Wash out your ears

In March​ 1945, the classical music world in Paris split into warring camps after the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s two-hour devotional suite for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. The performer was Yvonne Loriod, a young pianist who would later become Messiaen’s wife. Reciting texts infused with Catholic mysticism after each movement, Messiaen struck the critic Bernard Gavoty as a ‘lunatic curator of a vanished museum’; Poulenc described his followers, the so-called messiaeniques, as a ‘fanatical sect’ speaking ‘an impossible literary jargon’. In a letter to Stravinsky, the publisher Roland Bourdariat wrote:

Musicians here are divided into partisans for and against Messiaen and the chapel of ridiculous disciples that surrounds him, hypnotised by him, and, in which, like the Father Divine, he preaches a pseudo-mystical jargon. The religiosity of his sermons cannot hide an unbelievably vulgar sensibility, as well as false and absurd doctrines.

The ‘cas Messiaen’ was the most violent controversy to erupt in French music since the premiere of The Rite of Spring. While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste. Morton Feldman compared his ‘crazy colours’ to ‘Disneyland’. Richard Taruskin, an admirer, nonetheless derided his Turangalîla-Symphonie (1949) as a work of ‘sacroporn’, music which ‘perpetually skirts the fringe of kitsch’.

The reasons Messiaen became such a ‘case’ were identified early on by Virgil Thomson. Messiaen was, Thomson pointed out, ‘a fully-fledged romantic’ in a post-Romantic age, when the lines between advanced composition and scientific research were becoming increasingly porous, particularly in academic music departments. His music is extravagant, wild, sometimes to the point of recklessness; Taruskin called it ‘maximalist transcendentalist’, in the mode of Scriabin. For all its modernist dissonances, it deploys traditional tonality to dramatic, even bombastic effect. While many of his students enlisted in the revolution of ‘total serialism’, repudiating diatonic music, Messiaen saw no reason to limit his options in the name of musical progress. He didn’t believe in progress; he believed in God. ‘Although he was certainly a towering figure in the history of 20th-century music, he was not of it,’ Taruskin wrote. ‘In a peculiar way the 20th century did not exist for him.’

Yet Messiaen was hardly orthodox in his Catholicism, which made him nearly as much of an iconoclast in the Church as he was in the church of modernism. He identified with a mystical and rebellious Catholic current which rejected ‘mechanical’ forms of worship and embraced artistic innovation as a near sacred duty. Messiaen’s free-spirited outlook, as much as his enchanted modernism, made him a magnet for adventurous young composers, who saw him as the Sartre of the music world, a symbol of artistic authenticity. He dressed the part at the Paris Conservatoire, where he gave seminars in colourful shirts with open collars and encouraged his students’ most radical ideas. ‘His personality resembles some great baroque building,’ Pierre Boulez wrote. ‘Beneath the very real complexities of his intellectual world he has remained simple and capable of wonder – and that alone is enough to win our hearts.’

There was little room for doubt in Messiaen’s spiritual convictions, and his faith – ‘the literalness of his religious imagination’, in Thomson’s words – has often made more secular listeners uneasy. Yet Messiaen never sought to impose his beliefs on listeners. ‘My work is addressed to all who believe – and also to all others,’ he said. It inspires awe and wonder rather than piety, and it is often playful. With the exception of his late opera Saint François d’Assise, there’s nothing obviously Catholic about it, if you leave aside the texts he wrote to accompany it; nor does it have any of the ostentatious solemnity one finds in the liturgical minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. The Messiaen ‘cathedral’, if not exactly ecumenical, is vast, with plenty of room in the nave – as Edward Said noted – for ‘staunch secularists like myself’. The sixth movement of Vingt Regards, a turbulent fugue, is called ‘Par Lui tout a été fait’, and perhaps it was because ‘He’ had had a hand in everything that Messiaen felt free to avail himself of anything he found useful for his purposes: ancient Hindu rhythms; non-Western percussion instruments, which he considered to have ‘magical’ properties; the ondes Martenot, a theremin-like instrument; and, above all, the birdsong he transcribed on walks in the woods. This collage of elements lent itself to an expansive, often lavish orchestration, but it also left him open to the charge of an all too permissive eclecticism. For some of his students, notably Boulez, the problem wasn’t that Messiaen was too rigorous a Catholic, but that he was an insufficiently rigorous modernist.

