World War II and the early post-war years
The Second World War indeed had a great impact on Messiaen’s compositional development. Had he, through the thirties, developed a very personal and innovative style, it was the experience as prisoner of war in Silesia in 1940-41 that determined his understanding of musical time and space. During this imprisonment Messiaen composed his "Quartet for the End of Time". The work takes its inspiration from a verse of the Apocalypse, where an angel announces that time has come to an end. In the wretched situation Messiaen and his fellow prisoners found themselves, this must have been a terrifying thought – time stops, maybe starts going backwards?
Moreover, during his captivity in the camp Messiaen suffered from malnutrition; this provoked coloured hallucinations that must have added to the richness of his colour spectrum – he had composed with colours from the very beginning.
The circumstances around the performance of the quartet in the camp, with Messiaen performing on a most inadequate piano and fellow prisoners playing the violin, cello and clarinet parts, were quite extraordinary. Fellow prisoners from different countries who were present in the biting cold of the camp must have felt they were witnessing a historic event. Messiaen had created a music completely alienated from ordinary perception of time; in his own words “Time had become colour.”
When Messiaen finally returned to Paris, to his wife and then three-year-old son, he got a position as professor of harmony at the Conservatoire, where the sixteen-year-old pianist Yvonne Loriod was among his students. Loriod soon became his favourite student and after only two years Messiaen finished a gigantic work for two pianos, "Visions of Amen", for the professor and student to perform together, which they would do repeatedly. The sensual, ecstatic character of the work, as well as its monumental, cosmic dimensions, would never fail to make a strong impression, albeit some listeners had difficulties accepting this very combination of eroticism and spirituality.
Much of the same can be said about "Twenty Meditations on the Jesus Child" for solo piano, the cycle that emerged the year after – again written for Yvonne Loriod. Her incredible pianistic talent led Messiaen to break all hitherto known barriers of pianistic display. A symbiotic process between composer and performer brought about an orchestral richness of colour in piano writing that was unheard of until then. Messiaen called it searching for “a language of mystic love, at the same time varied, powerful and tender, in multicoloured ordinances”.
The carnal expression of a mystic-religious idea must have been shocking to many people at the first performance in Paris just after the end of the war.
In his next works, Messiaen turned to the forbidden love as it emerges in the Tristan legend. His study of the Peruvian variant of this worldwide legend brought about the song cycle "Harawi", a word from Quechua, the language of the Incas. The subtitle, "Songs of love and death", indicate the presence of “ a love that transcends the flesh, that transcends even the spiritual and that is enlarged into a cosmic dimension” – again a work of unusual dimensions, making exceptional demands on the performers. But it is worth the while: as in all the other works, this masterpiece provides visions of cosmos, with a richness of colour unprecedented in music history, perhaps except for the next work in the series of masterpieces by Messiaen, the Turangalîla Symphonie.
Håkon Austbø
About Messiaen and the Concerts
Olivier Messiaen was perhaps the most significant composer of the twentieth century. His work absorbs, as a kind of magnet, most of all that preceded and generated much of what was to come. The works presented in this festival have a central place in Messiaen’s output and represent probably the most fertile period of his compositional oeuvre – i.e.
Olivier Messiaen and Håkon Austbø
