ABSTRACT
In 1945, musical life in France was very much as it had been before the war. The two of the most influential figures in post-war European music, Olivier Messiaen and his pupil Pierre Boulez, have been Frenchmen. In different ways, the careers of these two men illuminate many of the problems and contradictions that have dogged French musical life for more than 200 years. Passionately interested in exploring new territory, the young Messiaen, who studied at the Conservatoire from 1919-1930, was a product of this system, but found no place in it as a teacher. Messiaen became a highly influential teacher, both at the Conservatoire and privately at the home of Guy Bernard Delapierre, an Egyptologist and composer of film music whom he had met in the camps. Messiaen provided an environment in which not only the music of acknowledged twentieth-century masters but also that of the Second Viennese School was studied seriously for the first time in France.