Messiaen was scarcely undiscriminating, however. About German music, for instance, he was notably ambivalent. He admired Wagner and paid homage to Tristan und Isolde in a trilogy of works culminating in the Turangalîla. But he had little interest in the linear movement and development at the heart of the German tradition; he was drawn to stasis, repetition and ritual. Although he flirted with serialism in the late 1940s, the attempt to create a new system of atonal composition based on tone rows struck him as a form of vanity that ‘sprang from a human brain’, as he explained in a book of interviews with Claude Samuel. (‘What endured and what still endures,’ he insisted, ‘is natural resonance.’) He preferred Stravinsky’s syncopated recasting of Russian folk music to the ‘insidiously grey’ music of Schoenberg. Messiaen himself wrote some of the most terrifying music of the 20th century – notably the apocalyptic ‘Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets’ in the Quartet for the End of Time – but what he wanted to communicate was ‘light, joy and glory’.

As Messiaen saw it, the real revolution in 20th-century music had been launched not by an Austrian Jew but by a Frenchman, Claude Debussy, who ‘introduced the idea of haziness, not only in harmony and melody, but above all in rhythm and in the succession of timbres’. In Messiaen’s early work, particularly in dreamy song cycles such as Poèmes pour Mi, dedicated to his first wife, the composer and violinist Claire Delbos, there are glimmering passages worthy of Debussy. But if Debussy’s more impressionistic compositions are evocative of shadows, water and sunken cathedrals, Messiaen’s music conjures intense light, strong colours and hard edges. His aim, really, is to render visible (or audible) what is invisible, and to create a feeling of what he described as ‘dazzlement’, éblouissement, a ‘theological rainbow’ he compared to stained glass in a church. As Taruskin wrote, ‘there is something genuinely scary about Messiaen at full strength.’ Messiaen would have agreed. ‘My music is not nice,’ he said in a BBC documentary in 1985. ‘I am convinced that joy exists. I am convinced that the invisible exists more than the visible.’

That conviction was often expressed in an old-fashioned triumphalism. Works like Vingt Regards and Turangalîla end with resounding chords of affirmation in F sharp major (a key he associated with the face of God), leaving no doubt as to whom praise is due. The power of faith expressed in Messiaen’s music, orchestrated with startling contrasts of timbre, incantatory repetitions (he called these motifs ‘rhythmic characters’) and surprising flashes of whimsy, is so overwhelming that a non-believer might just be temporarily won over to the Lord’s message. That wasn’t Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers alike to try to feel (not just to know intellectually) what the possibility for human transformation might be’.

Sholl’s book often reads like the life of a saint – as Messiaen, who cultivated the image of being a humble servant of God, would have wished. He hints at Messiaen’s ‘secret’ life, but never divulges what that might have been. He alludes to his wartime compromises and postwar silences, particularly with respect to the persecution of his Jewish colleagues at the Conservatoire, but he’s quick to explain them away, and has little to say about Messiaen’s antisemitism. (‘What I’m going to say is horrible,’ Messiaen told Samuel, ‘but by sentencing Christ to death, the Jews committed deicide.’) For all his diligence in describing Messiaen’s search for transcendence, Sholl fails to capture the earth-bound composer, who was witty and often cutting in his appraisal of his peers. ‘Nihilism is perhaps a beneficial worldview for John Cage,’ he told Samuel, ‘but if I had adopted this theory at the conservatory, my pupils would all have committed suicide; my class would have been strewn with dead bodies!’ Cage was not so much a composer as a ‘destroyer’, and if composers were tasked with any duty, it was to create.

What Sholl offers is a portrait of an artist who was both a fervent believer and a rebel, an avant-garde composer whose piety underwrote some of the most radical adventures in 20th-century sound. He understands that Messiaen experienced his religious commitments and unruly creative energies not as a clash but as a divinely ordained convergence. What bound them was love – for God, for birds and nature, and for Loriod, his wife and musical collaborator.

Olivier​ Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a poet. He spent his early years in Grenoble before moving with his family to Paris in 1919, when his father, Pierre, was hired to run a lycée in the Marais. The parents’ marriage was volatile. When Pierre was mobilised during the First World War, Cécile Sauvage, Messiaen’s mother, threw herself into an affair with her editor, Jean de Gourmont, leaving Olivier and his younger brother, Alain, to be raised by their maternal grandmother. After de Gourmont left her for another woman, Cécile retreated to a room that, in Pierre’s words, ‘was never aired, never lit, never cleaned’. Until her death from tuberculosis in 1927, she devoted herself to writing erotic, mystical poems about her lover, who would die six months after her.

