ABSTRACT

Although Olivier Messiaen’s fondness for birds is far better known than his affinity for mountains, his music is nonetheless filled with a geological theme. Both birds and mountains connote high elevation and lead toward the heavens, but birds sing rapidly in a high tessitura, while rocks and mountains complement them with a ponderous tempo, a low tessitura, and an absence of melody. Messiaen’s mountains represent, among other things, a form of time. He described ‘superimposed times’ in natural terms, referring to ‘the immensely long time of the stars, the very long time of mountains, the average time of man, the short time of insects, and the very short time of atoms’. 2 The Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus refers to stalactites and the Messe de la Pentecôte to caverns. A melody in Livre d’orgue traces the contours of the French Alps, the same landscape that opens the entire Catalogue d’oiseaux. The colours of Couleurs de la Cité céleste are those of gemstones listed in the Book of Revelation. The solemn, dense harmonies in Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum were his ‘chords of granite’. La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ reflects on the biblical miracle on Mount Tabor, scenes from Saint Franèois take place on Mount Verna, and Livre du Saint Sacrement contains birdsong notated on Israel’s Mount of Temptation. Shortly before composing Des Canyons aux étoiles…, Messiaen planned a ‘concerto des montagnes’ that was to name its three movements after mountains in France, Iran and Switzerland. 3 Messiaen’s commitment to the world beneath our feet even led him to invent an instrument, the geophone, to reproduce the song of the earth.