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“peculiar glow” or “supreme calm” of the experience of death. His own intention,

he said, was to portray death without sentiment. “Death is in store for all of us,”

he told his audience, “and I, for one, do not see anything good about the end of

our lives.” The final measures of the symphony sound like nothing so much as a

death rattle.

A strange event at the first performance underlined the symphony’s uncanny

character. During the fifth movement, Pavel Apostolov, a cultural functionary

who had once denounced Shostakovich’s “gloomy, introverted psychological

outlook,” left the hall in haste, his seat banging shut behind him. It was assumed

that he was making his displeasure known. In fact, he was having a heart

attack, and had to be carried off in a stretcher. “I didn’t want that to happen,”

Shostakovich drily commented. Apostolov was dead within a month. The

composer’s colleagues noted that the fifth movement of the symphony

contained the line “Now has struck the hour of death.”

Yet this outwardly bleak work offers a kind of hope of life after death, in the form

of an immortal solidarity between artists who transcend the stupidity of their

time. At the heart of the symphony is a setting of Küchelbecker’s poem “O

Delvig, Delvig!”:

O Delvig, Delvig! What is the reward

For noble deeds and poetry?

What solace for talent

Amid villains and fools? …

Free, joyous, and proud,

Our bond will not die!

Through joy and sorrow it will endure,

The union of those beloved by the eternal muses!

It does not take much guesswork to figure out who Delvig might be. When the

Fourteenth was performed at Aldeburgh in 1970, Donald Mitchell speculated the

movement portrayed the Britten-Shostakovich friendship, and Britten seemed to

concur. Shostakovich’s intentions are unknown, but the music affords some

clues. The principal melody is set forth by a solo cello, with another cello

moving in parallel sixths; it strongly resembles the double-stopped main theme

of Britten’s First Cello Suite.

For years, Britten and Pears had been hoping that their Russian friend would

visit them at the Red House in Aldeburgh. Shostakovich finally made the trip in

1972, even though he was in constant pain from a complex of illnesses—heart

trouble, lung cancer, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

At the Red House, he went alone into the library, where Britten had laid out the

material of a work in progress. It was a rare act of self-exposure from a

composer who kept his creative process sacrosanct. Britten waited outside—

Rosamund Strode recalled that he looked “very tense”—while Shostakovich

pored over the music. Two hours later, he emerged, wearing a cryptic smile. In

his mind, he had heard Britten’s final opera.

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In late May 1911, a few days after Gustav Mahler died in Vienna, Thomas Mann

arrived in Venice with his family. He had an assignment to write a brief essay

about Richard Wagner, who had died in the city three decades before. Staying

at the same beach hotel was a Polish boy named Wladyslaw Moes, whom his

friends called Adzio. Mann found his eyes drifting away from his writing paper

and toward the boy, and a mental obsession took hold of him. He used the

experience as the basis for

Death in Venice

Death in Venice,

Unlike his alter ego, however, Aschenbach carries his obsession to a comically

self-debasing degree, chasing Tadzio around the city and painting his own face

to look younger. Venice is in the grip of a cholera epidemic, and Aschenbach

consciously risks his health in order to remain near the boy. He dies on the

beach, in sight of his beloved.

in which, true to life, a celebrated

German author named Gustav von Aschenbach falls in love with a boy named

Tadzio while vacationing in Venice.

At first encounter, Mann’s novella would seem to be a solemn, somewhat

overwrought story about an artist’s struggle with the competing demands of the

mind and the body, of Apollonian and Dionysian principles. Aschenbach’s

physical attributes were modeled on the mighty figure of Mahler, whose

obituaries Mann had just read, and this association gives the fictional author a

high-culture veneer. But there is something faintly ridiculous about his oeuvre of

disciplined masterpieces, stocked with projects that Mann himself had

contemplated and then set aside—a book about Frederick the Great, a novel

titled Maya, an essay on “intellect and art.” Aschenbach’s blend of intellectual

grandiosity and boy worship recalls Stefan George, with his circle of

neomedieval adolescents, and also the nineteenth-century poet August von

Platen, who extolled youth in formally perfect sonnets. In the end, Death in

Venice

It was not so easy for Britten to smile at Aschenbach’s predicament, for his own

situation was perilously similar. Venice had been the scene of Britten’s

embarrassing infatuation with David Hemmings, during the rehearsals for

makes devastating fun of an irretrievably high-minded artist who is

overcome by the sexual energies that he has carefully repressed. Mann himself

escaped that trap simply by writing the story, releasing his desire in harmless

form.

