There’s Only One Thing Which Is True

There’s an irony in Messiaen. He’s among the most accomplished modernist composers, yet he is the antithesis of the modern mentality. There’s no Dostoevsky in him, no Nietzschean “where is God?” He was a devout Catholic without the slightest existential doubt, or any doubt about God’s blessings, and maybe the rest of us would doubt the cosmos less if we’d been handed his talents. “I am convinced that joy exists,” he once said. “I am convinced that the invisible exists more than the visible.” You’d expect that kind of certainty to produce comfortable music. Messiaen’s is anything but, and yet it’s never lost. Where other modernists were cutting themselves loose, he was anchored in nature.

Mozart is supposed to have said that Handel, when he chooses, strikes like a thunderbolt. Messiaen writes like that, with the decisiveness of a man living in a wholly sacred universe.

The conviction goes all the way down to the physics. In a 1985 film for The South Bank Show, he waves away the categories musicians argue over (tonality, modality, serialism) and says: “There’s only one thing which is true, and that is natural resonance.” The film then turns to George Benjamin, Messiaen’s former student, at the piano. Benjamin plays a low C and shows what’s hiding inside it: a series of fainter notes, the harmonics, the first five of which spell out the major chord at the root of Western music. Debussy, Ravel and Scriabin, he explains, added higher harmonics for richness. Messiaen went higher still. One of his favorite sonorities is the first twelve harmonics “crushed into a chord,” which gives his sound “a stained glass quality, a brilliance, a luminosity.” Next to a Debussy chord, a Messiaen chord has more torque. It carries so much energy and intention that at times it’s almost more than a casual listener can handle.

This is also why he’s a modernist of an unusual kind. Modernism was, in large part, a deliberate effort to detach one’s work from the trunk of tradition. Where Messiaen’s student Boulez wanted the past cut away, Messiaen borrowed from it: from his teacher Dukas, and above all from Debussy, whose Pelléas et Mélisande he called the most decisive influence of his life. And he went looking for more. He was drawn to the gamelan, he deployed serial techniques, but in his mind it all came down to color. Not a painter’s color, though. He saw his colors, he said, “not with my eyes, but inside my head.” Nature is irregular, and so are his rhythms. And yet, for all the difficulty, you always know where you are in a Messiaen piece structurally.

He also strikes me as an unusual man. Pious, married, by all appearances orderly, he was a passionate ornithologist who felt compelled to bring birdsong into the concert hall. Not birdsong as a mood, either, but particular birds, transcribed in the field, species by species, in pieces like the thirteen-part Catalogue d’oiseaux. His teacher Dukas had told his students to “listen to the birds.” Messiaen took the advice further than anyone; the birds, he said, were probably “the greatest musicians existing on our planet.” By all accounts he was a good man, and his students, a list that runs from Boulez and Stockhausen to Xenakis and George Benjamin, held him in high regard.

For Messiaen, music was close to a sacrament, with a spiritual reality of its own. In one interview he describes the long resonance of a gong as the mystical experience we’re after when we listen to music, a kind of dazzlement. He admired the Japanese because, though they weren’t Christian, they had what he called “an innate sense of the sacred”: as I understood him, a capacity to sit still and attend to it, to be tuned in. Sound can be that fascinating. Take away the parts of music we identify with, and the mystical experience is still there, at the level of the sound itself, which brings us back to natural resonance, the one thing he thought was true.

Turangalîla was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, who told Messiaen to write for as many instruments as he wanted, for as long as he wanted. Messiaen spent the summer of 1949 teaching at Tanglewood, and that December Leonard Bernstein conducted the premiere with the Boston Symphony. It’s the middle work of a trilogy on the Tristan legend, and it’s about human love rather than divine love. For a man so focused on the divine, that’s remarkable.

Messiaen was married to the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, who spent her last years in institutions and died in 1959. His faith ruled out leaving her. The piano part was written for Yvonne Loriod, his young student, who played the premiere; they married in 1961. The man who never doubted God was writing about earthly love for a woman he couldn’t have, and you can hear the struggle in it.

The second movement alternates a fast, leaping theme led by the trumpets with a soft one for strings and ondes Martenot. It goes back and forth between a kind of giddiness and a relaxation into beauty. The soft theme sits on a static, gorgeous chord, a canopy. With nothing else moving, the melody is the only motion in the room, and every time it strays from the harmony beneath, it grips you. In, say, a fugue, the same detour would be one thread in a busy texture; here it’s the whole event. And the piano keeps breaking in as an agent of chaos.

In the fourth, the romance is set against a jaunty rhythmic figure that could come from a Fred Astaire movie. Time freezes, the melody comes in, and then the figure returns. Where you expect one more melt into the romance, the piano takes a cadenza instead. Messiaen doesn’t develop material so much as set fragments side by side, like shards in a mosaic or a stained-glass window. Boulez said he practiced juxtaposition rather than composition.

The fifth is meant to be joy, and it is, unequivocally. But it doesn’t flow the way Holst’s Jupiter does. It isn’t joy experienced so much as joy being born. It comes out in clumps, pushed forward rather than flowing forward, joy breaking out of a husk of agony.

The sixth, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (the garden of love’s sleep), gives the love theme its first full statement, on strings and ondes, and it’s sublime. Above it the piano chatters in birdsong, and to my ear it’s sabotaging that gorgeous theme underneath; the theme rarely reaches the finish line. But the playfulness of the sabotage makes it, paradoxically, more romantic. The music keeps a certain detachment, and the detachment builds a palpable charge.

The eighth, Développement de l’amour, is developmental indeed, and it’s ecstatic. The love theme comes in the brass, and it sounds like a summit; this movement could have ended the piece. Messiaen heard it differently. For the lovers, he said, it’s terrible: they’re trapped in a passion growing to the infinite. I hear the ecstasy and the entrapment together, as the fifth movement holds joy and agony.

The finale is pure confidence, with great writing for percussion and the ondes sliding like someone stepping on a banana peel. It opens with a fast version of the love theme. Toward the end of the movement the theme slows, and the excitement turns momentarily to something like terror. Burke thought terror “the ruling principle of the sublime,” and Georges Bataille wrote at length about how near ecstasy lies to agony. In Turangalîla, terror and love turn out to be inseparable from the ecstasy. Then the love theme returns at its true tempo, in the whole orchestra, and it feels natural in that new world. It ends on an enormous F-sharp major chord and the tam-tam.

You can hear the conviction and the struggle at once, and the tension between them is what makes the piece so moving.

The love theme belongs to no single instrument. The strings carry it, and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, sings inside that texture with them. Elsewhere, as in the third movement, the ondes swoops and slides to throw you off balance. It does special effects, but it isn’t confined to them. An electronic instrument carries the most human melody in the work.

There’s tension all through the score: between Messiaen’s piety and his music’s modernity, and between the symphony orchestra, about as inherited as institutions get in Western music, and a newly invented electronic instrument sitting inside it. Turangalîla is a kind of Janus: a single figure on the branch of tradition, facing both ways.

I find it compelling how often the seemingly paradoxical pull between perennialism and Prometheanism lives in a single mind, and how it can work there as a generative dialectic rather than a deadlock.

Plenty of composers can use novelty as ornament. Few can work it into the Western high-art tradition so that it carries an argument. In Turangalîla the ondes deepens the love theme from inside the strings and, elsewhere, unsettles the ground under your feet. Argument, not ornament. It points to the path forward, which is always the same path, though always different.