Music for the End of Time

As composer, organist, teacher and theorist, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was the most influential European musician of the second half of the twentieth century--and yet he was in many ways far removed from his time and place. His religious beliefs were those of a pious medieval Catholic; his musical style ignored just about everything that had happened in European music between the troubadours and Wagner. He cobbled together a personal idiom out of bits and pieces of musical techniques and sources from around the world, forging them into a system he hawked with the ardent self-confidence of a traveling Bible salesman. His combination of naïve fervor, pedantry and self-made originality made him seem more like a misplaced American maverick--like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell or John Cage--than a product of French culture. And yet scarcely any Western European composers of the past sixty years have been untouched by his ideas.

Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, the co-authors of this handsomely produced new biography, have a long association with Messiaen's music, as a performer and a writer, respectively. For their devotion they were granted access to a huge private archive of papers, photographs and memorabilia still controlled by the composer's widow, Yvonne Loriod. This relationship yields predictable strengths and weaknesses. The book fills out our knowledge of Messiaen's career and reception (Loriod must have saved every review he received in his life), but it also tends to frame controversies in a defensive manner and fails to deal forthrightly with some of the touchiest and most interesting aspects of his career; Claude Samuel's book of conversations with Messiaen, Music and Color, and Rebecca Rischin's recent history of the Quartet for the End of Time--a work for violin, cello, piano and clarinet famously composed and premiered at a German prisoner-of-war camp in January 1941 before an audience of fellow prisoners--convey a much more vivid sense of Messiaen's private side. But the public "and then he wrote" story told here has its own fascination.

The facts of Messiaen's childhood are already familiar. His father was a professor of English (though Messiaen never learned the language). His mother, Cécile Sauvage, was an important poet; her ode to motherhood, L'Âme en bourgeon (The Flowering Soul), was written while she was pregnant with the future composer. Throughout his career Messiaen, who wrote his own texts for three song cycles and for the epic opera Saint François d'Assise, lauded his mother's influence on his music and poetry. Her death when he was 19 was one of two tragic personal losses that shadowed his career.

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