion to praising God in his art, and on another, his independent view of how music is made. Messiaen's music offers a range of ways of experiencing time: time suspended in music of unparalleled changelessness, time racing in music of wild exuberance, time repeating itself in vast cycles of reiteration. In Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time, leading writer and musicologist, Paul Griffiths, explores the problems of religious art, and includes searching analyses and discussions of all the major works, suggesting how they function as works of art and not only as theological symbols. This comprehensive and stimulating book covers the whole of Messiaen's output up to and including his opera, Saint Françoise d'Assise.

Paul Griffiths, born in Wales, has written novels, librettos and books on music. Among his many titles are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (also being reissued in Faber Finds).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Griffiths, Paul

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

Childhood and Before

Enigmas of time start before the beginning. For most individuals there is no knowing how genetic and environmental conditions have already begun to shape personality in the womb, but in Messiaen’s case there is something to be said about his uterine existence, since his mother, the poet Cécile Sauvage (1883–1927), made her pregnancy the subject of a collection of twenty poems, L’âme en bourgeon.1 Obviously these convey her experiences and not those of her son, but they are addressed to him, whether as embryonic child or new-born baby, and they must have affected his later view of himself. Indeed, he has confessed as much. In a book of conversations with Antoine Goléa that is one of the major sources for his early life, he admits that his mother’s poems ‘certainly influenced my character and my whole destiny’,2 and he interprets one line even as a prophecy that he would be an artist.3 Much later, in a note for a record of twelve poems from the collection recited with discreet interludes played at the organ by himself in 1977, he declares that ‘this is his purest pride: to have inspired L’âme en bourgeon’.4

Some idea of Sauvage’s effusive imagery and her affectionate if proprietorial manner in these poems may be had from one of the shorter ones, ‘La tête’:

O mon fils, je tiendrai ta tête dans ma main,

Je dirai: j’ai pétri ce petit monde humain;

Sous ce front dont la courbe est une aurore étroite

J’ai logé l’univers rajeuni qui miroite

Et qui lave d’azur les chagrins pluvieux.

Je dirai: j’ai donné cette flamme à ces yeux,

J’ai tiré du sourire ambigu de la lune,

Des reflets de la mer, du velours de la prune

Ces deux astres naïfs ouverts sur l’infini.

Je dirai: j’ai formé cette joue et ce nid

De la bouche où l’oiseau de la voix se démène;

C’est mon oeuvre, ce monde avec sa face humaine.

O mon fils, je tiendrai ta tête dans ma main

Et, songeant que le jour monte, brille et s’éteint,

Je verrai sous tes chairs soyeuses et vermeilles

Couvertes d’un pétale à tromper les abeilles,

Je verrai s’enfoncer les orbites en creux,

L’ossature du nez offrir ses trous ombreux,

Les dents rire sur la mâchoire dévastée…

Et ta tête de mort, c’est moi qui l’ai sculptée.5

If Messiaen had not been Messiaen, then no doubt this poem and its nineteen companions would have fallen with the rest of Sauvage’s work into obscurity. But if his music has saved her verse, it may be also that her poetry played some part in making him a composer in the first place. Uncountable aspects of inheritance and experience must go into the production of artistic creativity. One of them in Messiaen’s case could hardly fail to have been a garland of poems that so welcomed him as special.

The child of whom they speak was born in Avignon on 10 December 1908 and christened Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles, but soon afterwards the family moved to Ambert in the département of Puy-de-Dome, the birthplace of Chabrier. There the boy learned to read, and there he acquired a brother, Alain, born in 1913 and apparently not greeted by a second set of maternal poems from Sauvage. Even so, he, like Olivier, inherited or otherwise imbibed something of his mother’s poetic gift, becoming the author of verbal interpretations of music, including his brother’s, published as Cortège d’Euterpe. Pierre Messiaen, the boys’ father, was a man of letters too – a lycée teacher of English and translator of Shakespeare – but his part in their intellectual formation has generally been underplayed (perhaps justly: the composer never learned to master English). He was, inevitably, an absentee parent during a crucial period of his elder son’s life, for before Olivier was 6 the First World War had broken out and the English teacher become a soldier.

