SUPPORT YOUR SYMPHONY

Ludovic Morlot conducts Messiaen's Des canyons aux étoiles... on June 2 & 4; photo by Nick Klein.

OLIVIER MESSIAEN 
Des canyons aux étoiles...  (“From the Canyons to the Stars...”) 
BORN: December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France 
DIED: April 27, 1992, in Clichy, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 1972-1974 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 20, 1974, at Lincoln Center, New York City 

What to Listen For:

• Messiaen’s music features instrumental birdsong, rendered in virtuoso passages. Unorthodox instruments also intimate the sounds of wind and rumbling earth.

Bryce Canyon in southern Utah is one of the most strange and absorbing landscapes on earth. From the foot of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, row upon row of sandstone spires stretch skyward, filling a vast amphitheater. Carved over eons by ice and water, these formations have assumed fantastic gothic shapes. They stand like minarets of a silent city, one not of this world. From the high rim of the plateau the view is spellbinding. The sun passing overhead catches different colors in the pinnacles, accenting in turn the red, now the orange, now the purple or pale gold layers of sand. Descending the steep canyon walls, one is enveloped in silence broken only by the faint but constant rush of wind overhead. Farther down are stands of pinyon pines that have ventured up the canyon floor from the Paria River Valley, which lies to the southeast. Here the stillness is punctuated by the cries of Bryce’s oldest inhabitants: Steller’s Jays, Grey-headed Juncos, Clark’s Nutcrackers. At night, the stars shine with a brilliance possible only in the high, thin desert air.

In 1972, Olivier Messiaen visited Bryce Canyon and the nearby park areas of Zion Canyon and Cedar Breaks. There, the composer found what has always touched him most deeply and informed his music: a spectacular array of colors; the songs of birds; and a remote, mysterious grandeur. Above all, the intimations of colossal natural forces and the immensity of geological time filled him with “the Gift of Awe ... Awe which is the reverence of the sacred, of the Divine presence.” As was his lifelong practice, Messiaen set about translating this experience into music. The result, completed in 1974, was Des canyons aux étoiles....

It is hardly surprising that the geology of southern Utah struck a responsive chord in Messiaen’s imagination. This composer’s concerns, as related through his music, have always been with the suprahuman. The wit of Haydn or Prokofiev, the very human dramas and characters that Verdi etched with such clarity, even the heartfelt but ultimately worldly joys and sorrows of Mozart or Schubert have no place in Messiaen’s output. Instead, he gave us visions of the stupendous, the miraculous, the transcendent. Quartet for the End of Time, Colors of the Celestial City, Visions de l’Amen — merely the titles of Messiaen’s works indicate the rarified bent of his imagination and the magnitude of his true subjects.

Des canyons aux étoiles... partakes of three sources of inspiration that were important throughout Messiaen’s career. The first is the composer’s deeply felt correspondence between sound and color. Although he never employed the term synaesthesia to describe his co-experience of sound and color, and admitted that it is a subjective phenomenon, Messiaen did say that “whenever I hear or read music, I see color complexes in my mind that go with the sound complexes.” Reversing that process, Messiaen often composed what he considered specific colors into his music. Many of the passages in Des canyons aux étoiles... intend to evoke the vivid hues of Bryce Canyon and its surroundings.

The sounds of the natural world also made their way into this composition. Olivier Messiaen was an authoritative ornithologist whose extensive quotation of birdsong is unique in the history of music. Orchestrated bird calls of the type found in many of Messiaen’s works are heard throughout Des canyons aux étoiles... But the composer went beyond birdsong in evoking what he regarded as nature’s music. Two exotic instruments, the aeoliphone and the geophone, imitate respectively the sound of the wind and rumbling earth. For Messiaen, these are not merely sonic effects. “I’ve listened with intense emotion to the waves of the sea, to mountain torrents and waterfalls, and to all the sounds made by water and wind,” he told an interviewer. “[F]or me, all this always represents music.”

The third source of inspiration was Messiaen’s visionary Catholicism, which the composer insisted “is the first aspect of my work, the noblest and, doubtless, the most useful and valuable.” Messiaen’s faith was unusual in its embrace of miracles and highly-charged religious imagery and symbolism; and this accords with the sense of mystery and violent majesty at the heart of Des canyons aux étoiles... The composer was explicit about the religious nature of this work, declaring that it represents an “ascending from the canyons to the stars — and higher, up to the resurrected in heaven — to glorify God in all his creation: the beauties of the earth (its rocks, its birdsongs), the beauties of the physical sky, the beauties of the spiritual sky.”