Olivier described his childhood as ‘an enchanted world’, and his mother as a saint. In her L’Âme en bourgeon (‘The burgeoning soul’), a cycle of twenty poems addressed to an unborn male child written while she was pregnant, Messiaen saw an act of prophecy or, as he put it, of ‘musical expectancy’. Cécile had written of suffering from ‘an unknown, distant music’, and of a ‘window’ where ‘all the Orient sings in my being’ – a premonition, he claimed, of his career in music, even of his interest in Asia. His mother was absent for much of his childhood, but she ‘never doubted for an instant what I would be: a boy, an artist and a musician’. She was ‘the only influence in my life, and it happened before I was born’.

Premonition or not, that unknown, distant music made itself heard when Messiaen was a small child. By the age of seven he was reading the score of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice; at ten he was on to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. He taught himself to play the piano, the foundation of almost all his concert pieces. ‘I play piano as though I were conducting an orchestra,’ he wrote, ‘which is to say by turning the piano into a mock orchestra with a large palette of timbres.’ He discovered that when he heard a chord, he would see ‘corresponding colours. Not with my eyes, but inside my head.’

Shortly after moving to Paris, Messiaen enrolled at the Conservatoire. Marcel Dupré, the ‘Liszt of the organ’, taught him improvisation, Carnatic modes and ancient Greek rhythms. The composer Paul Dukas sparked his interest in birdsong by encouraging him to listen to birds, ‘the great masters’. But, as Sholl argues, his most important mentor was Charles Tournemire, an organist at the Sainte-Clotilde in the 7th arrondissement, who called him a ‘young and magnificent Christian Artist’, a ‘musician of the future’. Inspired by the ‘apocalyptic mysticism of Tournemire’s music’, Messiaen wanted to evoke the ‘unheard violence’, the ‘shock of lights and colours’, of the Psalms. In his early works for the organ, written in the 1920s and early 1930s, he distinguished himself as a ‘sound-colour musician’, driven less by ‘structural’ than by ‘acoustic’ logic, as the composer Michaël Levinas, a former student, put it.

Messiaen’s aesthetic iconoclasm was fuelled by his reading of thinkers the Church frowned on, such as Jacques Maritain, a philosopher and convert to Catholicism who emphasised the importance of subjectivity, individual moral action and freedom. As Sholl points out, a celebration of those values – and ‘a critique of prevailing conservative Church doctrines’ – could be heard in Messiaen’s improvisations at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, where with Tournemire’s support he became chief organist in 1931. Although Messiaen steered clear of ‘chords that are too anarchic’, he admitted to playing in ‘an avant-garde style … that would have frightened Schoenberg himself’. The French-American novelist Julien Green rhapsodised about the ‘monstrous beauty’ of Messiaen’s organ, ‘opening up immense caverns where rivers flow’. Aaron Copland recorded a different impression in his diary after hearing Messiaen at the Sainte-Trinité: ‘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.’ In fact, Messiaen was forced to draft an apology for having shocked the ‘old ladies’ attending church. But ‘to those who bellow about my so-called dissonances’, he said, ‘I tell them quite simply that I am not dissonant: let them wash out their ears.’

Messiaen’s radicalism – and his insistence that his experiments were in the service of higher spiritual ends – stirred resentment among his elders, eventually including Tournemire. When Messiaen dedicated the original copy of Apparition de l’Église eternelle (1932) to his mentor, Tournemire had already secretly turned against him, crossing out the one dedication he’d made to his student – driven, it seems, by a simultaneous loathing of his mysticism and envy of his gifts. Messiaen, he wrote in his journal, was a ‘terrible “arriviste”’, ‘impertinent, theologically immodest’, an ‘accomplished poseur’ who ‘exploits the most holy ideas, without shame … Little fool!’

Messiaen continued to write works for solo organ, and to perform at the Sainte-Trinité, until his death in 1992. The organ was an ideal instrument for his vision thanks to the orchestral massiveness of its sound and the variety of colours it could produce. But Messiaen never wanted to confine himself to a single instrument, or to the cathedral. He had wider ambitions, and a family to support. He had married Claire Delbos in 1932; five years later she gave birth to a son, Pascal. While Messiaen was still focused on music for organ, Delbos – ‘Mi’, he called her – wrote a luminous song cycle based on his mother’s L’Âme en bourgeon. (Messiaen himself refused to touch the work: ‘It would be dabbling in matters that are far too precious.’) But Delbos’s physical and mental health, like that of Messiaen’s late mother, was precarious. The haunting Poèmes pour Mi was reminiscent of the hushed chromaticism of Delbos’s writing. In it, Sholl notes, a couple finally relinquishes human companionship for the glory of resurrection. An omen, as it turned out: Delbos’s mental illness became debilitating, and she would spend much of her life in asylums until her death in 1959.

