Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and bird watcher. He was one of the most important musicians of the 20th century and also taught many students about music composition and analysis.
Messiaen began studying music at the Conservatoire de Paris when he was 11 years old. He learned from famous teachers such as Paul Dukas, Maurice Emmanuel, Charles-Marie Widor, and Marcel Dupré. In 1931, he became the organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, a position he held for 61 years until his death. During the 1930s, he also taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris. In 1940, after France was defeated in a war, Messiaen was held in a German prisoner of war camp for nine months. While there, he wrote a musical piece called Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) using only the instruments available in the camp: piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. The piece was first performed by Messiaen and other prisoners for other prisoners and guards. After his release in 1941, he became a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1966, he was also appointed a professor of composition at the same school, and he held both jobs until he retired in 1978. Some of his famous students included Iannis Xenakis, Mikis Theodorakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Jacques Hétu, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Kurtág, and Yvonne Loriod, who later became his second wife.
Messiaen saw colors when he heard certain musical chords, a phenomenon called chromesthesia. He believed these colors helped him create music. He traveled to many places and wrote music inspired by different cultures, such as Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi. His music included influences from Indonesian gamelan, which uses tuned percussion instruments. He was deeply interested in birdsong, recording bird calls from around the world and using them in his compositions.
Messiaen’s music is known for its complex rhythms. He used a system called "modes of limited transposition" in his compositions, which he developed from his early musical ideas. He wrote music for small groups, orchestras, solo organ, and piano. He also experimented with new electronic instruments created in Europe during his lifetime. For a short time, he explored a style called "total serialism," in which he is often recognized as an innovator. His use of color, his ideas about time and music, and his inclusion of birdsong are features that make his music unique.
Biography
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 at 20 Boulevard Sixte-Isnard in Avignon, France. He was the older of two sons in a family of writers. His mother, Cécile Anne Marie Antoinette Sauvage, was a poet, and his father, Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen, was a teacher and scholar of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud. He also translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen’s mother published a collection of poems called L'âme en bourgeon (The Budding Soul), which she wrote about her unborn son. Later, Messiaen said these poems deeply influenced him and predicted his future as an artist. His younger brother, Alain André Prosper Messiaen, became a poet.
At the start of World War I, Pierre joined the military, and Cécile moved with their two sons to live with her brother in Grenoble. There, Messiaen became interested in drama and recited Shakespeare’s plays to his brother. They made a homemade toy theater with backdrops made of cellophane. During this time, he also became a Roman Catholic. Later, Messiaen felt most comfortable in the Alps of the Dauphiné, where he built a house south of Grenoble. He composed most of his music there.
Messiaen taught himself to play the piano and later took lessons. He was interested in the music of French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. He asked for opera vocal scores as Christmas gifts and saved money to buy scores, including Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg. He said the Norwegian melodies in this work inspired his love for melody. Around this time, he began composing music.
In 1918, his father returned from the war, and the family moved to Nantes. Messiaen continued his music lessons. One teacher, Jehan de Gibon, gave him a score of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, which Messiaen called "a thunderbolt" and "the most decisive influence on me." The next year, his father got a teaching job at Sorbonne University in Paris. Olivier entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1919 at age 11.
At the Conservatoire, Messiaen did well academically. In 1924, at 15, he won second prize in harmony, taught by professor Jean Gallon. In 1925, he won first prize in piano accompaniment, and in 1926, he won first prize in fugue. After studying with Maurice Emmanuel, he won second prize for the history of music in 1928. Emmanuel’s work inspired Messiaen to study ancient Greek rhythms and unusual musical scales. After showing talent for piano improvisation, Messiaen studied organ with Marcel Dupré. He won first prize in organ playing and improvisation in 1929. After a year studying composition with Charles-Marie Widor, he joined the class of Paul Dukas in 1927. Shortly before the class began, his mother died of tuberculosis. Despite his sadness, he continued his studies and won first prize in composition in 1930.
While a student, Messiaen composed his first published works—his eight Préludes for piano (a piece called Le banquet céleste was published later). These works show Messiaen’s use of special musical scales and rhythms that are the same forwards and backwards (he called these "non-retrogradable rhythms"). His official debut came in 1931 with his orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées. That year, he heard a gamelan group, which sparked his interest in using tuned percussion instruments.
In the autumn of 1927, Messiaen joined Dupré’s organ course. Dupré later wrote that Messiaen, having never seen an organ before, sat quietly for an hour while Dupré explained the instrument, then returned a week later and played Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fantasia in C minor to a high standard. From 1929, Messiaen regularly played for the ailing Charles Quef at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité. When Quef died in 1931, Dupré, Charles Tournemire, and Widor supported Messiaen’s candidacy for the position. His formal application included a letter of recommendation from Widor. He was appointed in 1931 and remained the organist at the church for over 60 years. He also taught at the Schola Cantorum de Paris in the early 1930s. In 1932, he composed Apparition de l'église éternelle for organ.
In 1932, Messiaen married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (daughter of Victor Delbos). Their marriage inspired him to write music for her to play, such as Thème et variations for violin and piano, and to celebrate their happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he later orchestrated. "Mi" was his affectionate nickname for his wife. On 14 July 1937, their son, Pascal Emmanuel, was born. Messiaen celebrated this by writing Chants de Terre et de Ciel. The marriage became difficult when Delbos lost her memory after an operation near the end of World War II. She spent the rest of her life in mental institutions.
