ABSTRACT
In 1944, Olivier Messiaen completed the Trois petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine. His text is nearly pantheistic in its claims for divine immanence in the historical world of space and time. As many memorial plaques scattered throughout the city centre attest today, the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 was achieved only after a brutal urban battle. The brutal year of 1944 produced not only the Trois petites Liturgies, it also witnessed Messiaen's manifesto written at age 36: Technique de mon langage musical. The Symbolist movement was distinct from Catholic Revivalism as well as intimately related to it. Messiaen's invocation of the Surrealists Pierre Reverdy and Paul Éluard whisks us quickly from the fin-de-siecle into the vortex of the Jazz Age. Surrealism was a kind of terrestrial transcendence. It foregrounded the fantastical and the uncanny, the capacity of everyday reality to shock us into the awareness that our rational 'waking life' is not in control.