The work​ that first established Messiaen as a major composer outside the church, and which remains his most widely performed piece, was born of a different catastrophe: the fall of France in 1940. Mobilised as a stretcher-bearer a year earlier, Messiaen was captured by German soldiers in the woods near Nancy, and interned at Stalag VIIIA in Görlitz, Silesia. The conditions – the cold, the meagre rations – were gruelling, but a Catholic member of the Wehrmacht allowed him to keep his scores of Stravinsky, Berg and Ravel, and gave him music manuscript paper to write on. Composed in the prison’s latrines and barracks, the Quartet for the End of Time was performed in the camp, by Messiaen (playing the piano) and three other inmates: the cellist Etienne Pasquier, the violinist Jean Le Boulaire and the clarinettist Henri Akoka, a Jew from Algeria. ‘Never have I been listened to with such attention and such understanding,’ Messiaen recalled.

A number of myths surround the premiere, some spread by Messiaen himself, notably that the cello had only three strings (according to Pasquier, his instrument was intact), and that five thousand prisoners attended the performance (the hut only accommodated five hundred). But perhaps the most persistent myth is that the ‘end of time’ alluded to the agonies of the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, the Quartet longs for the end of time, because it means the return of the Messiah and the beginning of Eternity. When it was performed in Paris for the first time, no mention was made of its origins in German captivity; one critic praised Messiaen for permitting the listener to ‘visit the enchanted garden that he carries within himself, where he delights with the joy of pure music’. Messiaen never encouraged the notion that he’d written the Quartet as a protest against Nazism, but even he would end up exaggerating the suffering he’d endured.

As a progressive Catholic, Messiaen sympathised with de Gaulle and the Resistance. He mostly kept his distance from Vichy, and his students saw him as a patriot; his sombre, ritualistic work for two pianos, Visions de l’Amen, was commissioned in 1943 by a couple active in the Resistance. But he was willing to cut moral corners to advance his career. The job he took at the Paris Conservatoire in the spring of 1941 had been vacated five months earlier by the Jewish composer André Bloch, who had been dismissed from his job. To assume the post, Messiaen affirmed that he had no Jewish grandparents or ‘Jewish blood’; during the round-up of Jews at the Vel d’Hiv in July 1942, he went on holiday. Sholl rather indulgently describes Messiaen’s accommodation to Vichy as ‘a necessary part of rebuilding his life after captivity’. But the composer Odette Gartenlaub, one of his few Jewish students, recalled that Messiaen never communicated with her during the war, when she was in hiding. ‘Messiaen had my address; he just didn’t want to compromise himself.’

Nonetheless, the Quartet was an uncompromising work, though for aesthetic rather than political reasons. It combined arresting angularity with disarmingly tonal melodies of lyrical, rapturous simplicity. And its anti-linear structure seemed to defy time itself, thanks to hidden rhythmic cycles in constant permutation. In the third movement, a solo for clarinet called the ‘abîme des oiseaux’, Messiaen drew strikingly on the musical language of birds: he thought of them as angelic ambassadors of the sky. ‘Birds represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song,’ he wrote in the programme notes. Birdsong, idiosyncratic oscillations between dissonance and consonance, the formal evocation of a theological timelessness: the elements of Messiaen’s future approach came into sharp focus in the Quartet. It wasn’t to everyone’s liking. The critic André Hodeir complained of an ‘effusion of lyricism’, ‘inspired by the most dubious sources (one is reminded of Massenet, Tchaikovsky, and at times even of Gershwin)’.

An even more furious row broke out – the first rumblings of the ‘cas Messiaen’ – after the premiere in 1943 of the mesmerising Visions de l’Amen, influenced by Léon Bloy’s writings on suffering and expiation. The performers were Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod, a student in his harmony class who had turned the pages for him at one of his recitals. A young composer, Jeanne Demessieux, confessed in her diary to feeling ‘suffocated’ by Messiaen’s ‘dense, vertical writing’ and ‘endless melancholy melodies, which have nothing to do any more with counterpoint … In summary: too many notes; I miss Mozart.’ She wasn’t alone. But the Visions de l’Amen – and its companion work, Vingt Regards, which Loriod premiered two years later – expressed exactly the kind of music Messiaen said he wanted to write, ‘iridescent, subtle, even voluptuous (but not sensual, of course!)’. Not since Debussy, perhaps not since Scriabin, had a composer so masterfully exploited the orchestral and timbral range of the piano, the physical resonances of its sound. And Messiaen had found in Loriod a fearless interpreter who shared his Catholic convictions. As James Fletcher wrote in the LRB in 1996, ‘Loriod’s technical ability was such that Messiaen found it quite impossible to think up anything she couldn’t play – and it wasn’t for want of trying.’ He wrote nearly all his pieces with her in mind. They became inseparable, though since he was still married they weren’t able to consummate their relationship for nearly two decades. (His friend Antoine Goléa talked of Loriod’s ‘long and painful martyrdom’.) In 1961, two years after Delbos’s death, Loriod and Messiaen were married in a civil ceremony in the mairie of the 18th. A blackbird sang from the roof of the church that afternoon; they took it as a sign of benediction.