The

Turn of the Screw. As work on Death in Venice progressed, life continued to

mirror art in troubling ways. Britten ended up postponing a crucial heart

operation in order to finish the opera; according to Donald Mitchell, “He talked

quite calmly and dispassionately to us about the possibility of not having the

operation, even though it had been made perfectly clear to him that following

that path could have had only one outcome—the expectation of a very short

future life.” Pears was heard to say, “Ben is writing an evil opera, and it’s killing

him.” The line might have come from Mann’s story.

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At the beginning of the opera, Aschenbach finds himself trapped inside a purely

intellectual sphere—“My mind beats on, my mind beats on, and no words

come”—and his twelve-syllable opening line is fixed symbolically on a twelve-

note row. By the end of Act I, he has brought himself to the point where he can

say “I love you” to Tadzio, although the boy is not close enough to hear him. But

his profession of love is still pent-up and strangulated; although the setting of “I

love you” ends on an E-major chord, it is threadbare tonality, with the E and the

B deep in the bass and the G-sharp nothing more than an eighth note in the

tenor part. (This is the same key through which Blake’s “invisible worm” flies in

the Serenade.)

Tadzio’s music comes from a different world. It is based on the Balinese

gamelan, which Britten had first encountered as far back as his American days,

via the composer Colin McPhee, and which he had experienced firsthand during

a visit to Bali in 1956. One gamelan scale that he notated on that trip overlaps

perfectly with Tadzio’s theme in

From here on, Aschenbach’s personality undergoes an audible

dissolution; obsessive repetitions and self-quotations echo the final madness of

Grimes. Yet when Aschenbach finally comes to terms with his condition and

fate—“O Aschenbach … Famous as a master … Self-discipline … your strength

… All folly, all pretense …”—the orchestra makes a final stab at Mahlerian

splendor.

Death in Venice. Gamelan-like sounds had

cropped up all over Britten’s music from the late fifties onward: in the ballet

score The Prince of the Pagodas, in the church parable Curlew River, in the

music for Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, significantly, in the

“pacifist aria” of Owen Wingrave,

Mann’s story makes it clear that Aschenbach’s “relationship” with Tadzio is a

fever dream from beginning to end. Dying on the beach, the distinguished

author hallucinates a moment of connection—“it was as if the pale and lovely

soul-summoner out there were smiling to him, beckoning to him”—and then

slumps over dead. The final sentence—“And later that day the world was

respectfully shocked to receive the news of his death”—shows Mann’s cold-

eyed detachment from his alter ego.

in the course of which a young man rebels

against his conservative military family. Britten’s celebrations of the exotic have

both a political dimension—the composer is reasserting his anti-establishment

stance—and also an erotic one. He would have known from McPhee, a pioneer

in gamelan-based composition, that Western visitors to Bali could purchase the

favors of local boys for a modest price. Tadzio is no Anglican innocent; he is

stereotyped as an Eastern Other, available and aware. Very likely, Aschenbach

is the virgin in this scene.

In the opera, Tadzio beckons for real, and Aschenbach’s air of fulfillment is

allowed to stretch into the final bars. There is again a touch of Mahler in the

surging of the strings. Tadzio’s theme acquires new weight and wisdom. Yet it

retains its non-Western aspect, ebbing and flowing like an Indian raga. The

music of intellect fades, and what remains, a high violin and a glockenspiel, is

the music of the Other. We are entering into Tadzio’s consciousness, seeing the

world through his eyes. With Aschenbach dead, he is no longer the object of

desire but the voice of desire. He is like Szymanowski’s King Roger, who rises

from the “abyss of loneliness, of power” to bathe his body in the sun.

