About this Piece

“Messiaen is a full-fledged romantic. Form is nothing to him, content everything, and the kind of content he likes is the convulsive, the ecstatic, the cataclysmic, the terrifying, the unreal.... The faults of his taste are obvious; and the traps, of mystical program music, though less so, are well known to musicians, possibly even to himself. Nevertheless, the man is a great composer. One has only to hear his music beside that of any of the standard eclectic modernists to know that. Because his really vibrates, and theirs doesn’t.” —Virgil Thomson

Thomson (1896–1989), the brilliantly waspish American composer-critic, wrote these words in the late 1940s, as part of an essay on Messiaen’s work to that point. His irreverently enthusiastic reception of music he deeply admired serves as a healthy antidote to the off-putting worshipfulness that has come to surround this most accessible—entertaining and sexy and original—composer who, as Thomson put it elsewhere, “shows the determination to produce somewhere in every piece an apotheosis destined at once to open up the heavens and to bring down the house.”

Conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, in his Orientations, remarked on the all-embracing nature of Messiaen’s artistic outlook: “[Messiaen] has opened windows not only on Europe, but on the whole world, on civilizations as remote in space as in time. He has thought of the distinguishing marks of any civilization not as barriers but as possible links. Living in a world so much inclined to exclusive nationalism that neighbors, by their very existence, were thought of primarily as enemies and aggressors, Messiaen has been willing to accept freely everything that could enrich him, broaden his vision, or increase his potential strength.”

Among the basic components of the “Messiaen style”is the influence of Debussy, initially by way of his Pelléas et Mélisande. The precocious 10-year-old Messiaen, a self-taught pianist with a phenomenal musical memory, received the score of Debussy’s opera as a gift: “A provincial teacher [of harmony, Jehan de Gibon] had placed a veritable bomb in the hands of a mere child,” the composer recalled in a 1980 interview. “It was love at first sight. I sang it, played it, sang it again. That was probably the most decisive influence I’ve received.” It led to his first published composition, a set of piano pieces with a Debussy-like title and stylistic orientation, Huit Préludes (1929).

Familiarity with the entire Debussy oeuvre led to a fascination with musical styles of Eastern Asia. To these, Messiaen added elements of European music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance—of which he was both a student and a practitioner, as composer and organist.

Also notable was Messaien’s interest in birdsong, not in the manner of observers such as Beethoven, Wagner, and Mahler, but as an amateur ornithologist. He utilized “the sovereign freedom of birdsong” as an integral part of his musical thinking from the early 1950s, shortly after the composition of Turangalîla, through the end of his life, in such creations as Oiseaux exotiques (1956), Catalogue d’oiseaux (1958), and the opera about a renowned bird lover, Saint François d’Assise (1983).

Turangalîla-symphonie is a work about love—human, physical, sexual love—the centerpiece of what the composer called “a trilogy on the myth of Tristan and Isolde,” whose other components are the song cycle Harawi: Chant d’amour et de mort (1945) and the choral Cinq rechants (1948).

Turangalîla was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1945, when the Russian-born, American-based conductor Serge Koussevitzky invited Messiaen to teach composition at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.. The first performance was presented by the Boston Symphony in 1949, under the baton of Koussevitzky’s protégé the 30-year-old Leonard Bernstein.

The title Turangalîla has its origin in two Sanskrit words, “Turanga,” time—as applied to movement and rhythm—and “Lîla,” play. Messiaen found the word “Turangalîla” among a list of Indian rhythms written down by a 13th-century scholar named Śārṅgadeva, whose compilation vastly expanded Messiaen’s rhythmic vocabulary—and that of subsequent composers.

The orchestra for this 10-movement musical orgy is appropriately immense, with a spectacular array of percussion—including glockenspiel, celesta, and vibraphone—employed to create what has been referred to as a gamelan effect, referring to typical Indonesian, “soft-percussion” music; a hugely demanding solo piano part, written for Yvonne Loriod, who would become the composer’s wife; and the eerie, theremin-like keening of the ondes martenot, an electronic instrument played with a keyboard and by moving a ring along a metal ribbon to produce long, sustained notes and otherworldly glissandos.

While this is hardly a symphony in the traditional sense, there are aspects of traditional symphonic form within its landscape: The fourth movement, for instance, might be regarded as a scherzo with two trios (although the fifth movement is the real scherzo of the piece), and the ninth is a set of variations of a sort that might be found in a symphonic finale. The composer described the eighth movement as a “development section for the symphony as a whole,” although the listener would be hard put to discern this function, coming as it does so far along in the work.

Turangalîla is a depiction of the contrast of carnal, passionate love and idealistic, tender love, centered in the romantic explosion of “Joie du sang des étoiles” (Joy of the blood of the stars), the sort of wildly imaginative title that has proved catnip to the composer’s devotees, anathema to his detractors. The movement’s theme, in thirds, blasted out by the trombones and first heard at the start of the symphony, is, according to the composer, his “statue theme…evoking the terrifying brutality of Mexican monuments.” He elaborated:

“Imagine a theatrical scene. Here are three characters on stage: The first is active and has the leading role in the scene; the second is passive, acted upon by the first; the third witnesses the conflict without intervening, being only an observer and not stirring. In the same way three rhythmic groups are in action: The first augments (this is the attacking character); the second diminishes (this is the character who is attacked); the third never changes (this is the character who stands aside).”

No one has described this magnificent monster of a work better than the composer himself, dedicating it to“love that is fatal, irresistible, transcending everything, suppressing everything outside; joy that is superhuman, overwhelming, blinding, unlimited”—and echoing that most love-obsessed musical work of them all, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

—Herbert Glass