If Messiaen was ruffled by the attacks on his music – or tormented by the interminable postponement of his union with Loriod – he gave no indication of it at the Conservatoire. ‘In his pale, thoughtful face, his gaze was utterly calm as the sky above,’ the composer Guy Bernard recalled. ‘Despite his hunger, despite his thirst, he seemed far away, appeared to be thinking of something else – of something very pure and brilliant.’ Messiaen’s inner circle at the Conservatoire were known as Les Flèches (the Arrows), and at the head stood Boulez. ‘In the wastes – and wastings – of the Conservatoire,’ he recalled, ‘a single personality stood out as a clear beacon, teaching only harmony but having a reputation to which more than a hint of sulphur attached … Messiaen’s class … was the only one that gave its members that conspiratorial feeling beneath all the excitement of technical discovery for young people devoted to “l’artisanat furieux”.’

Surrounded by his students as he sat at the piano, Messiaen would speak as much about ‘the dances of planets and atoms’, and the poetry of Breton and Éluard, as he did about music. He lectured on Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg and Berg, but also introduced his students to gagaku, gamelan and other forms of non-Western music: he ‘opened windows’, Boulez said, ‘not only on Europe, but on the whole world, on civilisations as remote in space as in time’. Among his protégés were some of the great modernists of the postwar era: Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, George Benjamin. But Messiaen had no interest in moulding acolytes. He urged his students to follow their intuitions and – in the case of foreign-born pupils – their native traditions. ‘You have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics,’ he told Xenakis. ‘Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.’ (When Xenakis took umbrage at Messiaen’s remark that he was ‘talented … even very talented’, but that he composed in ‘a naive fashion’, Messiaen replied: ‘Please don’t take it as an insult. I hope I am also naive and will remain so as long as I live.’)

Messiaen’s​ impact on the European avant-garde of the postwar years was so profound that Grisey called him ‘God the Father’. Yet he left behind no ‘school’ of composition and was nearly as much influenced by his students as they were by him. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he went through what Boulez called a ‘period of intense self-questioning, possibly as a result of the explorations carried out by some of his pupils (of whom I was one) who had made a more or less radical break with his personal predilections’. Out of this period emerged one of his least characteristic works, an audacious series of atonal studies for piano called the Quatres Études de rythmes, composed partly during a stint at the Darmstadt School for experimental music. In the second and most striking of these études, the ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, Messiaen became the first European composer to apply numerical organisation to pitch, duration, dynamics and timbre. As Boulez saw it, Messiaen appeared ‘to be questioning everything that had been most personal, and probably most dear to him, in his previous music’. But this self-questioning turned out to have been a parenthesis – or, more likely, an illusion harboured by Boulez and Les Flèches, the champions of ‘total serialism’. Messiaen, they soon discovered, was at most a fellow traveller, not a convert to the movement.

Boulez later admitted that the relationship in Messiaen’s art between discipline and immediacy, or between ‘calculation and spontaneity’, was not so much a ‘conflict’ as ‘alternation, cohabitation’. But as a young man, he was less forgiving of Messiaen’s heterodoxy: ‘When Messiaen writes a rhythmical canon … it is immediately underlined by an avalanche of chords, for no reason at all; it appears in the structure at whim; it vanishes without further ado. In short, Messiaen’s method never manages to fit in with his discourse, because he does not compose – he juxtaposes.’ ‘When he first entered class, he was very nice,’ Messiaen recalled of Boulez. ‘But he soon became angry with the whole world … Even if he is smiling, there is more underneath than a smile.’ After a performance of the Turangalîla, Boulez told Messiaen that it made him want to vomit.