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Like Aschenbach, Shostakovich and Britten died in middle age. On a last trip to

America in 1973, Shostakovich spent a day with doctors from the National

Institutes of Health, who could offer no solution to his myriad health problems.

The composer took the news calmly, almost with a shrug, according to his

American translator, Alexander Dunkel. He stopped in at a performance by

Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic and attended a postconcert

banquet, which produced an awkward moment: the “arch-apostle of

modernism,” as Shostakovich called Boulez, bent down to kiss the hand of a

composer about whom he had never had anything good to say. “I was so taken

aback,” Shostakovich reported to Glikman, “I didn’t manage to snatch it away in

time.”

A more sincere gesture of respect greeted Shostakovich when he went to the

Metropolitan Opera to hear Aida.

Somehow, Shostakovich went on writing music, even though he had trouble

moving his right hand. Strains of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata mysteriously

infiltrate his final work, the Viola Sonata, written in June and early July 1975. He

died on August 9, at the age of sixty-eight. At the premiere of the sonata Fyodor

Druzhinin responded to the audience’s ovation by holding the score over his

head, as Mravinsky had done at the premiere of the Fifth.

During the final intermission, trumpet players

in the orchestra saluted him by playing the opening phrase of the final

movement of the Fifth Symphony. Now Shostakovich was the great man in the

box, the focus of awe.

Britten died in December of the following year, at the age of sixty-three, of

complications brought on by bacterial endocarditis, the same condition that had

killed Mahler. Michael Tippett wrote a remarkably generous obituary: “I want to

say, here and now, that Britten has been for me the most purely musical person

that I have ever met and I have ever known.” Just as remarkable was the

gesture made by Queen Elizabeth II, the head of the Church of England. When

the news of Britten’s decease reached her, she sent a telegram of condolence

to Peter Pears.

ZION PARK

“I have found that

Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties

it is not to be,” Adrian Leverkühn declares, in his

bloodcurdling meditation on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “The good and the

noble, what they call the human, despite the fact that it is good and noble. What

men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and, in their moment of

fulfillment, have jubilantly proclaimed—it is not to be. It will be taken back. I will

take it back.”

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Thomas Mann’s Faustian composer is alluding to a musical code that is written

into Beethoven’s last string quartet. In the introduction to the finale, the viola

and cello play a sighing minor-key phrase to which are attached the words

“Must it be?” The violins reply, swinging into the major: “It must be!” The little

exchange was conceived as a joke, but it has a serious subtext; it expresses in

miniature the spirit of cosmic affirmation that blares forth so triumphantly in

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” Leverkühn has no interest in embracing the millions.

In the twentieth century, he might argue, affirmation has become banal. Only by

striking the dark note can he achieve true seriousness and originality.

Leverkühn’s aesthetic of denial and negation captures in somewhat

exaggerated form one of the dominant strains of twentieth-century music. The

fictional composer bears traces of Schoenberg and Webern, who professed to

have killed tonality, and perhaps of Varèse, who fancied himself a “diabolic

Parsifal.” Leverkühn also foreshadows Boulez, with his aesthetic of “still more

violent”; Cage, who said that he was “going toward violence rather than

tenderness, hell rather than heaven”; the ironic, self-flagellating, death-

obsessed Shostakovich; and even Britten, who made an arabesque of the

words “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” (When Mann heard Britten’s

Serenade, he wrote, “Adrian Leverkühn might well have been very happy to

have done some of these things.”) More than a few canonical twentieth-century

works— Salome, Erwartung, the Rite, Wozzeck, Lulu, Lady Macbeth, Peter

Grimes

After the war, composers took up what might be called catastrophe style with a

vengeance, history having justified their instinctive attraction to the dreadful and

the dire. Krzysztof Penderecki one-upped his colleagues by producing, within

one decade,

—ride fateful currents toward scenes of violent or mysterious death.

