ABSTRACT
Sept Haikai: esquisses Japonaises pour piano solo et petit orchestre, published in 1966, was the first work to appear after Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod's long delayed marriage of 1961. Messiaen then elaborated on the programme of Sept Haikai when he was interviewed by Claude Samuel in the 1960s and 1980s, but by far the most detailed account did not appear until the posthumous publication of his Traite V/ii in 2000. If Messiaen was simply interested in the depiction of a Buddhist icon, he could have chosen other things, for instance, the monolithic Buddha statue of the Todaiji, one of the key Buddhist monuments in the Nara park. Messiaen's mapping of the left and right custodian kings to the 'Introduction' and 'Coda' may strike us as a rather odd and risky idea; none of the other pieces carries a programme that can be pinned down to just one specific object.