Nonetheless, Messiaen remained generous to his former pupil, describing him as a ‘confirmed serialist’ who ‘was able to transcend the dogma and, in a way, treat it with the same instinctive abandon that Mozart applied to tonality’. The anger of ‘rebels’ was a ‘natural reaction’, and Boulez had avoided becoming a doctrinaire serialist by adding ‘a bit of my rhythmic restlessness and, above all, a Debussyian shimmer’. As Messiaen understood, Boulez was, despite his Teutonic allegiances, a typically sensual French composer, and he would eventually become one of the finest conductors of Messiaen’s work.

At the heart of Boulez’s argument with Messiaen was the question of French music’s relationship to the Austro-German tradition. Where Boulez sought to radicalise a revolution against tonality launched in Vienna – Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of dissonance’ – Messiaen gravitated instead to the emancipation of sound brought about by Stravinsky and the Russian tradition, and by ritual musics produced beyond the West. He considered rhythm ‘the primordial and perhaps essential part of music’: one of his key influences was a 13th-century Hindu rhythmician, Sarngadeva. His other signature was painstaking attention to sound-colour. ‘Those aren’t orange enough,’ he told a pianist playing chords from his Quartet for the End of Time. He proceeded to demonstrate how to achieve a brighter, more ‘orange’ colour. In Technique de mon langage musical, published in 1944, he developed his ideas into an idiosyncratic system based on ‘modes of limited transposition’ and ‘non-retrogradable rhythms’ (rhythms that read the same way backwards and forwards, like palindromes): their purpose was to create a sense of atemporality, suggestive of theological timelessness. ‘The truths I express, the truths of the Faith,’ he said, were ‘always rooted in a radiant, unchanging reality’.

Still, when Boulez observed that Messiaen practised juxtaposition rather than composition, he had a point. As Christopher Dingle argues in his contribution to Messiaen in Context, Messiaen was ‘primarily an orchestral composer’, ‘implicitly orchestrating his music even when no orchestra was involved’. The piano and organ were the pillars of his orchestration, which incorporated not only the usual brass, woodwind and strings but also more exotic instruments such as the vibraphone, chromatically tuned cowbells, tam-tams, cymbals and the xylorimba, an enormous xylophone with a massive range. More than any of his European contemporaries, with the possible exception of Edgard Varèse, he assigned to percussion a structural, not merely decorative, role in his compositions.

The voluptuousness and imagination of his orchestration often provoked charges of eroticism. Messiaen’s denials were strenuous (he invariably invoked his religious intentions) but unpersuasive, since his own writing about music was infused with language that owed much to Surrealism. In a manifesto from 1946, he championed music that was ‘tender or violent, full of love and vehemence … Music that is like new blood, a signed gesture, an unknown perfume, an unsleeping bird’. To hasten the arrival of ‘that innovator, that liberator who is so patiently awaited: the composer of Love’, composers would have to overcome their tendency towards ‘laziness’ and invent new sounds to render visible the invisible realm of God’s kingdom. The path to the divine lay through aesthetic innovation – even transgression.

The most feverish expression of Messiaen’s vision was his eighty-minute-long Turangalîla-Symphonie, whose ten movements fused Stravinskian percussiveness, Wagnerian leitmotifs and Indian rhythms. Commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, it was premiered at Tanglewood in 1949 under the direction of Leonard Bernstein (who apparently hated it). Turanga in Sanskrit means ‘flow of rhythm’; lila, the dialectic of construction and destruction. Stravinsky found the work to be ‘more embarrassment than riches’; while he was ‘flattered’ by Messiaen’s homage, ‘I would prefer to receive royalties.’ Turangalîla’s lustiness and riotous excess led Boulez to call it ‘brothel music’, but what Messiaen understood better than his critics was that the line between religious and sensual ecstasy isn’t easy to discern – if it even exists in movements like ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’, which imagines the union of two lovers. And while the love Messiaen celebrates is cosmic, not physical, the pianist for whom it was written was Loriod, with whom a union wouldn’t be possible for another decade.

Turangalîla​ marked the end of Messiaen’s first great period. His next, which began in the early 1950s, grew out of his immersion in birdsong. He had been transcribing birds on 78 rpm recordings since the 1930s; his favourites were the song thrush and the meadowlark. But now he began venturing into forests and mountains and writing down the melodies of birds: ‘artists who, like me, are sensitive to colour’. It wasn’t simply their sounds or their freedom of improvisation that appealed to him, but their orchestration, as if there were an ‘invisible conductor’. As Sholl points out, birdsong provided him with an alternative to serialism. It was also ‘a way of infusing his music with nature and framing modernist dissonance within a religious and ecological framework’. At the time, Messiaen’s preoccupation with birds and nature was widely seen as another of his eccentricities. Today, it can be seen to have prefigured the ‘ecological’ sensibility of composers like John Luther Adams.

