Exotic bird

French composer Olivier Messiaen's culturally diverse music is the backbone of this year's New Creations Festival in Toronto. (Toronto Symphony Orchestra)

Born a century ago, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a French mystic and composer who once wrote and premiered his music in a Nazi labour camp. His sound was inspired by birdsong and landscapes, Chopin and synesthesia. Greek and Hindu rhythms permeated his music, as did Bach and Debussy. Today, Messiaen is considered one of the pre-eminent composers of the 20th century. And in Canada, he also represents a binding influence on both French and English composers.

This month the Toronto Symphony Orchestra presents its fourth annual New Creations Festival with Messiaen’s work as the backbone. TSO conductor Peter Oundjian says his idea for a Messiaen tribute dates back almost two decades. In 1990, two years before the composer died, Oundjian approached him in hopes of commissioning a string quartet. “He replied, ‘Not a quintet?’ — to include piano, because everything he wrote had keyboards in it,” Oundjian recalls. Although Messiaen never composed the proposed quintet, Oundjian says that remark “was the inspiration for this festival.”

There will be plenty of keyboard action in this centennial salute to Messiaen. Its four concerts feature piano heroes Marc-André Hamelin, Peter Serkin and Yefim Bronfman. The program includes the Messiaen works Oiseaux exotiques, Couleurs de la cité Céleste, Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine and Turangalîla-Symphonie. Surrounding his work will be pieces by Philip Glass, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Canadian composers Jeffrey Ryan, Malcolm Forsyth and Jacques Hétu.

Messiaen is especially enthralling to the Canadian imagination because no other composer forged such shining individuality out of cultural synthesis. His music is as Russian in some parts as it is Japanese in others. It’s full of ecstatic Catholic imagery while dripping with sensual ardour. And none of it is mere pastiche. While embracing a universe of input, every bar of Messiaen’s music only ever sounds like his own.

David Rogosin, who teaches piano at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University, is currently studying Messiaen’s music in Paris. “Messiaen stacked lyrical sounds on top of brutal chords,” says Rogosin, “and that broken-up texture is now an integral part of 20th-century [music].” This impulse can be heard as early as 1932, in his Theme and Variations, where the violin sings with sweet lightness as the piano chord formations fall around the melody like church pews lobbed at a nightingale. The result is tender but without sentimentality, and imbued with a pictorial, cosmic strangeness.

Toronto Symphony Orchestra conductor Peter Oundajian was inspired to create a Messiaen tribute back in 1990. (TSO)

“Messiaen loved Catholic imagery,” says Rogosin. “He was inspired by the stained glass windows in the cathedrals. And those shifting, lurching chords in his piano music, like Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, were literally translations of light shining through coloured glass.”

In many Messiaen pieces, clumsy, ominous low chords are set against flitting bird calls and swishing melodic parts; the elements swerve around each other in a kind of empyrean debate. The chords are primitive and strong, while the tunes and ornithological chirps are graceful and beautiful. These bodies of sound merge and shatter and re-emerge in new ways.

While Messiaen’s music has its own personal structure, it slyly propounds centuries of French classical tradition. The composer thought a great deal about his musical heritage, says Rogosin. “He’d regularly compare other music to French music, even if it was Schoenberg. He’d play a line from a score on the piano and say ‘That’s like Chopin,’ or ‘That’s like Couperin.’”

Here Rogosin offers a clue as to why this music is so visually evocative. “Look back to French music instruction books, going back to the time of Rameau, and you see functional harmony with an added sixth. You’re not supposed to do that; it compromises the drama. But this added sonority creates additional resonance around the harmony, a halo of sound. Overall,” concludes Rogosin, “Messiaen’s harmonies were a continuation of Debussy’s.”

“Messiaen’s taste for the exotic came from Debussy as well,” adds Toronto composer Gary Kulesha. “But Messiaen was not afraid to make an ugly sound. There are episodes of his music, sections of it, that were just hideous. Debussy never would have done that. But Messiaen understood, though, that life was now different after World War II. The existence of the atom bomb changed everything. There was no going back to the old way of enjoying yourself.”

There is a marked difference in Messiaen’s music before and after the Second World War. “We think of him as a contemporary figure,” says Kulesha, “but we don’t pay enough attention to his great, pre-war stuff.” Works like Theme and Variations sound untroubled in a way that never recurs in Messiaen’s music after his time as a prisoner of war. It was while interned at Stalag 8-A in Goerlitz that Messiaen wrote his Quartet for the End of Time, which he performed with three fellow prisoner-musicians at the camp on Jan. 15, 1941. (Messiaen later remarked that the premiere, held on a freezing cold day with thousands of guards and prisoners listening silently, was the best audience he’d ever had.)

From that point onward, Messiaen lived for the next 50 years exactly the way he wanted to: as a composer, an organist at Église de la Saint-Trinité in Paris, and as a revered music teacher whose students included Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Montreal composer Jacques Hétu studied with Messiaen in the early 1960s. “He was an intelligent, fascinating man who never taught composition, only analysis,” Hétu recalls. “We studied Wagner’s Ring, and scores of Berg’s. Never his own music. But Messiaen’s harmonies deeply affected me. The spirit of French music was there. Though my own musical structures are more classical than his, more German.” Hétu’s Organ Concerto will be performed at the New Creations Festival alongside Messiaen’s mammoth Turangalîla symphony, scored for orchestra, piano and ondes Martenot.

Peter Serkin is among the pianists performing Messiaen's work with the TSO. (TSO)

The Turangalîla, with its glacial chords and melodic rivers, is a 10-movement mapping of ecstasy. The Sanskrit-derived title implies a galactic love song, a hymn to bliss, time, movement, rhythm, life and death. Angular melodic gestures are built out of the orchestra, big and deceptively simple-sounding ones, juxtaposed against fluttering faster melodies higher up in the register. It can be a divine experience if the conductor is less concerned with evoking gravitas and allows the music’s innate celebration to transpire, its variations of colour subtle but glittering.

Messiaen had the neurological aberration known as synesthesia, and often saw sounds as colours. To bring something of this experience to the audience, the festival has engaged the services of Canadian video artist Jimmy Haze. His medium will be big screens and light.

“I’m naive about classical music,” Haze admits, “but this music has these grand sweeping moments, and there are lots of visual parallels to work with: Bass-y notes — black. High notes — white. Like that. It’s like we’re, in a visual way, adding on an extra harmony. Hopefully, people who know [Messiaen’s] music already will discover something new in it, from what it inspired in me.”

And there, though he may not realize it, Haze affirms the French aspect of Messiaen’s music, with an added sonority that heightens its power. But that unbreakable French base supports acres of foreign cultural ideas, including innumerable musical and philosophical systems from beyond the composer’s Gallic roots.

Messiaen’s outlook contained multitudes, but was capable of a profound simplicity. Music by Messiaen collects a limitless sound world without dulling the unique glow of its disparate elements. Contradictions can operate as fuel.

“Messiaen was very passionate about love, about the power to give and receive pleasure,” Oundjian says. “And yet his compositions all share a highly spiritual feel.” Perhaps that’s the key to Messiaen’s secret: combine things without forcing them to reconcile, and you get a larger, more interesting picture.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s New Creations Festival runs April 9, 12, 16 and 17 at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall.

John Keillor is a Toronto writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.