This scene really took place many years ago at the Berliner Ensemble during a performance of George Tabori’s Goldberg Variations. Olivier Messiaen was completely free from such fears of loss. He was deeply rooted in his faith – hardly by chance, this “musician of the invisible and unheard” (Jean-Rodolphe Kars) played the organ for 61 years at the Église de la Trinité in Paris, the place of his spiritual and musical grounding. God, as abstract as the figure may seem, was always a kind of conversation partner for Messiaen. With Him, he was able to “discuss” the deeper meaning of the triad of theological virtues: faith, hope, and love; this is evident in countless of his compositions. In some of them, one can even almost see the glow of the sky, the divine power. The seriousness with which the French composer approached this, how much he was tracing the mystery of spiritual life, is exemplified by a passage from his (only) opera St. François d’Assise, where he gives his title character the words of Thomas Aquinas just as he prepares to confront the highest judge. These words can be understood as an explicit confession of faith by composer Olivier Messiaen: “Lord! Lord! Music and poetry have brought me near to You: through the image, through the symbol, and through the absence of truth (…) Lord! Lord! Enlighten me with Your presence! Redeem me, make me drunk, blind me forever with Your abundance of truth.”

This sentence can be understood as an imperative credo for Messiaen’s composing. And while this may seem nostalgic in times of agnosticism, atheism, and anthropocentrism, one finds hardly any signs of wear in his oeuvre: the aura and charisma of the time remain unbroken. To experience this, one only needs to listen to a work like Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus for piano. Messiaen composed this cycle towards the end of World War II also as a pamphlet against an increasingly godless world. Two years later, he tried to classify his uniquely personal poetics: “I have tried to be a Christian musician and to sing my faith, without ever succeeding (…) I really don’t know if I have an ‘aesthetic’, but I can say that my preference is for music that is shimmering, refined, even voluptuous, but of course not sensual. Music that sings. Music that is supposed to be new blood, a symbolic gesture, an unknown fragrance, a bird without sleep. Church-window music, a circle of complementary colors. Music that expresses the end of time, omnipresence, transfigured bodies, and divine and supernatural mysteries. A ‘theological rainbow’.” If one seeks a musician capable of conjuring this “theological rainbow” onto the celestial vault, one inevitably comes to Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Already one of the great pianists of our time, Aimard has particularly earned high praise as an interpreter of Messiaen’s piano works (with whom he was friends, and who studied at the Conservatoire supérieur in Paris with his second wife, Yvonne Loriod). No other pianist could capture the idiomatic language of Messiaen’s music in all its poetic and spiritual variety as Aimard did. Yet this artist does not appear before us as a “teacher” when he performs works like Vingt Regards, Catalogue d’oiseaux, or Quatre Etudes de rythme. His great, almost solitary art lies in his ability to combine intellectual detachment with deep emotion, all while balancing on the narrow line between objectifying distance and subjective familiarity. And he was also able to transfer all of this to his students, who are gradually following in his footsteps.

A memory of deeply sorrowful and highly religious nature is evoked by the work Olivier Messiaen essentially composed during the winter months of 1940/41 in the “Stalag VIII A” in Görlitz: Quatuor pour la fin du temps. The pain of daily life here also merged with a “higher” idea, the biblical revelation of John. The work is dedicated to the angel who announces the end of time in this apocalypse. The unusual instrumentation was due to the circumstances: alongside Messiaen, who played the piano during the premiere in early April 1941, were clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Etienne Pasquier, all inmates of the National Socialist prison camp. Quatuor pour la fin du temps reflects their reality: it is a work of day, night, and nightmares, in which its creator, by his own account, “discovered the rainbow of the angel” and “a strange circle of colors”; yet, despite all the sadness, it looks far upward: to where the angelic voices Messiaen believed in all his life can be heard. In Quatuor pour la fin du temps, the grammar of creation and eternal light emerges – as a parable, as an introspective, ecstatic sound event, and, not least, as proof that Nietzsche might have been wrong when he, albeit reluctantly, proclaimed the death of God.

Photo: Marco Borggreve