They are what Olivier Messiaen called “black masterpieces.”

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Dies Irae (Auschwitz

Oratorio). Not coincidentally, the fictional Leverkühn became something of a folk

hero among postwar composers, most of whom read Mann’s book at one time

or another. Henri Pousseur’s conceptual opera Votre Faust

The twentieth century was unquestionably a terrible time in human history—“the

century of death,” Leonard Bernstein called it—but proximity to terror does not

obligate the artist to make terror his subject. Theodor Adorno, who helped to

write the musical passages in

(1960–68) told of a

Leverkühnish composer named Henri, who, in one scene, conducts an analysis

of Webern’s Second Cantata.

Doctor Faustus,

There is much to be said for the artwork that answers horror by rejecting or

transcending it. Think of the halo-like aura of Stravinsky’s

saw modernism and kitsch as

polar opposites, yet even he admitted that modernism can bring forth its own

kind of kitsch—a melodrama of difficulty that easily degenerates into a sort of

superannuated adolescent angst. Georg Lukács, in a critique of Adorno,

remarked that the philosopher resided in a “Grand Hotel Abyss,” from whose

aestheticized security he gazed on the agony of man as if it were an Alpine

vista.

Symphony of Psalms,

or of the weightless profundity of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, or of the sacred

song of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” As the fearful fifties gave way to the

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antic sixties, many European composers looked for a way out of the labyrinth of

progress. One was György Ligeti, who witnessed the century of death at close

range, having lost most of his family in Hitler’s death camps and then suffered

further under Stalinism in his native Hungary. Ligeti nonetheless found it in him

to write music of luminosity and wit.

Messiaen, the composer of the Quartet for the End of Time, can be defined as

the anti-Leverkühn. In the latter part of his career he wrote works titled The

Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, From the Canyons to the Stars …,

and Saint Francis of Assisi,

each of which ends with an explosive affirmation of

a major key, outdoing even the coda of Beethoven’s Ninth in unrestrained

jubilation. Yet it is not harmony that Beethoven would readily have recognized.

Messiaen’s triads are suffused with surrealist, futurist energy. They are

evidence of a deep investigation into sound itself, one that doubled as a quest

for an all-encompassing language of the spirit. The composer once compared

the Resurrection of Christ to an atomic detonation, and Christ’s image on the

Shroud of Turin to the human shadows that were supposedly seared on walls in

Hiroshima. With utmost vehemence, he says, “It must be.”

Saints are rarely as interesting as devils, and Messiaen, who was born in

Avignon in 1908, led a fairly uninteresting life. His biography contains one very

sad story—his first wife, the poet Claire Delbos, suffered from cerebral atrophy

and had to be committed to a nursing home—and one intensely dramatic

episode, the writing of the

Messiaen

Quartet for the End of Time at Stalag VIII A.

Otherwise, Messiaen kept to a steady routine—composing music, teaching

classes at the Paris Conservatory, traveling to attend performances of his

works, and, every Sunday, playing organ at the Church of the Holy Trinity in

Paris. He held the latter job from 1931 until his death in 1992, playing Messiah

Fellow composers would sometimes drop by Holy Trinity to find out what kind of

music Messiaen played for the parishioners on an ordinary Sunday. Aaron

Copland wrote in his 1949 diary: “Visited Messiaen in the organ loft at the

Trinité. Heard him improvise at noon. Everything from the ‘devil’ in the bass, to

Radio City Music Hall harmonies in the treble. Why the Church allows it during

service is a mystery.”

at Christmastime and fulfilling other prosaic duties.

For the last three decades of his life, Messiaen lived with his second wife, the

pianist Yvonne Loriod, in an old building in the eighteenth arrondissement of

Paris, in the area of Montmartre. As Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone report in their

biography of the composer, the accommodations were fairly spartan, with one

communal bathroom on each floor of the building. The main living quarters were

decorated in devout Catholic style, plastic crucifixes all around. When the

composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen called on Messiaen, he looked to

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see what books and records were on the shelves, but could find only a copy of

the Bible and various recordings of Messiaen’s own works.

