The Rest Is Noise Series: Zion Park: Messiaen, Ligeti, and the Avant-Garde of the Sixties. Alex Ross

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      Three Messiaen works from the late forties—the song cycle 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, 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.

      The jazzy tinge is felt even in the immense sacred landscape of the piano cycle 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 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, they were not persuaded of his more conservative ideas about harmony.

      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 Livre d’orgue, which contained perhaps the most intricately constructed, densely harmonized music of Messiaen’s career.

      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.

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