Olivier Messiaen

Music, Art and Literature

Nigel Simeone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351555906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

When Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, the prevailing image was of a man apart; a deeply religious man whose only sources of inspiration were God and Nature and a composer whose music progressed along an entirely individual path, artistically impervious to contemporaneous events and the whims both of his contemporaries and the critics. Whilst such a view contains a large element of truth, the past ten years has seen an explosion of interest in the composer, and the work of a diverse range of scholars has painted a much richer, more complex picture of Messiaen. This volume presents some of the fruits of this research for the first time, concentrating on three broad, interrelated areas: Messiaen's relationship with fellow artists; key developments in the composer's musical language and technique; and his influences, both sacred and secular. The volume assesses Messiaen's position as a creative artist of the twentieth century in the light of the latest research. In the process, it identifies some of the key myths, confusions and exaggerations surrounding the composer which often mask equally remarkable truths. In attempting to reveal some of those truths, the essays elucidate a little of the mystery surrounding Messiaen as a man, an artist, a believer and a musician.

Chapter One
Messiaen and Cocteau

Stephen Broad

I didn’t approve at all of the movement led by Cocteau – I’m not speaking of Cocteau the poet or film director, but of the Cocteau of Coq et l’arlequin, the torchbearer of a certain musical renewal, supposedly a simplification that took Gounod as a starting point and stumbled in the ‘return to Bach’.

Samuel, 1994, pp. 112–13

Messiaen – ‘composer-rhythmician-ornithologist’ – is a figure we instinctively feel we know. In a time of scepticism he was the musical visionary; in an urban world he was the ‘ornithologist-composer’; in a complex and secular age he was the ‘simple man of faith’. Our understanding of the composer is underpinned by the sense that he stood apart from the rest of the twentieth century, that he was somehow different. This notion is deeply ingrained: the entry on Messiaen in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for example, begins simply: ‘He was a musician apart’ (Griffiths, 2001, p. 491).

Of the well-known episodes in Messiaen’s life, one in particular seems to be most at odds with the idea of the ‘musician apart’. This is Messiaen’s collaboration with Yves Baudrier, André Jolivet and Daniel-Lesur as La Jeune France. Although the impetus for its formation has been interpreted in a number of ways, most commentators cite a desire to counter the prevailing aesthetic of neoclassicism as espoused by its leading impresario and figurehead, Jean Cocteau.

It is surprisingly difficult to find such a direct explanation from Messiaen himself. Nonetheless, the quotation at the head of this chapter confirms that Messiaen disapproved of Cocteau and with the ethos of neoclassicism – indeed, Messiaen comments elsewhere in the same interview that no valid works have sprung from neoclassicism (Samuel, 1994, p. 195). In this essay I aim to trace and reassess Messiaen’s relationship to neoclassicism and Cocteau by reference to contemporary writing by Messiaen, mostly through his articles for the French and Belgian musical press, written between 1936 and 1939. While some of this journalism is well-known (such as Messiaen’s article for Revue musicale on Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue), much of it has only recently come to light, allowing an appraisal of this fascinating relationship to be made for the first time.

It is difficult to imagine two creative people more different in style and temperament than Olivier Messiaen and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau’s wild enthusiasm for all kinds of artistic work strikes a great contrast with Messiaen’s single-minded course through music. Likewise, the high profile that Cocteau maintained for nearly half a century stands in contrast to the self-effacing Messiaen. Where there are a relatively small number of photographs of Messiaen, Cocteau is one of the most readily recognizable artists of the twentieth century. Cocteau’s biographer, Francis Steegmuller, enumerates the many photographs of his subject, giving at the same time a flavour of the man: In The Harlequin Years, his eloquent survey of musical life in Paris in the decade following the Great War, Roger Nichols shows Cocteau’s emergence as ‘torchbearer’ of the new aesthetic in the context of a musical culture that had already been profoundly changed by the punitive shortages of wartime, the perceived superannuation of symbolism and a renewed rejection of all things Germanic (Nichols, 2002, pp. 18–19). The ideas expressed by Cocteau in his manifesto Le Coq et l’arlequin may be seen as representative of the time.

As a slim young pre-1914 aesthete; close to the front in his wartime ambulance-attendant’s uniform, said to have been designed for him by the dressmaker Paul Poiret; posed by Man Ray in Dadaist settings that featured his beautiful hands; speaking into a megaphone during a performance of his spectacle Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel; surrounded by the composers known as ‘Les Six’; standing with Jean Marais, with the casts of his plays, with Stravinsky, with Picasso, with Edith Piaf, with Colette, with Charlie Chaplin, with the Queen of the Belgians; perched on a ladder painting his murals; wearing his French Academician’s sword or his Oxford gown: Cocteau was always photographed.