No one reported anything like a seamy underside to the composer’s personality.

The conductor Kent Nagano, who collaborated closely with Messiaen in his last

years, was once pressed to tell some unflattering or otherwise revealing

anecdote about his mentor, and all he had to offer was a story about how

Messiaen and Loriod had once devoured an entire pear tart at one sitting.

God spoke to Messiaen through sounding tones, whether the mighty roar of the

orchestra or the church organ, the clattering of exotic percussion, or the songs

of birds. The Lord could manifest Himself in consonance and dissonance alike,

though consonance was His true realm.

“The tonic triad, the dominant, the ninth chord are not theories but phenomena

that manifest themselves spontaneously around us and that we cannot deny,”

Messiaen once said. “Resonance will exist as long as we have ears to listen to

what surrounds us.” He had in mind the fact that the major triad, on which

tonality rests, is related to the lower intervals of the natural harmonic series,

those that arise from any resonating string. Schoenberg, in his Harmonielehre,

In his 1944 textbook

proposed to set aside consonances and to derive new chords from what he

called “remote overtones.” Messiaen believed that the ear could, and should,

take in tones both near and remote—both the reassuring resonances of

fundamental intervals and the obscure relationships among the higher tones.

Technique of My Musical Language, Messiaen notated

what he called “the chord of resonance,” in which eight distinct pitches from the

natural harmonic series sound together (C, E, G, B-flat, D, F-sharp, G-sharp, B-

natural). Strongly dissonant in effect, it still has the C-major triad at its base—a

“natural” foundation for an abstract form. Mahler placed a chord very much like

this one at the roaring climaxes of his unfinished Tenth Symphony.

Technique of My Musical Language also set out a system of “modes of limited

transpositions,” analogous to the modes of ancient Greek music (Aeolian,

Dorian, Lydian, and so on). They are based on the composer’s study of early-

twentieth-century music, especially Stravinsky and Bartók, as well as of folk and

traditional music from Bali, India, Japan, and the Andes. The first mode is

Debussy’s whole-tone scale. Mode 2, made up of alternating semitones and

whole tones, is the octatonic scale, on which Stravinsky built the Rite. Mode 3,

in which one whole tone alternates with two semitones, slightly resembles the

scale commonly associated with the blues. Mode 6 happens to be the same as

the slithering clarinet scale that begins Salome. The three remaining modes are

more eccentric scales of Messiaen’s devising. What they have in common is

that they are symmetrical in shape, dividing neatly along the fault line of the

tritone. The diabolus in musica sounded divine to Messiaen’s ears; it was the

axis around which his harmony rotated. Messiaen’s modes generate a fabulous

profusion of major and minor triads, as Paul Griffiths points out in his study of

the composer. But they do not—indeed, cannot—produce standard chord

progressions of the kind that are found in hymnals. Instead, the harmony skids

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from one triad to another, following the sinuous contours of the modes.

Messiaen called these effects “rainbows of chords.”

The Technique might be read as Messiaen’s answer to—and refutation of—

Harmonielehre. Schoenberg, too, considered his harmonies emblems of the

sacred; the wordless six-note chords in Moses und Aron,

Messiaen rejected the stereotype of French music as a poised, graceful, self-

limiting art. From an early age, he favored the lavish, the opulent, the

unashamedly grand. His 1932 organ piece

mimicking the voice of

the burning bush, tremble with divine force. The difference between

Schoenberg and Messiaen is ultimately theological. Schoenberg believed that

God was unrepresentable, that His presence could be indicated only by placing

a taboo on the familiar. Messiaen felt that God was present everywhere and in

all sound. Therefore, there was no need for the new to supersede the old: God’s

creation gathered magnificence as it opened up in space and time.

