Turangalîla-symphonie
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born in Avignon, France, on December 10, 1908, and died in Paris on April 27, 1992. Serge Koussevitzky via the Koussevitzky Music Foundation commissioned the work that was to become the Turangalîla-symphonie in 1945. Messiaen began work on July 17, 1946, and completed it on November 29, 1948. The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Bernstein’s direction gave the first performances on December 2 and 3, 1949, followed by the New York premiere on December 10, during Charles Munch’s first year as BSO music director. Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s future wife, was the piano soloist; Ginette Martenot, sister of the inventor of the instrument, played the ondes Martenot part. Messiaen made orchestrational revisions to the score in 1990.
The score of Turangalîla-symphonie calls for solo piano and ondes Martenot, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, piccolo trumpet, cornet, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion (glockenspiel, celesta, vibraphone, tubular bells, triangle, Turkish cymbal, Chinese cymbal, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, tam-tam, maracas, woodblock, three temple blocks, tambourine, Provençal tambourine, snare drum, bass drum), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). Duration of the piece is about 80 minutes.
“This work is a love song.” (Olivier Messiaen, program notes for the world premiere performance)
“It is one of my richest works in terms of findings, it is also the most melodic, the warmest, the most dynamic and the most colored.” (Olivier Messiaen in conversation with Claude Samuel)
Today’s composers can only dream of the commission that the French composer Olivier Messiaen received in 1945 from Serge Koussevitzky: “compose the work as you like, in any style and length, with the instrumentation you would like, and I impose no time limit for you to deliver the work.” While Messiaen was not completely unknown in the United States—Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra had already performed one of his compositions as early as 1936—his reputation was then mostly limited to France, where his works were indeed receiving more and more attention and where, ultimate consecration, he obtained a succès de scandale at the premiere of his Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine.
What Olivier Messiaen submitted was undoubtedly far beyond what Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra expected, as the new work exceeded everything the composer had written until then: a ten-movement, eighty-minute, at times boisterous if not downright carnal symphony for a monumental orchestra including a large percussion section plus a virtuoso piano part and the ondes Martenot, the electronic instrument invented in 1928. In the program notes published on the evening of the world premiere of the Turangalîla-symphonie (the official title), Messiaen explained that “the three keyboard instruments, glockenspiel, celesta, and vibraphone, have a special role similar to that of an East Indian gamelan…. The percussion, very complicated, perform a true rhythmic counterpoint. In addition, an ondes Martenot solo…dominates the orchestra with its expressive voice. Finally, a part for piano solo which is extremely difficult is designed to point up (“diamanter”) the orchestra with brilliance, with chord clusters and bird songs, thus making the Turangalîla-symphonie almost a concerto for piano and orchestra.”
Messiaen started work on the symphony in July 1946, in the middle of Parisian postwar euphoria, and completed it in November 1948. The Turangalîla-symphonie stands in the middle of his “Tristan” trilogy, which also includes the song-cycle Harawi, chant d’amour et de mort (1945) and Cinq Rechants (1948). In an interview with French musicologist Claude Samuel, Messiaen said that, with those works, he wanted to portray “the idea of a fatal love, of an irresistible love, of a love which, in principle, leads to death and which in a sense calls for death; for it is a love that transcends the body and the spirit, and extends to the cosmos.” In retrospect, it is also possible to see in Messiaen’s Tristan trilogy the expression of the complex and probably not guilt-free feelings he was starting to experience for his pupil and soon-to-be muse (and later wife), the pianist Yvonne Loriod, while his first wife, the violinist and composer Claire Delbos (1906-1959) was institutionalized with steadily declining health.
As for the exotic title made of two Sanskrit words that he chose for his new work, Messiaen offered the explanation: “Lila literally means play, but play in the sense of divine action on the cosmos, the play of creation, of destruction and reconstruction, the play of life and death. Lila is also Love. Turanga is Time, the time which runs like a galloping horse, time which slips like sand through the hourglass. Turanga is movement and rhythm. Turangalîla then signifies at one and the same time, a love song, a hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death.”
Inevitably, Messiaen must have felt that the biggest pitfall associated with such a gigantic work was the potential lack of unity. He therefore adopted the tried principle of the cyclic form, in which themes, melodies or thematic materials are used in more than one movement as a unifying device. He identified four cyclical themes that reappear throughout his symphony. The first two can be heard in the first movement and, in accordance with the old classical principle, are markedly contrasting. We first hear the “statue theme,” thus named because, according to the composer, it has “the heavy, terrifying brutality of old Mexican monuments. It has always evoked for me some terrible and fatal statue,” exposed fortissimo by the trombones “in ponderous thirds.” Then comes the “flower theme,” “given to the caressing clarinets pianissimo, [and] in two voices, like two eyes reflecting each other…. The most appropriate image here is that of some flower. One thinks of the tender orchid, the decorative fuchsia, the red gladiolus, the pliant corn lily.” Two additional themes also play a significant role: the “theme of love,” which according to the composer is “the most important of all” and is heard for the first time in the languorous sixth movement; and an abstract, chord-based theme without explicit symbolic significance, used as a basis for various backgrounds.
The Turangalîla-symphonie occupies a central position within Messiaen’s production and can be considered both an overview of his career until then and a starting point toward new perspectives. Several of the elements that were either already or soon to be part of his musical language can be found in the Turangalîla: birdsongs (especially in the sixth movement), although here they are stylized and idealized compared with Messiaen’s later works for which he will patiently transcribe birdsongs and even identify them in the score; Hindu rhythms and Greek metres; “rhythmical characters,” a concept initially observed in Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, in which motives act like the characters in a theatrical play and who, when interacting, evolve, mature, and even transform themselves; and several personal rhythmical devices Messiaen refers to as “non-retrogradable rhythm” and “rhythmic canon.”
What could in less expert hands be a mere exhibition of heterogeneous and sometimes hardly compatible devices, novel effects, and instrumental virtuosity rolled into naive religious mysticism, becomes here a musical tour-de-force that, far from eschewing excesses, uses them to express a quasi-psychedelic sound-world of ecstasy echoing the intimate thoughts of a man who sees in the act of love “a reflection, a pale reflection
but nevertheless a reflection of the only true love, Divine Love” and for whom, to quote Virgil Thompson, “the content he likes is the conclusive, the ecstatic, the cataclysmic, the terrifying, the unreal.”
The Turangalîla-symphonie was premiered on December 2, 1949, in Boston with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Yvonne Loriod was the piano soloist and Ginette Martenot (the sister of the instrument’s inventor) played the ondes Martenot. Earlier that same year, Olivier Messiaen came for the first time in Tanglewood where he taught composition and analysis (he would come again in 1975). Despite the seemingly apparent affinity between the exuberant work and the conductor, Bernstein neither recorded nor conducted it after the initial concerts in Boston and New York, although a thirty-minute recording of a rehearsal has surfaced, allowing a short albeit fascinating glimpse of the gigantic task the musicians then faced. One-time Tanglewood Fellow and future BSO Music Director Seiji Ozawa made an important recording of the work in 1967 and led the BSO in the first Tanglewood performance of the piece, the orchestra’s contribution to that year’s Festival of Contemporary Music. Today, more than twenty recordings and regular performances around the world are overwhelming testimonies to the popularity of the most fascinating, endearing, surreal, colorful, and joyful musical works of the 20th century.
Jean-Pascal Vachon
Based in Vienna, Canada-born musicologist Jean-Pascal Vachon is booklet editor at BIS Records.
