4/1/20

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Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)

In deciding what piece I would pick to be the first of this blog, I knew that whatever I picked would have to be of much significance to me. It is for that reason that I settled on a piece that within the last year has risen to become one of my favorite orchestral works (excluding those of Sibelius) while also proving to be a work of a lifetime for the composer that wrote it: Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie. This monster of a composition clocks in at ten movements (totaling close to 70-80 minutes in length) and is written for large orchestra with virtuosic solo parts for piano and ondes martenot. The ondes martenot is an instrument that fascinated Messiaen with its alien electronic sound, closely resembling the sound of a theremin (though the ondes martenot is constructed in a very different manner and resembles a keyboard with a sliding ring in front of the keys).

Turangalîla is so massive in scope, it would be impossible to unpack it completely even given a full day of writing, but I think that a good way to approach it for the average listener is the way that was presented to the Nashville Symphony audience when I traveled back to Nashville last May (and missing my father’s birthday - sorry dad!) to hear it live. It’s important to understand that such an experience would be hard to find in the future - the work is not frequently performed for many reasons (pure length, large instrumentation including the ondes martenot which usually must be sent in from somewhere just for such performances, and even the poignant harmonic language throughout that can distance many unprepared listeners), despite Messiaen’s fame in the canon of Western music. The concert in Nashville featured a talk before the piece was performed (with Turangalîla being the only piece on the program), and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero was tasked with explaining the piece and warning the audience beforehand. The way he put it (though this may be slightly paraphrased) was as such: “This piece is unlike most other pieces heard in the concert hall - it challenges the listener to stay actively involved for the entire length. It will feel at times like it is impossible to follow and digest, but giving it your best will reward you with a journey unlike any other piece of music you will hear.”

Messiaen (like every composer who lived past the works of Richard Wagner) was greatly influenced by the myth and opera of Tristan and Isolde. Granted, this work may not sound like what you would initially expect “love” to sound like (and would instead sound like literally any other composer’s works from the Romantic Era), but Messiaen attempts to portray the wide range of emotions and ideas that all fall under the broad concept of “love.” His realizations of “love” are also linked in a coherent sense - from the first fragments of the love theme in movement II, to the passionate love of movement V, which is immediately followed by the most delicate yet complete iterations of the love theme in movement VI, and all the way to the development of the love theme in movement VIII and the climax in movement X. That is where the journey of this piece lies, and also the reason why the cult-like following of this piece will call it a ‘culmination of a life’s work’ for Olivier Messiaen.

Below I will be linking two different recordings of the piece so that you can watch either the score or Gustavo Dudamel in concert - I am quite fond of both versions. Before listening to the piece from the beginning, it may be helpful to familiarize yourself with one of the most important motifs that frequently comes back throughout the piece: the statue theme (first heard at time marking 0:33 in both recordings). It is believed that Messiaen has said this about the statue theme: “It has the oppressive, terrible brutality of ancient Mexican monuments, and has always evoked dread. It is played in a slow tempo, pesante.” As the piece progresses, I encourage you to track how the context in which the theme is presented changes, and to speculate on Messiaen’s intentions.

In one concluding thought (which will likely become a lengthy paragraph), I would like to leave you with this: give the piece a chance. The piece will never come to sound in your head like the way Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler do, and it took me several (and I mean several) listenings to come to appreciate it. The immediate sound of the piece is completely foreign from romantic orchestral repertoire, but part of Messiaen’s genius is how he can maintain his own voice and harmonic language throughout an incredible spectrum of emotions (like how different movement II is from movement X). Allow the piece to challenge your attention and capacity for interest just as it did for me. There were quite a number of people who walked out of the concert hall mid-performance when I heard it in Nashville because they could not hold on to the piece and what it had to say. Now, with concert halls all over the world closing down for a period of time, one can listen to the piece a few movements at a time with breaks in between to swallow and digest the music before them. I do not anticipate all of my blog posts to be this lengthy, but a piece like Turangalîla-Symphonie warrants a lot of explanation, and for how it has captivated me every time I listen to it, I feel like I owe it to the piece to explain as much as I can to the next listener. Personally, I am a sucker for the movements that are more tonally based (unlike movements III, VII, and IX), so I would have to say that my favorite movement is movement V - feel free to leave a comment on which movement is your favorite below.