From Music for the Radio to a Piano Cycle: Sources for the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus

The strange genesis of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, first conceived as an accompaniment for a radio play by Maurice Toesca, has received close investigation in studies by Edward Forman and Siglind Bruhn. ¹ In addition to these studies, two new sources have led to the need for the present synthesis that reconstructs more precisely how, during the first half of 1944 in occupied Paris, Messiaen came back to the subject of Christ’s Nativity, which had previously inspired La Nativité du Seigneur, written in 1935.