Apparition of the Eternal Church

While Messiaen took on a markedly more aggressive, even at times abrasive

voice in the

intersperses velvety modal harmonies with pillarlike open fifths that the

composer called “simple, almost brutal.” There is an atmosphere of gradual

ritual, incense, rustling robes, flickering candles in a shadowy space—a church

of the mind as real as the one in which the listener is presumed to be seated.

Quartet for the End of Time, he did not lose his flair for the simple,

astounding gesture. The two most excruciatingly beautiful movements of the

(Quartet—the two “Louanges,” or hymns of praise, to the eternity and

immortality of Jesus—are in fact adaptations of pieces that he had written

before the war. The first “Louange” is based on Fêtes des belles eaux, or

Festival of Beautiful Waters, a work for six ondes Martenot (an early electronic

instrument akin to the Theremin). The second comes from the 1930 organ piece

Diptyque. Curiously, Fêtes was written in 1937 for a “festival of sound, water,

and light” along the banks of the river Seine. Women in white dresses played

Messiaen’s music in conjunction with fireworks and fountains; the formal

divisions of the piece were dictated by the requirements of the engineers. The

first long, slow, searching phrase, which the cello plays in the Quartet,

To know that such a spectacle lies behind the “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus” is

to appreciate the many-sidedness of the composer’s aesthetic, his ability to

move in a flash from the mundane to the sublime. Messiaen expects paradise

not just in a single awesome hereafter but also in the scattered ecstasies of

daily life. In the end, his apocalypse—“There shall be time no longer”—may

have nothing to do with the catastrophic circumstances under which it was

conceived. Instead, it may describe the death and rebirth of a single soul in the

grip of exceptional emotion.

originally

accompanied a tall jet of water, which, Messiaen said, was a “symbol of Grace

and Eternity.”

Messiaen’s early sacred pieces, the Quartet included, are like Christian

surrealism. They have something in common with those later paintings of

Salvador Dalí in which Christ floats above the earth like an astronaut or

superhero. That image applies especially to the composer’s next big works,

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Visions of the Amen for two pianos and Three Small Liturgies of the Divine

Presence for chorus and instrumental ensemble, both written while the

Germans still occupied France. The Visions indulges in what Paul Griffiths calls

“ever splashier paroxysms of cheapened harmony … a further stage in

Messiaen’s abjuring of a sophisticated response to what is musically

embarrassing.” The text of the Liturgies scandalously intermingles sacred and

erotic phrases, some culled from religious literature and some coined by the

composer, all in the form of a love letter to God (“You are so complex and so

simple, you are infinitely simple”). The harmony is plush and the orchestration

picturesque, reminiscent in passing moments of the swashbuckling film scores

of Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. Wailing in the middle of the

ensemble are the sci-fi-ish tones of the ondes Martenot. Some critics balked—

one compared the Three Small Liturgies

The overflowing richness of the

to “an angel wearing lipstick”—but

audiences cheered. Messiaen had the ability, Virgil Thomson noted, “to open up

the heavens and to bring down the house.”

Liturgies and other works of this period belies

the fact that Messiaen was at this time facing the greatest personal crisis of his

life. His wife had suffered a sharp decline shortly before the end of the war, and

after an unsuccessful operation she lost her memory. “She had to be put in a

home, where everything was done for her,” Yvonne Loriod told Peter Hill. “From

that time Messiaen brought up his young son by himself. He did all the

housework and all the cooking and he would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning

to make the coffee and get breakfast for his son before he went to school.” As

Delbos’s mind failed, Messiaen came to rely increasingly on Loriod, who was

attending his classes. After a respectable interval, the two fell in love. Loriod

played alongside the composer in the premiere of Visions of the Amen,

Three Messiaen works from the late forties—the song cycle

her

strong personality mirrored in the fresh extravagance of the music.

Harawi, the

Turangalîla Symphony, and the choral piece Cinq rechants—fall into what

Griffiths calls the “Tristan trilogy.” All address in one way or another the story of

Wagner’s doomed lovers, and Tristan und Isolde is directly cited along the way.

