Messiaen

by Peter Hill, Nigel Simeone

The French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) is a musician about whom most remains to be discovered. More than a decade after his death our knowledge of Messiaen is largely conditioned by what he said about himself in lectures and interviews, in his work as a teacher, and in the monumental seven-volume treatise that encompassed the whole of his composing world. But Messiaen’s public documents conceal as much as they reveal, seldom explaining why a work was written or what complexities went into its making. The composer was similarly reticent about his private life.This is the first book to explore the world that Messiaen was at pains to keep hidden. Based upon unprecedented access to Messiaen’s private archive granted to the authors by the composer’s widow, Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone trace the origins of many of Messiaen’s greatest works and place them in the context of his life, from his years at the Paris Conservatoire and his passionate first marriage to Claire Delbos through the immense achievements of his final decades.

Genres: Music, Biography

450 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2005

About the author

Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield.

Reviews

[Richard Wolff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Admirably full of detail about Messiaen's life and work, the writing suffers from too frequent excerpts from source material that might have been better used to shape a coherent, toned narrative, but as is often take away from providing a unified, focused composition.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over a nearly 70-year career the French composer Olivier Messiaen gave the world a number of monumental works, usually ascribing their quality to divine inspiration. While Messiaen was one of the major composers of the 20th century, he really let little slip about his personal life or the process of composition. After his death in 1992, his widow Yvonne Loriod began to open up his archives, revealing the inner man behind the hype. MESSIAEN (Yale University Press, 2005) by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone is the first biography to take into account Messiaen's private papers and a great number of never-before-seen photographs. It vastly expands our knowledge of Messiaen's life and work.

Hill and Simeone have really succeeded in writing an exemplary musical biography, giving equal attention to the life of the composer and the specifics of his musical output as it relates to his life. The musical details are described in terms understandable by the layman with some minimal level of musical education, and except for the composer's manuscripts used as simple illustrations, there are no score samples used. Furthermore, while even new musical biographies (e.g. Kurtz's SOFIA GUBAIDULINA: A Biography) treat only the composer's journeys to and opinions of concert performances, Hill and Simeone give abundant space to recordings of Messiaen's music.

The new light shed on Messiaen here includes details of the creative process from the abundant notebooks he kept. We can finally see the steps towards masterpieces like "Oiseaux exotiques" or "Chronochromie". Information on the writing of "La Transfiguration" is augmented by the exhaustive correspondence between Messiaen and his exasperated patroness at the Gulbenkian Foundation. The most noteworthy of the information Hill and Simeone provide on Messiaen's personal life is the story of his first wife Claire Delbos' early breakdown and death, apparently some kind of terrible physical neural degeration instead of the usual rumour of garden-variety madness.

I've often found Messiaen's works challenging, with his monumental structures and arcane religious themes being somewhat daunting compared to the total abstraction and conciseness of other avant-garde composers. This biography by Hill and Simeone has helped me become more comfortable with Messiaen's oeuvre, and so as a musical biography I think it immensely successful.

[charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant... I have so much more appreciation - though he was already my favourite composer - for Messiaen's music after reading this

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book much more than I actually did. Perhaps it was the way in which I read it that caused confusion: I started reading it in 2014, then took about a two year break when I returned the book to the library and moved away for a job. When I checked it out again and tried to start where I left off, I couldn't get back into it and was confused, since I remembered enjoying reading it when I first started.

My two theories on that:
1. My literary preferences changed in the between time
2. I had just finished The Rest is Noise, which puts the music as the main cast of characters and the composers are merely the people who make the music happen. In this book, music is just the central aspect to Messiaen's life, rather than the protagonist in its own right.

NOTE: if you love primary sources, you'll love this book. There are some chapters where it feels like there is more text from excerpts of letters and articles than text written by the authors. Perhaps the abundance of primary sources contributed to me getting restless with the book: biography readers are not the intended audience for private letters and newspaper and biography readers have different goals when reading an article.