Olivier Messiaen – a life of profound creativity and influence

Olivier Eugene Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10th December 1908 in Avignon, France.  Olivier Messiaen was the son of Pierre Messiaen, a scholar of English literature, and the poet Cecile Sauvage.  Oliver entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919 at the age of eleven.  He was a student there until his early twenties studying with Paul Dukas (composition & orchestration), Maurice Emmanuel (history of music) and Marcel Dupré (organ and improvisation).  He also studied piano, timpani & percussion, as well as harmony, counterpoint and fugue.
Messiaen stood apart from his contemporaries from the start.  He created a totally individual ‘voice’, all influenced by his eclectic influences not least Indian rhythms, the music of ancient Greece and the Orient, his own ‘modes of limited transposition’ and, most famously, birdsong.  In fact, Messiaen began collecting the songs of birds when he was eighteen. Early works reveal such interest and delight, but it was not until after the Second World War that his music became steeped in their actual songs (notably Catalogue d'Oiseaux, Réveil des oiseaux, Oiseaux Exotique, Le merle noir, and Petites esquisses d'oiseaux) and indeed the symbolism of the habitats of these feathered creatures.  However, it was Messiaen’s profound Roman Catholic faith that influenced him most of all.
Messiaen, a performing musician, was organist at Eglise de la La Sainte-Trinité in Paris from the age of twenty-two and held this post until his death on April 27, 1992.  He promoted new music throughout his life.  As early as 1936, he founded the group La Jeune France together with the composers Andre Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, to promote new French music.  The war saw Messiaen incarcerated as a prisoner of war in Stalag 8A, Gorlitz, Poland.  It was here that he composed the Quatour pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the end of Time).   In 1941, on his return from captivity, he took up a post at the Paris Conservatoire where he taught analysis, theory, aesthetics and rhythm.  In 1966 he was officially appointed Professor of Composition.  Messiaen’s influence had a profound effect on the next generation of composers.  Young composers flocked to his classes, among them Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and, more recently, the British composer George Benjamin.  Toru Takemitsu also had huge admiration for his mentor, and his first meeting with the composer proved to be a seminal experience.
Messiaen married twice.  His first wife, Claire Delbos, died in 1959 in a psychiatric hospital having suffered physically and mentally for many years.  They had one son, Pascal (born 1937).  Messiaen married Yvonne Loriod in 1961.  She had been a pupil of Messiaen’s since his very first class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1941.  A pianist of dazzling skill, Loriod became one of the greatest interpreters of his music.   When her husband died, he left his last work, a concerto for four musicians, incomplete.  Yvonne Loriod undertook the final movement's orchestration with support from another of Messiaen’s students, the British composer George Benjamin.
Toru Takemitsu wrote on the death of Olivier Messiaen:
“His death leaves a crisis in contemporary music.  Truly, he was my spiritual mentor.  Among the many things I learned from his music, the concept and experience of colour and the form of time will be unforgettable.”
Paul Max Edlin © 2008

Some comments by Messiaen:
On Leonard Bernstein who conducted the first performance of the Turangalila Symphony, Boston, November 1949:
"I am forty-one years old and I have put into my Symphony all of my strengths of love, of hope and of musical research. But I know you are a man of genius and that you will conduct it the way I feel it."
On Synaesthesia (the union of the senses):
"I too see colours - if only in my mind - colours corresponding to sound. I try to incorporate this in my work, to pass on to the listener. It's all very mobile. You've got to feel sound moving. Sounds are high, low, fast, slow etc. My colours do the same thing, they move in the same way. Like rainbows shifting from one hue to the next. It's very fleeting and impossible to fix in any absolute way.”