The other 100th birthday

Surveying the view from Mount Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen, shown here in March 1952, would have celebrated his 100th birthday Wednesday. (Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty Images)

It was easy to miss with all of the hoopla for Elliott Carter's 100th birthday, but last week also marked the centenary of a towering figure in modern music: Olivier Messiaen.

This visionary French composer, who died in 1992, would have turned 100 on Wednesday. He was an inspiration to many great composers of the late 20th century, but his staggeringly original art inhabits a world all its own.

Across six long decades of creative activity, Messiaen largely managed to rise above the stultifying polemics of modern music by nurturing his art from sources far deeper than any modish style or any myth of musical progress. The composer was a mystic for whom music could conjure actual visions of blazing color; he was a pious Catholic whose spiritual life was at the pulsating core of his entire creative enterprise; and he was a devoted ornithologist who found in birdsong an irresistible symbol of freedom and a musical model at once advanced, expressive, and completely natural.

The mechanical workings of Messiaen's music, its rhythmic innovations and its special system of modes, earned him the respect of many in the avant-garde. But the brilliant surfaces of this music and its sense of inner urgency allowed Messiaen to reach a much wider audience that continues to grow. (How many other avant-gardists have a mountain in Utah named after them?) His was a fusion of intellectual rigor and spiritual sincerity, of musical sophistication and an almost primitively mystical sensuality.

Last week, the music world was toasting Carter with the Boston Symphony Orchestra leading the festivities from Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, but Messiaen's 100th did not go completely unnoticed. Over the last three years, the scholar Andrew Shenton has spearheaded the Boston University Messiaen Project, with its website (www.oliviermessiaen.net) emerging as an invaluable online destination for all things Messiaen.

On Wednesday night, the project co-presented the first American screening of a recent film, "The Charm of Impossibilities," at the Museum of Fine Arts, followed by a live performance. Also this week, Deutsche Grammophon released "Olivier Messiaen: Complete Edition," an outstanding 32-disc box set with recordings of every piece in Messiaen's catalog.

The new film, directed by Nicolás Buenaventura Vidal, has the noble aim of exploring the dramatic birth of Messiaen's best-known work, the "Quartet for the End of Time," written and premiered when the composer was interned as a prisoner of war in a German camp in Silesia in 1940-41. For the occasion, Vidal tracked down POWs from the same camp, known as Stalag VIII A, and their vivid memories of "the French Mozart" as a prisoner, and of the premiere itself, are the strongest aspects of this film. It was also gripping to hear archival tape of the composer's own memories of that dark period, and of the day of his arrival when he was stripped of his clothing yet allowed to cling to a bag of sheet music.

But instead of simply telling the great story of one of the most iconic premieres of the 20th century, Vidal indulges in misguided directorial preening. We get free associative close-ups of the forest in winter; a collage of boots and clogs clomping on snow and other surfaces; and after the story of Messiaen's initial capture, the film cuts to a bizarre interpretive dance.

Vidal's most unfortunate choice was to devote large amounts of time to a wince-inducing dramatic reenactment of the premiere, in which contemporary musicians perform in a drab barracks-like room, dressed in black prison garb, wearing tattered gloves and ill-fitting shoes, and playing on damaged instruments modeled on those available in the camp at the time. The whole dress-up routine is in very poor taste, and while intentions here were surely earnest, it is ultimately inimical to the kind of historical empathy that Vidal was presumably trying to elicit.

Those curious about this extraordinary premiere, which took place on a freezing night before a packed crowd of prisoners sitting in rapt silence, are far better served by Rebecca Rischin's riveting account in "For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet." It is written from a perspective of great sympathy for the composer and his work, yet one of the fascinating aspects Rischin points out is how Messiaen exaggerated in later life several key details of the premiere, including the size of the audience present (he claimed there were 5,000, when it could have been no more than several hundred) and the quality of the instruments. (He told many interviewers that Etienne Pasquier performed on a cello with only three strings, even though Pasquier repeatedly corrected him, insisting that all four strings were intact.) Even this pure-hearted composer was not above nudging history in the direction of mythology.

Rischin plausibly believes that Messiaen was trying to shade the legend of this premiere with an "aura of the miraculous." But the composer's music - and the Quartet in particular - ultimately needs little help in that regard. To wade into the new "Complete Edition" box set is to be struck afresh by the radical innovation and expressive urgency that lies behind so much of this music.

Highlights of the set include the live recording from the Salzburg Festival of Messiaen's great opera, "Saint Francois d'Assise" under Kent Nagano; Olivier Latry's authoritative account of the complete organ works - music in which the composer's theological imagination often seems at its most literal, with sky-rending dissonances and hushed beatific prayers; violinist Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich's white-hot rendition of the short "Theme et Variations"; and Pierre Boulez's commanding performances with the Cleveland Orchestra.

There are of course occasions where the best performances lie elsewhere. Tashi's recording of the "Quartet for the End of Time" is more compelling than the one included here, for instance. But in its massive range and in the overall quality of the performances this set is unsurpassed.

On the very last of the 32 discs comes a parting gift in the form of the kaleidoscopic piano duo, "Visions de l'Amen" in a moving performance by the composer himself and his wife, the brilliant pianist Yvonne Loriod. On the wings of these two pianos, the pair takes to Messiaen's musical cosmos. We hear his vision of creation from Genesis, his contemplation of the stars, the agony of Jesus, and the yearning for the tender peace of heaven. There is birdsong (from "some of my best singers: the blackbird, the chaffinch, the blackcap"); there is Judgment Day ("a bell of doom"), and the final movement ends in a kind of ecstatic apotheosis. You might say that the music whites out in its final bars - except that the ears are actually drenched in a dazzling wash of color.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.