ABSTRACT
Artistically, it shows an exhilarating creative response to what was for Messiaen a very particular technical challenge, one that drew results from him that were radical and, in their individual way, astonishing. This chapter presents a very different kind of vividness and exuberance in Messiaen music, as well as many quieter moments of a strange and haunting tranquillity. It also explores the darker, less obvious world, an expressionistic world, essentially, though pointedly surrealist in its rhetoric, of ambiguous and disturbing emotion refered to as the phrase 'spiritual violence'. The song cycle Harawi and the Cinq Rechants frame, chronologically speaking, the enormous and very brilliant orchestral machine that is the Turangalila-Symphonie. The tacit assumption that Harawi expresses Messiaen's secret and illicit love for Loriod was neatly, and perspicaciously, turned upside down by Hill and Simeone, who instead saw this 'song of love and death' as a great leave-taking from Claire of the most poignant and impassioned kind.
