Messiaen

The more I learn this guy’s music, the more I regret not being born in time to have met him.

Yesterday was a rough day for me, and it may take me a while to cope. Popping in his opera “Saint François d’Assise” (Nagano conducting, on D-G) is like a balm. He was such an oddball, and as on fire with the faith as it seems any could expect to be in his profession. A genius, he basically won every prize he could have applied for - piano, organ, history, composition, counterpoint, ... and his musical œuvre is (almost) all directed to God.

This opera .... I dunno. It’s hard going down at first, but it’s nothing like Schoenberg. It fills four CDs, and the score is in 8 oversize books - quite heavy.

His was such a joy-filled faith - nothing on pain or suffering in his work, but all about things like the appearance of the Eternal Church, the Ascension - the glory stuff. (Kind of an antithesis of the doom-and-gloom image some paint of the pre-V2 Church.)

He wrote one piece of liturgical music (that I know), an “O sacrum convivium” from the 1930s. It is simply stunning. Simple in form and even in texture - all homophonic, but his harmonic language is so original and passionate. I have begun to think, too, that the “et futuræ gloriæ” is meant to be a musical “orgasm” - tying in the joy of the marital act to the Eucharist and to the “future glory” of salvation. (Decades before JP2’s Theology of the Body!)

I also highly recommend the Turangalila Symphony - the Naxos recording is unusually good.