(Steegmuller, 1970, p. 5)

Le Coq remains an extraordinarily effective piece of polemic. The 1918 tract (Cocteau described it as ‘a little book about music’) was self-published in its first edition but quickly sold out. Its relentlessly combative aphorisms hit out wildly in many different directions, while the exaggerated perspective of its lampooning portrays a French musical edifice teetering under its own weight. Although it can seem incoherent in places, it nonetheless makes persuasive reading. Cocteau contrasts the proud French coq with the sad arlequin, a caricature of eclecticism that plays on a clever pun: the word arlequin also refers to a meal made up of left-overs and therefore implies that eclecticism is similarly second-hand. Le Coq was influential to a generation of composers, uniting Les Six and laying the foundations for neoclassicism.

Although few trends escape Cocteau’s rapier attacks, he is particularly scathing of the music that had dominated Paris before the Great War. Cocteau adopts Satie as a musical figurehead for his ideas and flippantly satirizes Debussy and Wagner: ‘Pelléas is … music to be listened to with one’s head in one’s hands. All music which has to be listened to through the hands is suspect. Wagner is typically music which is listened to through the hands’ (Cocteau, 1972, p. 318). The musical clichés and sensibilities of impressionism are ridiculed, and a neat sideswipe is made at Debussy by reference to his professed love of violet (also Messiaen’s favourite colour): Despite being ‘anti-eclectic’, Cocteau claims diverse kinds of popular music as sources of ‘fertilization’ (though he does not make it clear why this is not in itself a kind of eclecticism): ‘The music-hall, the circus, and American Negro bands, all these things fertilize an artist just as life does’ (Cocteau, 1972, p. 312). Above all, Cocteau calls for a music that reflects its times: ‘The function of art is to seize the spirit of the age’ (Cocteau, 1972, p. 312). Cocteau, then, would have music that echoed the era of the motor car and the aeroplane, Picasso and jazz hot, the cinema and the phonograph.

Impressionist musicians thought the orchestra in Parade poor, because it had no sauce. … For the majority of artists a work cannot be beautiful without an intrigue of mysticism, love or boredom.

(Cocteau, 1972, p. 314)¹

The Impressionists feared bareness, emptiness, silence. Silence is not necessarily a hole; you must use silence and not a stopgap of vague noises. Black shadow – black silence. Not violet silence, interspersed with violet shadows.

(Cocteau, 1972, p. 311)²

By the mid-1930s the tendencies that had been set in motion by the trends Nichols identifies and given momentum by Cocteau’s manifesto had become the basis of the prevailing aesthetic in France. In a relatively short period, the ideas of the firebrand Cocteau had become firmly embedded in musical culture: the neoclassical revolutionaries had, in a sense, become the new musical establishment. It was against this new order that the four young composers of La Jeune France now rebelled.

The group was the initiative of Yves Baudrier, who approached Messiaen with the idea (and the funds) to form an alliance that would champion the ideal of a return to the spiritual in music and make a conscious effort to reject the largely neoclassical consensus. They launched themselves with an impressive concert and a splash of publicity in June 1936 and went on to offer concerts of various kinds for about eight years. Led by Baudrier, La Jeune France collaborated on a manifesto laying out the aims of the group, and this was printed in the programme of their first concert. It is not, as has been suggested by some, a point-by-point repudiation of Le Coq – given the riotous nature of Le Coq, such a systematic rejection would be impossible – but it does reject Cocteau’s key ideas. It begins thus:

As the conditions of life become more and more hard, mechanical and impersonal, music must relentlessly bring its spiritual violence and its generous reactions to those who love it.³

This bears comparison with the following passage from Le Coq et l’arlequin: The Jeune France composers reject two of Cocteau’s ideas here. First, they explicitly reject the notion that music should be related to ‘the spirit of the age’; second, they allude to the images of ‘machinery and American buildings’, which Cocteau has united with classical art, and reject them in their characterization of life as becoming ‘hard, mechanical and impersonal’. Cocteau’s opposition to ‘superfluity’ and ‘the beauty of the Useless’ is countered by La Jeune France’s reference to ‘generous reactions’. Where Cocteau would eschew the superfluous, La Jeune France revels in ‘generosity’. ‘Generosity’ is clearly an important theme for the group, since the phrase is repeated twice in the course of the short manifesto. Yet it is unclear exactly what is intended by the ‘generous reactions’ that La Jeune France promote without knowledge of the similar, but contrasting image of superfluity in Le Coq.

Machinery and American buildings resemble Greek art in so far as their utility endows them with an aridity and a grandeur devoid of any superfluity. But they are not art. The function of art is to seize the spirit of the age and extract from the contemplation of this practical aridity an antidote to the beauty of the Useless, which encourages superfluity.