Des canyons aux étoiles... employs a large group of woodwinds and brass, featuring solo French horn; 13 string instruments, each playing a separate part; an extensive battery of percussion, including aeoliphone and geophone; and solo piano, whose part was composed especially for the composer’s wife, the superb French pianist Yvonne Loriod. The work unfolds in three large sections. The outer parts each contain five movements, while the central panel has two movements. That symmetry typifies Messiaen’s fascination with palindromic patterns of duration, a principal feature of his approach to rhythm and the larger rhythm of form.

Part One of Des canyons aux étoiles... opens with a solo for horn in Le désert (The Desert). This music, Messiaen noted, evokes the desert and its corresponding “emptiness of the soul which allows it to perceive the inner conversations of the spirit.” We also hear several birds and the sound of the wind.

Les orioles (The Orioles) is a movement based entirely on the songs of orioles found in the western United States, different birds represented by the piano, xylorimba and orchestra, respectively.

Ce qui est écrit sur les étoiles (What is Written in the Stars) finds Messiaen taking verses from The Book of Daniel (Chapter 5, Verses 25–28) as his inspiration. These are fierce in their prophecy that “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it” and “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” The orchestra intones an abstract invocation of these words. Other elements include a chorale for brass and a dazzling concert of birdsongs.

The titular bird in Le cossyphe d'Heuglin (The White-Browed Robin) is native not to the American west but to southeast Africa, and its representation in an extended piano solo is for purely musical reasons. It is, Messiaen noted, “a wonderful songbird.”

Cedar Breaks, like Bryce Canyon, is a huge amphitheater carved into the side of a plateau — less colorful but deeper, wilder and more austere. These qualities, Messiaen said, “imbued in me a feeling very close to that of Awe ... The Holy Scriptures tell us that ‘Awe is the beginning of Wisdom.’” The composer conveyed the experience in Cedar Breaks et le don de crainte (Cedar Breaks and the Gift of Awe), a movement encompassing birdsong, the sound of the wind and a majestic pronouncement by the full orchestra of invocations that, Messiaen explained, praise God’s holiness.

Part Two begins with Appel interstellaire (Interstellar Call). The solitude of the desert evoked in the opening measures of Des canyons aux étoiles... now becomes the solitude of interstellar space. This movement brings another extended solo for horn.

Messiaen intended Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange (Bryce Canyon and the Orange-Red Rocks) to capture the profusion of colors in the sandstone of Bryce Canyon. Those colors also suggested to him the vision of the Holy City described by St. John in his Apocalypse (Chapter 21, Verses 19–20).

Part Three opens with Les ressuscités et le chant de l'étoile Aldébaran (The Resurrected and the Song of the Star Aldebaran), a movement that gives us the song of Aldebaran, brightest star in the constellation Taurus. It sings in a languid, even sensuous voice, its long phrases embroidered with birdsongs. The whole is very much like the sixth movement, “Garden of the Sleep of Love,” in Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie, and is informed by the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verses 41–42: “For one star differs from another in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead.”

Le moqueur polyglotte (The Mockingbird) is a second movement for solo piano based entirely on bird songs.

The particular birdcall of La grive des bois (The Wood Thrush) outlines a cheerful major triad, given here in its “ideal” form by horn and, in more ornithologically correct form, by piccolo and percussion. “For me,” Messiaen stated, “the song of the Wood Thrush stands as the symbol of that archetype God intended for us [but] which we more or less misrepresent in our worldly life.” The avian song is answered by the rushing wind and the more complex songs of other thrushes.

Omao, Leiothrix, Elepaio, Shama takes its name from four birds found in the Hawaiian Islands, and their songs punctuate both the vigorous horn melody heard at the outset of the movement and its subsequent variations. The resulting music is extraordinarily colorful and complex, including not only the songs of these and other birds, but Hindu rhythms, novel instrumental techniques and a substantial piano cadenza.

Like the Mormon pioneers who discovered it, Messiaen viewed Zion Canyon as a reflection of heaven. Throughout Zion Park et la Cité céleste (Zion Park and the Celestial City) — Part Three's final movement and Des canyons aux étoiles...'s conclusion — a chorale for orchestra alternates with a mélange of birdsong.

© Paul Schiavo 2022