At the same time, there are echoes of Indian talas, Balinese percussion

ostinatos, and Peruvian folk song. In passing moments the harmony turns

almost “pop”; Messiaen liked to sweeten his triads with added sixths, garnishing

A major with an F-sharp, for example. At the end of the second “Chant d’amour”

movement of Turangalîla,

The jazzy tinge is felt even in the immense sacred landscape of the piano cycle

that chord is played as a slow, slinky arpeggio, in the

manner of a cocktail-lounge pianist. There might as well be a chanteuse in a

tight dress leaning to the side.

Twenty Aspects of the Infant Jesus, written in 1944; one four-note motif in the

tenth piece, depicting the “spirit of joy,” sounds suspiciously like the jaunty four-

note refrain of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” while the fifteenth, “The Kiss of the

Infant Jesus,” vaguely recalls the same composer’s “Someone to Watch Over

Me.” Wagner, in Tristan and Parsifal, saw a fatal contradiction between body

and spirit; Tristan and Isolde could complete their passion only in self-

destruction, the Knights of the Grail could preserve themselves only by

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renouncing sex. Messiaen perceived no contradiction, indeed no difference,

between the love of man and the love of God.

With the coming of the fifties, Messiaen went through his own “Cold War

crisis”—a spell of experiment and self-doubt akin to Stravinsky’s modernist

maneuverings in the same period. Messiaen’s faith in an “infinitely simple” God,

as expressed in infinitely simple chords, wavered. “We are all in a profound

night,” he told his Paris Conservatory class one day, “and I don’t know where I

am going; I’m as lost as you.”

Messiaen served as a mentor to many of the chief innovators of the postwar

era. Boulez, Xenakis, and Stockhausen all studied with him at one time or

another. Even before the end of the war, Messiaen’s class had acquired the

reputation of being a nest of radicalism. While the young revolutionaries learned

much from their teacher’s interest in non-Western music, his cultivation of new

rhythmic processes, his early interest in electronic instruments, and, above all,

his proto-serialist Scale of Durations and Dynamics,

Boulez’s high-handed, scornful treatment of Messiaen led to a situation in which

the roles were almost reversed; for a while, it seemed as though Boulez were

the master and Messiaen the disciple. “You know that Messiaen is developing

wonderfully,” Boulez wrote to Cage in 1951, in a schoolmasterish tone. He went

on: “He has just written some organ pieces on 64 durations, with registration

modes.” These were part of the organ cycle

they were not persuaded of

his more conservative ideas about harmony.

Livre d’orgue,

From 1949 on, Messiaen made appearances at Darmstadt, where he proved as

adept as any of his colleagues at filling up blackboards with quasi-scientific

diagrams. But he soon took off on an unexpected tangent. One day in 1953,

Antoine Goléa related, he showed his students a book containing colorful

illustrations of birds. “Birds are my first and greatest masters,” he announced.

He then exhibited notebooks where he had transcribed birdsong heard on

expeditions to different parts of France. “Birds always sing in a given mode,” he

said. “They do not know the interval of the octave. Their melodic lines often

recall the inflections of Gregorian chant. Their rhythms are infinitely complex

and infinitely varied, yet always perfectly precise and perfectly clear.”

Messiaen’s students must have wondered whether he had lost his mind, or,

alternatively, whether he was satirizing the Darmstadt mentality.

which contained

perhaps the most intricately constructed, densely harmonized music of

Messiaen’s career.

But Messiaen was very much in earnest. He had first made deliberate use of

birdsong in the Quartet for the End of Time, where the voices of the blackbird

and the nightingale carry the solo clarinet movement “Abyss of the Birds.” For

the remainder of the fifties, Messiaen modeled nearly all of his instrumental

lines on the contours of bird melodies, and they would reign over his music to

the end. The first sustained demonstration came in Réveil des oiseaux, or

Awakening of the Birds, for piano and ensemble, first performed at the

Donaueschingen Festival in 1953. Dozens of birds are heard singing in turn,

and in the “dawn chorus” twenty-one of them gather together in a charming