During this time, Messiaen composed several multi-movement organ works. He adapted his orchestral suite L'Ascension for organ, adding a new movement called Transports de joie d'une âme devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne (Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ which is the soul's own). He also wrote the cycles La Nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of the Lord) and Les Corps glorieux (The Glorious Bodies).
In 1936, Messiaen joined with André Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier to form the group La jeune France ("Young France"). Their manifesto criticized the carefree style of Parisian music and rejected Jean Cocteau’s Le coq et l'arlequin in favor of "living music" with sincerity and artistic dedication. Messiaen’s career soon moved away from this phase.
In 1937, Messiaen composed Fête des belles eaux for an ensemble of six musicians to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition. This piece showed his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument. He included the instrument in many of his later works.
At the start of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army. Because of poor eyesight, he was assigned to a medical support role instead of combat. He was captured at Verdun, where he
Music
Messiaen's music is often described as different from the Western musical tradition, even though it developed from that tradition and was influenced by it. Much of his work avoids the usual Western ideas of moving forward in music, developing themes, and resolving harmonies in a traditional way. This is partly because of the symmetrical patterns in his methods, such as the "modes of limited transposition," which do not allow the typical harmonic endings found in Western classical music.
Messiaen was deeply influenced by Shakespeare's portrayal of human emotions and his magical world. These interests later shaped his compositions. He was not focused on religious themes like sin, but instead explored ideas of joy, divine love, and redemption.
Messiaen constantly created new ways to compose music, always blending these ideas with his existing style. His later works still used the "modes of limited transposition." Many experts believe that his continuous development made each major work from Quatuor onward a summary of all his previous compositions. However, almost all of these works introduced new techniques, such as using a special type of language in Meditations, inventing a new percussion instrument called a geophone for Des canyons aux étoiles…, and allowing parts of his music in St. François d'Assise to move independently of the main rhythm.
In addition to creating new techniques, Messiaen studied music from other cultures, including Ancient Greek rhythms, Hindu rhythms (like the 120 rhythmic units called deçî-tâlas), Balinese and Javanese Gamelan music, birdsong, and Japanese music.
Although Messiaen helped others understand his techniques by writing two detailed treatises (the second one published after his death), he believed that developing and studying techniques was a way to achieve intellectual, artistic, and emotional goals. He argued that a musical piece should be judged on three things: whether it is interesting, whether it sounds beautiful, and whether it touches the listener.
Messiaen wrote a lot of music for the piano. Even though he was a skilled pianist, he relied heavily on Yvonne Loriod's technical skill and ability to play complex rhythms. From Visions de l'Amen onward, he composed piano music with her in mind. He once said, "I can be as unusual as I want because for her, anything is possible."
Modern French music, especially the work of Debussy and his use of the whole-tone scale (which Messiaen called Mode 1), greatly influenced Messiaen. He rarely used the whole-tone scale in his own compositions because, he said, "nothing new could be added" after Debussy and Dukas. However, the modes he did use were also symmetrical.
Messiaen greatly admired Igor Stravinsky's use of rhythm in works like The Rite of Spring and his orchestral color. He was also influenced by the brilliance of Heitor Villa-Lobos, who performed in Paris in the 1920s. Among keyboard composers, he respected Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, Frédéric Chopin, Debussy, and Isaac Albéniz. He loved the music of Modest Mussorgsky and adapted the "M-shaped" melody from Boris Godunov, changing the final interval from a perfect fourth to a tritone.
Messiaen was also influenced by Surrealism, which is seen in the titles of some of his piano Préludes (like Un reflet dans le vent…, "A reflection in the wind") and in the imagery of his poetry, which he included as prefaces to some of his works.
Color plays a central role in Messiaen's music. He believed that terms like "tonal," "modal," and "serial" are misleading for analysis. He argued that music is either colored or not, and that composers like Monteverdi, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Stravinsky all wrote music with strong color.
In some of his scores, Messiaen wrote down the colors he associated with the music (such as in Couleurs de la cité céleste and Des canyons aux étoiles…). This was meant to help conductors interpret the music, not to tell listeners which colors they should see. This focus on color was linked to his synaesthesia, a condition that made him see colors when he heard or imagined music. In his treatise Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie, he described the colors of certain chords in detail, ranging from simple descriptions like "gold and brown" to complex ones like "blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black, and white."
When asked about Messiaen's influence on composers, George Benjamin said, "I think the way he used color has been very influential. He showed that color could be a structural, fundamental part of music, not just a decorative element."
Many of Messiaen's techniques involved symmetries in time and pitch.
From his earliest works, he used non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms, meaning rhythms that read the same forwards and backwards (see Example 2). He sometimes combined these rhythms with harmonic sequences in a way that, if repeated indefinitely, would eventually cycle through all possible combinations and return to the beginning. For Messiaen, this represented the "charm of impossibilities" in these processes. He only showed a small part of these patterns, as if giving listeners a glimpse of something eternal. An early example of this appears in the first movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps, where the piano and cello work together.
Messiaen used "modes of limited transposition," which are groups of notes that can only be moved up or down by a semitone a limited number of times. For example, the whole-tone scale (Messiaen's Mode 1) has only two versions: C–D–E–F♯–G♯–A♯ and D♭–E♭–F–G–A–B. He developed these modes from the harmony in his improvisations and early works. Music using these modes avoids traditional harmonic progressions because, for example, Mode 2 (which is the same as the octatonic scale used by other composers) allows dominant seventh chords that do not include the mode's tonic.
In addition to using non-retrogradable rhythms and Hindu decî-tâlas, Messiaen also used "additive" rhythms. This involved slightly lengthening or shortening notes or