If you’d been up long before dawn, in a Brisbane hotel in May 1988, you would have witnessed a long-awaited meeting. In the lobby an elderly Frenchman and his rather younger wife were greeted by an Australian, who drove them to the hinterland of the Gold Coast in the hope of witnessing the display of the Prince Albert’s Lyrebird. The Australian was an ornithologist, a student of birds. So was the Frenchman. The two men had been corresponding for 25 years. The early morning excursion was for the elderly gentleman a highlight of his first and only visit to Australia.
If you knew this Frenchman well, you wouldn’t be surprised. You might be, though, if you knew him only by reputation: the man widely considered the greatest then-living composer of music – Olivier Messiaen.
‘Ornithologist’ was as much a part of Messiaen’s definition of himself as ‘composer’ and ‘rhythmician’. Birds, Messiaen pointed out, were the first to make music on this planet, and had ‘discovered’ all sorts of sophisticated musical devices, such as singing a melody forwards then backwards, which we have learnt from them. Part of the excitement of being with Messiaen on his visit to Australia was the near-certainty that he would write some of the birds he heard there into his next music, which indeed happened with Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà...
‘…several excursions to hear lyrebirds…’
Messiaen had put lyrebird calls in his opera St Francis of Assisi, but, as he explained in an interview given in Australia, ‘just a tiny little bit…I didn’t know the lyrebird well enough, having heard it only on a recording.’ When he heard the Prince Albert’s Lyrebird, he talked about it all day afterwards.
On excursions into the bush to hear the birds, Messiaen took only his musical note paper, and wrote down the birdsong as a musical dictation. His wife, Yvonne Loriod, was said to carry a tape recorder, to check later. Her acute musical ear led her to exclaim about her husband’s transcriptions, ‘Oh! But I think there are some quarter-tones in here!’ The Messiaens made several excursions to hear lyrebirds: to Sherbrooke Forest, near Melbourne; to Tidbinbilla, outside Canberra, as well as to the Gold Coast.
Messiaen was in Australia as part of a major project of ABC Concerts. He was present at many performances of his works, including the Melbourne Symphony’s performance of his Turangalîla Symphony, and received an honorary degree from the University of Sydney. In the Great Hall of the University, where the degree was conferred, British organist Gillian Weir, in a series of recitals, played all Messiaen’s organ works – all but one, that is, and thereby hangs a tale. According to the French publishers of Le Livre du Saint Sacrement, Messiaen had given exclusive permission to play the work to another organist, Jennifer Bate. The story illustrates Messiaen’s rather touching dependence in his later years: once he had stopped playing, he became even more grateful to his interpreters, and was liable to say to several that they were the only possible player of his work.
Following every note in the score
I sat next to the composer in Brisbane while the Australian Chamber Orchestra, under French conductor Marc Soustrot, played Des canyons aux étoiles (inspired partly by an earlier visit to the USA). Loriod, using just a scrap of paper as a memory aid, played the enormously demanding solo piano part. Messiaen followed every note from the three volumes of the full score. His eyes never deviated from a path between the score and the stage: vicarious performing indeed!
I then remained in Brisbane to attend a performance of Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen, given by pianists Roger Muraro and Elena Varvarova, while Des canyons aux étoiles was being played in Sydney. A stage manager of the Queensland Performing Arts Complex came up to me waving some music: ‘What are these?’ she asked. They were the trombone parts of Des canyons aux étoiles. They had been left behind, and were too big to be sent by fax. That evening in Sydney some of the audience were surprised to see the three trombonists scribbling whenever they had nothing to play. They were trying to make it easier to play their parts without too many page turns, from the same single copies of the full score Messiaen had been following the previous evening! After the performance, Messiaen exclaimed, ‘They didn’t leave anything out! It’s a miracle!’ As a devout Catholic believer, he truly meant what he said.
Extreme challenges in performance were nothing new for Messiaen, as we were reminded when a group of French musicians, in his presence, played his Quartet for the End of Time, composed by Messiaen in 1941 in a prisoner of war camp, and given its first performance to his fellow captives on instruments that barely worked at all.
‘…a quiet, unassuming, yet impressive presence…’
Messiaen as a person was an intriguing amalgam of absolute certainty of his craft and convictions on the one hand, and Christian humility on the other. At a lecture-recital given at Sydney University by his sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod on the ondes martenot, the pioneering electronic instrument which features in many of his works, he was asked why he didn’t use a more up-to-date synthesiser. He explained that the ondes martenot, where the player controls the notes with a finger wound in a ribbon, is an instrument where there is direct contact with a human being. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘the human being is often my own sister-in-law!’ This seemed to many of his audience a question-begging reply, but also the expression of a completely personal certainty of purpose.
We took Messiaen to a restaurant in Sydney’s Chinatown, because he was happiest, at age 80, with noodles and soup. In the party were conductor Marc Soustrot and violinist Alain Moglia, one of the leaders of the Orchestre de Paris. They were talking about a concert where they had played together a piece by Henri Collet, little known as a composer, but famous as the music critic who dubbed a group of 1920s composers ‘Les Six’. ‘What was Collet’s music like?’ we asked. ‘Rather like Symphonie espagnole of Lalo, re-heated,’ said Soustrot (it was probably Collet’s Concerto flamenco No.2, of 1946). At this point Messiaen raised his head out of his chicken noodle soup and said, ‘Oh well, everyone does what he is capable of.’ This was the nearest to criticism of another composer I heard him utter. He was a quiet, unassuming, yet impressive presence throughout his visit to Australia. His excitement about the birds, and his devotion to the woman who seemed like a kind, practical French bourgeois housewife – until, that is, she began to play the piano: these were moving.
More moving still, when you had met them, was the wonderful evidence of a life of creative dedication, inspired by faith, in the festival of his music which celebrated his only visit to Australia.
First published in Symphony Australia programs, 2012.
David Garrett, then Research Officer for ABC Concert Music, was an interpreter for Messiaen on part of his visit to Australia in 1988.