Sauvage took the two boys to her brother André’s house in Grenoble. He was a surgeon, and also involved in the war effort; the boys were therefore in the charge of their mother and of her mother, Marie Sauvage, and they were brought up, according to the composer’s account, ‘in a climate of poetry and fairytales … such as enormously develops a child’s imagination and leads him towards thinking in immaterial terms, and so to music, the most immaterial of the arts’.6

From fairytales to music, though, the route lay through drama and religion. Messiaen has recalled how at the age of 8 he recited the whole of Shakespeare from an edition ‘decorated with romantic woodcuts’7 (this was before his father published his own translation), with his brother as participant or audience. He even went further and made a toy theatre: ‘For the back of the stage I used Cellophane wrappings that I found in sweet boxes or patisserie bags and then painted with Indian ink or quite simply with water-colours; then I put my sets in front of a window, and the sun coming through the coloured Cellophane projected coloured light on to the floor of my little theatre as well as on to the characters.’8

These childhood Thespian endeavours may be of small consequence, but what is significant is that Messiaen should have remembered them decades later and thereby given the hint that they were important to the development of his creative mind: one can hardly miss the suggestion of stained-glass windows, so potent an image in his artistic world. At the same time his mind was learning to work musically. Having taught himself to play the piano, he began composing canons at the octave when he was 8, and only afterwards was sent to his first teacher, a Mlle Chardon. Between the ages of 7 and 10 he demanded operatic vocal scores for his Christmas presents: Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, Gluck’s Alceste and Orfeo, La damnation de Faust, Die Walküre and Siegfried were duly left by Père Noël, and these he sang and played through at the piano.9 His repertory also included, astonishingly for a child so young, Debussy’s Estampes and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit,10 so that at an early age he was in touch not only with the magic realm of an opera of the mind but also with some of the most significant of recent French music.

Not surprisingly, given this musical precocity, he began to compose. La dame de Shalott, a piano piece after Tennyson’s poem, is mentioned from 1917, and described by the composer of fifty years later as ‘a very childish piece, but not altogether stupid and not entirely without sense, a piece I still regard with a certain tenderness’.11 Another observer has found ‘in the little allegro describing Lancelot’s ride … a distant premonition of the “Intermède” from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps’.12

At this stage, though, one might have thought the boy was preparing himself for a career as an operatic composer, were it not that his theatrical preferences were all imaginary and fantastic: there is no account in his reminiscences of ever visiting a real theatre, and his favourite Shakespeare plays, like his chosen operas, were those with a strong element of the supernatural, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. In fact, the theatre was a second best. It was in the Catholic faith – which he adopted for himself, his parents not being particularly religious – that he found something to touch his sense of the mysterious much more deeply. For if Shakespeare offered him ‘super-fairytales’,13 he discovered in his religion ‘this attraction of the marvellous multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold’.14

Speaking thus has, however, brought him much misunderstanding. A faith that regards the Gospels and the Apocalypse as a sort of ultimate Hans Christian Andersen must appear lacking in adultness, and it is hardly enough to insist, as Messiaen has insisted, that the difference between Shakespeare and Christian belief is simply that between ‘a theatrical fiction’ and ‘something true’.15 But such naïveté can only be admired: to question Messiaen’s sincerity and his motivation is as unprofitable as it is improper. The most it can yield is a fake reason for dismissing his music, whereas it may be more productive to examine ways in which the contemplation of divine things has led him to take up musical and philosophical issues of interest to all.

Much of the remainder of this book will be concerned with these matters, but the territory can be quickly charted here. In the first place, quite straightforwardly, the wish to display Christian mythology in music has given Messiaen a reason to compose: something vouchsafed to few of his contemporaries in an age when music is no longer much prompted by patronage, commercial interest or, except in some instances, self-advertisement. Secondly, he has given himself the challenge of attempting to describe in music the most awe-inspiring figments of the human mind – the Incarnation, the Resurrection of...