At times, Messiaen’s curiosity about birds and their environment appeared to equal – even eclipse – his interest in music. (The journalist Anna Murdoch reports that ‘his face would become completely impassive’ when the conversation moved to other subjects.) Between 1956 and 1958, he composed an extensive sequence of studies for piano based on transcribed birdsong, the Catalogue d’oiseaux. As Sholl notes, ‘Messiaen does not copy nature, something he regarded as “foolish”, but rather makes his own syncretic image of nature.’ That image evoked terror as much as beauty – the Catalogue score includes phrases like ‘the screams of a pig having its throat cut, howling and subsiding’ – and it found even fuller expression in his orchestral works of the 1960s, starting with the Chronochromie, which had its premiere in October 1960.

The lushness of percussion, the churning density of call-and-response, the hypnotic circularity of birdsong motifs imbued Chronochromie with an almost otherworldly feeling of strangeness. (When it was performed in France in 1962, he had to duck to avoid a punch to his head as he made his way through the audience.) As he observed of his vision of the Apocalypse, Couleurs de la cité céleste (1964), in which four trombones and three xylophones are supplemented by clarinets and percussion instruments including four gongs and two tam-tams, such music ‘does not finish, having never really begun: it turns upon itself, interlacing its temporal blocks, like the flamboyant and invisible colours of a rose window in a cathedral.’ When the composer Henri Dutilleux joked that he had ‘annexed’ birds, Messiaen replied: ‘But there still remain many others!’

Messiaen had always had an affinity with ‘the East’. But in the second half of his career, the Asian dimensions of his work, the feeling for stasis and ritual, became still more pronounced. In the summer of 1962 he and Loriod spent a month in Japan, where he went birdwatching, attended Kabuki theatre and began to write a series of Japanese-themed works (Sept haïkaï). In Japan he discovered ‘a country where everything is noble’, and the same ‘innate sense of the sacred’ that he wanted to convey in his own music. When a Japanese student told him that he felt torn between Western music and his own traditions, Messiaen’s advice was: ‘Remain Japanese!’ Asians, he believed, ‘are on much closer terms with the beyond than we are, and that’s why their music is static. The music written by me, a believer, is equally static.’ Although Messiaen’s views of ‘Orientals’ were perfumed with a typically Gallic exoticism, many Asian musicians – including Toru Takemitsu, one of his great admirers, and the conductor Seiji Ozawa – considered him a kindred spirit.

From the mid-1960s until his death, Messiaen’s ambitions grew ever more monumental. The scale of his late music reflected, in part, the commissions he received. But it also expressed his desire to conjure God’s glory and the vastness of nature. At the same time, perhaps as a result of his encounter with Japanese culture, the music became less florid: sparer, if not quite austere. As Sholl writes, in works like Des canyons aux étoiles … there is a ‘sense of evoking majesty through restraint’. Commissioned in 1971 by Alice Tully, Des canyons drew inspiration from a trip he and Loriod had made to southern Utah, where, at an elevation of eight thousand feet, they visited Lion’s Peak, with its red and white sandstone. Listening to the birds in Bryce Canyon during ‘the season of courtship, the period in which the males sing in order to assert their territorial claims’, he recalled, ‘we were all alone, it was marvellous, an absolute solitude.’

While Loriod took photographs, Messiaen recorded the colours of the cliffs and the scent of the vegetation, and wrote down the melodies of the western tanager, a red and yellow bird with a flute-like voice which ‘sings a combination of three notes (tiot-tiot-tiot)’. The result of this research was a magical tone poem for piano, horn, xylorimba, glockenspiel and orchestra, including an expanded percussion section with a wind machine and an instrument of Messiaen’s own invention, the ‘geophone’, a large drum filled with lead pellets. Des canyons begins with an evocation of the desert and concludes with a glorious vision of Zion Park. To hear it is to be enveloped by the chirping of birds and the colours of the rocks. A serene sense of space and silence – very far from the boisterousness of the Turangalîla – is achieved through a series of unaccompanied solos: the contemplative ‘Appel interstellaire’ for horn; the ravishing glissandi of the piano cadenza in ‘Le Moqueur polyglotte’. Never before had Messiaen so skilfully merged with the nature he loved. A few years after its premiere the state of Utah renamed Lion’s Peak ‘Mount Messiaen’.

