|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Messiaen: Illuminations of Eternity
| Article
# : |
10380 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
3,203 Words |
| Author
: |
Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
One of the most startlingly original composers of our time, Olivier Messiaen was both in and beyond the Western musical tradition. He found much of his inspiration in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, which he served as organist for most of his life, yet the range of influences that helped shape his music was remarkably broad: ancient Greece and India, birdsong throughout the world, the passion of human love, landscapes as disparate as southern France and southern Utah. And it was his achievement to craft from these sources a personal language and body of work that contains intense emotional appeal and colorful fascination for any open-minded listener.
At his death last April, Messiaen left a body of some forty major works, dominated by a dozen large-scaled orchestral pieces. The rest is divided approximately equally among vocal (including choral) compositions, piano and organ pieces, and one massive chamber work. And it was all capped by his final creation, ?lairs sur l'Au-Dela (Illuminations of the beyond) commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 150th anniversary season and completed only a few months before Messiaen's death. ?lairs had its premier in November 1992 at New York City's Lincoln Center. In this seventy-eight-minute work in eleven movements, the composer's involvement with his God and his God's world finds final, powerful expression.
Messiaen--christened, in the grand Gallic tradition, Olivier Eugene Prosper Charles Messiaen--had his artistic career anticipated for him while still in the womb. Before his birth on December 10, 1908, his mother, the prominent poet Cecile Sauvage, had written a volume of poems dedicated to him, L'Ame en bourgeon (The flowering soul). Throughout the cycle of twenty poems, she refers to her child's future greatness: "I carry within me the love of mysterious and marvelous things." His father, Pierre Messiaen, was a professor of English who produced a well-known translation of Shakespeare. And it was the magical, supernatural world of Shakespeare that first attracted young Olivier; at the age of eight, he recited the play to his younger brother, building tiny stage sets out of colored cellophane that projected colors onto the floor.
He had already taught himself piano, though formal lessons were soon begun; by age ten he could play complicated works by Debussy and Ravel, putting him into tangible contact with some of the most recent French music. That same year, he was given a score of Debussy's opera Pelleas et Melisande; he himself described it as a thunderbolt, a revelation probably the most decisive influence on me." The following year, at age eleven,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
