'Olivier Messiaen' Review: Composing in Sound and Color
Opinion by Tim Page • 1mo • 4 min read
The life and work of the French composer Olivier Messiaen continue to fascinate. A mystic Catholic who sought inspiration from birdsong, vast empty canyons, stained-glass windows and his own explorations of Asian music, Messiaen (1908-92) was an original thinker who, from the beginning, went his own way. His music combined jagged modernist melodies, complex rhythmic patterns and dense formal schemata in a manner that was, paradoxically, passionate, extravagantly colorful and sometimes swooningly Romantic.
Like Liszt and Scriabin before him, Messiaen spent his life in a state of synesthesia, a sensory crossing of wires that may result in “seeing” sounds. “When I hear music, when I read music,” Messiaen said, “I see colors, which are marvelous and impossible to describe because they are moving like the sounds themselves.” He described one of his harmonic sequences as going “from blue striped with green to black spotted with red and gold, by way of diamond, emerald, purplish-blue, with a dominant pool of orange studded with milky white.” Once, while watching a ballet, he became sick to his stomach because the purplish hue of the lighting clashed with his own conception of the color of G major.
Messiaen is a ripe subject for study. Though his works appear on concert programs less frequently than those of some of his contemporaries, he is far from an obscure figure. His most popular work, a piece best known in English-speaking countries as the “Quartet for the End of Time,” even inspired a 2014 novel with that title, by the Canadian writer Johanna Skibsrud. Now Robert Sholl, a professor of music at the University of West London who also teaches at the Royal Academy of Music has given us a slim, smart and sympathetic volume titled “Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography.”
Like Messiaen’s music, the book is not for everybody. Mr. Sholl knows the composer’s work intimately—he has played all of Messiaen’s organ music and seems to subscribe to much of his worldview. But “Olivier Messiaen” seems to me most valuable as an annotated meditation on the composer’s work for those who know it well and have the training to absorb its complications. As pure storytelling, it is somewhat less captivating.
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“Quartet for the End of Time"
“Turangalîla Symphony”
“Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus”
(“Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus”)
What's the Colour of Music? Messiaen and Colour
Xylophone orchestral excerpt- Olivier Messiaen - Oiseaux exotiques
Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques
Album cover!
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