(Cocteau, 1972, p. 312)

So, we can read Messiaen’s participation in La Jeune France (and his signature on the manifesto) as an engagement of sorts with some of the debates that Cocteau had set in motion some seventeen years earlier. However, Messiaen later made a curious attempt to put some distance between himself and the Jeune France manifesto, and to play down the significance of the group: ‘I wasn’t in complete agreement with that Manifesto … The whole thing [La Jeune France] lasted only two or three years. When war broke out, we became separated from each other’ (Rößler, 1986, p. 105). Messiaen’s comment on the limited extent of his engagement with La Jeune France seems consistent with the image of a composer who avoids becoming involved in the grubby realities of day-today musical politics. Manifestos, positions and polemics all seem far removed from the Messiaen we feel we know. (Messiaen’s comment that La Jeune France lasted only two or three years is rather more perplexing – since we know this is not the case.)

We might be drawn to conclude that Messiaen’s role in La Jeune France was relatively limited – at least in the context of the group’s engagement in the aesthetic manoeuverings of the day. Certainly Messiaen’s extensive series of interviews with Claude Samuel, which represent the composer’s considered views on his musical outlook and himself, go a long way to support this assumption and, therefore, suggest that the episode has limited importance to our understanding of the composer. Neither the original interviews of 1967 (English edition 1976), nor the considerably revised and extended 1986 version (English edition 1994) mentions La Jeune France at all. Fortunately, however, we need not rely entirely on the composer’s later pronouncements for an insight into this fascinating episode, because Messiaen’s journalism (from the time of La Jeune France) allows us a different perspective on his relationship to neoclassicism and Jean Cocteau. This journalism reveals a very different picture.

One of Messiaen’s better-known writings from the 1930s is a short piece on Stravinsky’s rhythmic procedures for La Revue musicale in 1939. The article contains a biting sideswipe at neoclassicism that seems rather uncharacteristic.

It is strange that, while Stravinsky has exerted a powerful influence over his immediate contemporaries in the dual domains of polytonality and sumptuous orchestration, he has rarely done so in that of rhythm. They admire his rhythms, but it is a lazy admiration, complacent and fruitless. The lamentable bars of 3 and 4 that are the habitual sickness of our Parisian concerts are proof of this. As for the young composers, they have followed a very different path from their elders – they have returned to the sensual and the spiritual.

(Messiaen, 1939d, pp. 91–2)⁴

Writing in 1985, Paul Griffiths incorporated this unexpectedly severe pronouncement into the familiar narrative as an inconsequential aberration, the exception that proved the rule:

The harsh judgement on neoclassical aesthetics could have come from any of the members of La Jeune France [sic]. For Messiaen, however, this was not only his first but also his last engagement in polemics. His halfhearted career as a public musician – writing essays, backing manifestos, accepting commissions, composing for the conventional concert world – was at an end.

(Griffiths, 1985, p. 76)

When the Stravinsky essay is seen in the light of Messiaen’s other writings, the pot-shot at neoclassicism quoted above is revealed to be no isolated case: in fact, Messiaen waged a subtle, but sustained and public campaign against neoclassicism through his journalism for some three years between 1936 and 1939.

In the article on Stravinsky, Messiaen bemoans the ‘lamentable’ squareness of the rhythms employed in the music that he hears around him, employing the striking image of a ‘sickness’ infecting new music. It is clear that for Messiaen, issues in musical language are inseparable from the wider concerns of his aesthetic outlook, and rhythm becomes a symbol of the void that Messiaen considers to lie at the heart of neoclassicism. He sees rhythmic blandness as the most obvious indication of the artistic paucity of neoclassicism on the one hand and (presumably, his own) rh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of Music Examples
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Note
• Introduction
• 1 Messiaen and Cocteau
• 2 ‘L’Harmonie de l’Univers’: Maurice Toesca and the genesis ofVingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
• 3 Messiaen and Dutilleux
• 4 Les Noces and Trois petites Liturgies: an assessment of Stravinsky’s influence on Messiaen
• 5 From Fête des belles eaux to Saint François d’Assise: the evolution of the writing for Ondes Martenot in the music of Olivier Messiaen
• 6 Messiaen recorded: the Quatre Études de rythme
• 7 Messiaen’s chords
• 8 The record of realism in Messiaen’s bird style
• 9 Musical analysis according to Messiaen: a critical view of a most original approach1
• 10 Messiaen – bibliophile
• 11 Observations on time in Olivier Messiaen’s Traité
• 12 L’Ame en bourgeon
• 13 The life and works of Jean Lurçat (1892–1966)
• 14 Dancing Turangalîla: Messiaen and the ballet
• 15 Frescoes and legends: the sources and background of Saint François d’Assise1
• 16 The works of Olivier Messiaen and the Catholic liturgy
• Bibliography
• Index