Messiaen’s four-hour opera Saint François d’Assise, premiered in 1983, depicted the life of one of his heroes, a bird lover who, he believed, resembled Christ with his ‘poverty, his chastity, his humility, and, bodily, by the stigmata that he received on his feet, his hands and side’. It featured only nine solo vocal parts but was written on a grander scale than any of his previous works, with a choir of 150 singers and more than a hundred musicians, including 22 woodwind players. Messiaen travelled to Assisi and New Caledonia to do research for the sixth scene, St Francis’s sermon to the birds, ‘Le Prêche aux oiseaux’. The opera had no overture (‘Overtures are symphony numbers nobody listens to’) and some grumbled that, as Messiaen put it, ‘There is no sin in your work.’ (‘I prefer flowers,’ he said.) And yet, as Sholl writes, Saint François is a story of ‘desire and longing’, even if they are ‘eschatological’ rather than sexual. The lyricism of the writing for female voice exceeds even his Poèmes pour Mi. As the composer Nathan Shields suggested to me, ‘You feel as if you were wandering in some monolithic temple, where the symbols are alien and perplexing, but where you can feel the devotional energy radiating from the stones.’

‘Now he’s happy,’ Loriod told Claude Samuel when her husband died in April 1992. All his work had expressed what he called a ‘musical expectancy’, a longing for eternity; at last it had come. Alain Messiaen described his brother as a ‘SUBLIME being’ and predicted that he would enter the tenth circle of angels who form the chosen. Messiaen’s sanctification, however, worked against him in France, where his music became associated with the Church, in spite of his revolt against religious orthodoxy, his pro-Resistance sympathies and his mentoring of the avant-garde – as well as his influence on radical thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari, who often cited his theory of ‘rhythmic characters’.

Outside France, particularly in the United States, Messiaen’s work is more popular and more widely performed than ever. You can hear echoes of it in the music of Jonny Greenwood, a member of Radiohead and composer of film scores who learned to play the ondes Martenot and considers himself a fanatical messiaenique. Messiaen has even inspired a cartoon character: Turanga Leela, the cyclops heroine of Matt Groening’s Futurama. Where Boulez’s music evokes a vanished age of modernist rigour, Messiaen’s fits more easily into a polystylistic era in which collage, cross-pollination and eclecticism are valued over purity, scientism or narratives of progress like ‘total serialism’. What Boulez bemoaned as Messiaen’s ‘juxtaposition’, his sensitivity to rhythm and colour, has become the order of the day. Traditional Western prejudices against so-called static music have crumbled, thanks both to the spread of ‘world music’ from Africa, India and the Arab world and to the emergence of minimalism in the 1960s. Nor is there anything strange, or suspect, about devotional music: some of the best-known composers of the last half-century, from Steve Reich and Philip Glass to Meredith Monk and Sofia Gubaidulina, have invoked religious or spiritual inspirations, to say nothing of Afro-futurist jazz musicians like Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, spiritual leaders in their own right. As Sholl argues, Messiaen helped to create ‘a space for a new form of “contemporary spiritual music”’.

Yet Messiaen’s work stands at a formidable remove from what Taruskin called the ‘sacred entertainments’ of contemporary spiritual music. Far from consoling or comforting listeners, it makes demands on them, nearly as much as the Catholic faith he professed. (He is widely seen as the precursor of Spectralism, a compositional movement focused on the physicality of sound, founded by his students Murail and Grisey.) The ferocity of his music – as unyielding as his Catholicism – goes hand in hand with what George Crumb called its ‘spiritual exaltation’.

Towards the end of his life, Messiaen said that one of his ‘greatest joys’ was that ‘my music is no longer classified as bewildering, even as demoniac; instead I’m recognised as a co-messenger of the Word.’ The ‘illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith’, he reflected, had been ‘the noblest aspect’ of his work. Do Catholics have greater access to its secrets? The organist Paul Jacobs, one of his most accomplished contemporary interpreters and a practising Catholic, believes so. While anyone can listen to his work with pleasure, he told me, ‘there is an extra layer of appreciation’ for believers, who can identify with the ‘terrifying joy’ it communicates. That may be true. But for the rest of us, Messiaen is not so much a messenger of the Word as a man whose faith led him to the furthest reaches of sound. And it is precisely the ‘bewildering’, violent, ecstatic nature of his music – the freedom of imagination he found, ironically, through and within the Church – that accounts for its universal effect. Jonny Greenwood perfectly captured the transgressive thrill of it when he said that until he heard the Turangalîla as a teenager, ‘I didn’t know it was allowed to write music like that.’