Birds and their songs have haunted the poet's imagination since the days of the ancient Greeks, but none have sought out the music of treetop troubadours with the combined persistence, scientific rigor, and sheer religious awe of Olivier Messiaen.
This remarkable French composer and grandfather of the 20th-century avant-garde wrote mind-bendingly original music full of radiant washes of color. He was a devout Catholic with mystical sympathies, and a man for whom ornithology was a perfect extension of religious faith. Outfitted with his notebooks, binoculars, a tape recorder, and an almost childlike sense of wonder, he traveled all over the world, transcribing bird songs and declaring himself an avid student of the grand orchestra of the skies.
"For me," wrote Messiaen, "it is here that music lives: music that is free, anonymous, improvised for pleasure, to greet the rising sun, to charm one's mate, to tell all the world that this branch and this meadow belong to you, to put an end to all disputes, bickering and rivalry, to work off the excessive energy born of love and joie de vivre, to articulate time and space and join with your neighbors in constructing rich and improvised counterpoint, to solace your fatigue and to say farewell to another portion of life as the evening falls."
From the mid-century until his death in 1992, the fruits of his bird song research filled Messiaen's compositions, sometimes unadorned, more often stylized to suit his expressive needs, sometimes on the edges of the works, sometimes at their core. The composer's so-called "bird style" found its supreme expression in his monumental piano cycle "Catalogue d'Oiseaux" or "Catalogue of Birds," which premiered in 1959. A bracing three-hour tour of Messiaen's spiritual aviary, it references some 75 species, from the little ringed plover to the goldfinch to the oystercatcher. All are rendered in their natural habitats, which of course become part of the music.
This landmark work will receive its first complete Boston performance on Jan. 31 at New England Conservatory as part of a welcome piano mini-festival honoring the composer in the centennial year of his birth. The event, a brainchild of pianist and NEC piano faculty chair Bruce Brubaker, is designed partly to showcase the breadth of the school's keyboard talent; all performances will be by students. "Catalogue d'Oiseaux" will be divided among many performers, as will the monumental "Vingt Regards" on Feb. 7 and the complete Piano Preludes on Feb. 8. Some 40 young pianists in total will participate, including a competition winner who will serve as soloist in "Oiseaux Exotiques" on Feb. 14. The concerts will be supplemented by an ornithologist's lecture on bird song and a seminar on "Vingt Regards."
Messiaen (pronounced Mess-YAHN) began jotting down bird song in his early teenage years while wandering the fields of the Aube countryside, but it was not until the 1950s that he began taking the practice more seriously, eventually filling around 200 notebooks with transcriptions of bird song and vivid impressions, both verbal and musical, of the natural sites he encountered. In his corresponding music one hears not just individual birds - by turns spiky, madly twittering, and majestic - but the bustling choruses of dawn, the blessed quiet of the noonday forest, the eerie sounds of the canopy at night, and the dissonances of the wind and the churning sea.
The task of capturing the sublime intricacies of bird song, its exotic timbres and rhythmic asymmetries, spurred a technical renewal of Messiaen's musical language and his use of harmony. The composer's biographers Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone sketch this process beginning with Messiaen's earliest bird song work of the 1950s, "Réveil des Oiseaux," in which he aimed for such a purity of representation that the composer himself might vanish, as if slipping away into the forest.
This fantasy of self-abnegation was of a piece with Messiaen's personal and artistic hardships at the time, with his wife gravely ill and his own health declining. He was meanwhile striving to find a truthful and authentic path through the wilderness of the 1950s avant-garde. His biographers describe him as being reduced to tears by an argument with his students. One of them, composer Alexander Goehr, later voiced doubts about his teacher's new passion. How could all this bird song not degenerate into music of pure bathos? Messiaen replied crisply that if Goehr felt that way, he would make sure not to bring him into the woods. Goehr later heard "Oiseaux Exotiques" and was astonished.
It was hardly the first time that stylistic breakthroughs emerged from Messiaen's periods of adversity. The centennial year will provide at least two local opportunities to hear performances of Messiaen's best-known work, the epochal "Quartet for the End of Time," written during World War II when Messiaen, then a French soldier, was interned at a German prison camp in Silesia. It is scored for the unusual combination of piano, clarinet, cello, and violin because those were the instruments available at the camp. The dire circumstances spurred Messiaen to create some of his most luminous and ecstatic music, especially the stunning final movement called the "Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus." There the clarinet and cello fall silent as the violin unspools a quietly prayerful solo line over gently pulsing chords on the piano. The melody ultimately floats up into the very highest reaches of the violin and then gradually drifts away, as if dissolving into the sky. Messiaen described it with unblushing simplicity: "This movement is pure love."
The ensemble Tashi made an authoritative recording of the Quartet back in 1975, and its players (Peter Serkin, Richard Stoltzman, Ida Kavafian, and Fred Sherry) will reconvene to perform the piece in a free concert at Harvard's Paine Hall on April 25. For devoted Messiaen fans, this is not to be missed. The piece will also appear on a Boston Chamber Music Society program to be performed Feb. 8 and 10.
Meanwhile, Boston University is tending to the composer's virtual estate with an ambitious online Messiaen Project at oliviermessiaen.net. Let's hope other local institutions jump on board for the 2008-09 season, and perhaps even, dare one say it, collaborate. NEC is doing its part with the upcoming mini-festival, though the school could have made a much bigger splash by expanding the events well beyond the piano department. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has not yet announced plans for next season, but rumors are floating that it could include at least one major work by Messiaen. The grandly scaled "Turangalila" Symphony would be a natural choice, as it was premiered by the BSO in 1949, but how about the composer's late, great opera "St. Francis of Assisi." A concert performance of that work would instantly be an event of national significance. One can always hope.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.
