Olivier Messiaen Biography Quotes 4 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Olivier Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon, France, to a literary family whose influence shaped his imagination as deeply as any musical training. His father, Pierre Messiaen, was a noted translator of Shakespeare, and his mother, the poet Cecile Sauvage, wrote verses anticipating her son's artistic sensibility. Drawn early to theater, color, and myth, he took up the piano as a child and soon began inventing music that blended narrative imagery with harmony. After the family settled in Paris, he entered the Conservatoire, where he studied harmony with Jean Gallon, counterpoint and fugue with Georges Caussade, music history with Maurice Emmanuel, composition with Paul Dukas, and organ and improvisation with Marcel Dupre. He collected first prizes in these disciplines and left the school with a distinctly personal vocabulary already visible in early works such as Le banquet celeste and the Huit preludes for piano.

Sainte-Trinite and Early Career
In 1931 Messiaen was appointed organist at the Church of La Sainte-Trinite in Paris, a post he retained for the rest of his life. His Sunday improvisations became legendary, revealing an extraordinary command of counterpoint, rhythm, and color. In 1932 he married the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, for whom he wrote the wedding piece Theme et Variations and, later, the passionate cycle Poemes pour Mi. Alongside organ cycles such as La Nativite du Seigneur and Les Corps glorieux, he co-founded the group La Jeune France with Andre Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, advocating sincerity, spirituality, and expressive intensity over fashionable abstraction. Early orchestral works like Les Offrandes oubliees and L'Ascension announced a composer for whom theology and timbre were inseparable.

War, Captivity, and the Quatuor
Mobilized in 1939, Messiaen served as a medical auxiliary. Captured in 1940, he was interned at Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz. There he composed Quatuor pour la fin du temps for fellow prisoners and available instruments: clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, cellist Etienne Pasquier, and himself at the piano. Premiered in the camp, the work set the tone for his postwar output: visionary, rhythmically audacious, and built from the "modes of limited transposition", cyclical scales that generate kaleidoscopic harmonies. The Quatuor's blend of apocalyptic imagery and tender contemplation made his reputation far beyond France once the war ended.

Teacher, Theorist, and Mentor
Returning to Paris, Messiaen taught at the Conservatoire, first in harmony and later in analysis and composition. His classes became a crucible for postwar modernism. Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Karel Goeyvaerts, Jean Barraque, Alexander Goehr, Claude Vivier, Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail, and George Benjamin all studied with him or were profoundly marked by his teaching. Messiaen's Technique de mon langage musical set out his harmonic, rhythmic, and formal principles, while he introduced students to Greek and Hindu rhythmic theory, non-retrogradable rhythms, additive processes, and synesthetic color-hearing. The 1949 piano study Mode de valeurs et d'intensites galvanized a younger generation exploring integral serialism, even as Messiaen himself pursued a broader spiritual and coloristic horizon.

Sound, Faith, and the Piano
Messiaen's Catholic faith underpinned much of his output. Works like Trois petites liturgies de la Presence Divine and Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus fused ecstatic harmony with rigorous rhythmic architecture. Central to his style were brilliant chordal "colors", perceived synesthetically, and the use of birdsong as a living, melodic source. Pianist Yvonne Loriod, first his pupil and later his wife, inspired a stream of pianistic masterpieces with daunting technical demands, among them Vingt regards and the vast Catalogue d'oiseaux, which transcribed the calls of species from across Europe with scientific care and poetic freedom. She became the foremost interpreter of his keyboard music, shaping its reception on stage and on record.

Orchestra, Ondes Martenot, and Global Recognition
In the mid-century orchestral works, Messiaen broadened the palette of percussion and winds and embraced the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument often championed by virtuosos such as Ginette Martenot and later Jeanne Loriod. The Turangalila-Symphonie, commissioned with support from Serge Koussevitzky and premiered in the United States with Leonard Bernstein conducting, stands as a monumental celebration of love, time, and rhythm, and, together with Harawi and the choral Cinq Rechants, forms his Tristan trilogy. Subsequent scores including Chronochromie, Oiseaux exotiques, and Couleurs de la Cite celeste explored dense rhythmic canons and layered birdsong within glowing harmonic fields, showing how carefully calibrated time-structures could yield overwhelming sensual effect.

Travel, Nature, and Monumental Sacred Works
Messiaen's fascination with landscape and ornithology took him far afield. A journey to Japan informed Sept Haikai, while the memorial Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, commissioned in France under the aegis of Andre Malraux, resounded for brass and percussion in sacred spaces. His largest religious architecture, La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ, set scriptural texts with blazing choral and orchestral colors. Commissioned by Alice Tully, Des canyons aux etoiles... drew on desert vistas and the birds of the American Southwest to frame a cosmic meditation on creation. The opera Saint Francois d'Assise, a long-cherished project completed in the early 1980s, offered a serene, contemplative dramaturgy of grace, miracles, and nature, embodying his belief that music could witness to transcendence without theatrics.

Personal Trials and Partnerships
Messiaen's personal life informed his art in ways both luminous and tragic. Claire Delbos's prolonged illness cast a shadow over the 1940s and 1950s; their son, Pascal, remained a quiet presence around whom Messiaen maintained a devoted family life. After Delbos's death, he married Yvonne Loriod in 1961. Loriod's pianism, editorial diligence, and tireless advocacy were crucial to the dissemination and accuracy of his scores. Around them gathered performers and colleagues who sustained his projects: organ-builders and church officials at La Sainte-Trinite, ensembles willing to master unusual instrumentations, and generations of students eager to absorb his methods and convictions.

Late Style and Final Years
After decades at the organ loft and the Conservatoire, Messiaen entered a late period marked by serenity and synthesis. The grand organ cycle Livre du Saint-Sacrement returned to his earliest performing medium with crystalline counterpoint and radiant registrations. Eclairs sur l'Au-dela..., completed near the end of his life and premiered posthumously by the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez, condensed a lifetime's concerns: birds, bells, blazing brass chorales, and quiet, timeless chorales that seem to suspend gravity. He died on 27 April 1992 in the Paris area, having remained organist of La Sainte-Trinite since 1931 and an unfailing presence in French musical life.

Legacy
Messiaen's legacy is unusually broad. As a composer, he fused theological meditation with rhythmic invention and timbral opulence; as an organist, he sustained an improvisatory tradition linking Franck, Widor, and Dupre; as a teacher, he catalyzed diverse paths from postwar serialism to spectralism. The distinctiveness of his modes, non-retrogradable rhythms, and bird-derived counterpoint has made his music instantly recognizable yet endlessly variable in color. His pupils, among them Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Grisey, Murail, and Benjamin, carried aspects of his thinking into radically different aesthetics. Through the devotion of Yvonne Loriod and many performers, and through published writings that document his methods, Messiaen stands as one of the central musical figures of the twentieth century, a composer for whom sound was a vision of eternity.

Our collection contains 4 quotes who is written by Olivier, under the main topics: Music - Faith - God.

Other people realated to Olivier: Claude Debussy (Composer), Igor Stravinsky (Composer), William Bolcom (Composer)