THEOLOGY


Rose Window, Notre Dame Cathedral

 

Theology - Notre Dame Address - Stained Glass - Trinite Church

In addition to faith and inspiration, Messiaen’s Catholic beliefs provided him with a model for the construction of his music. His many works that incorporate religious or mystical themes are not merely musical tone poems on the subject, but an attempt by the composer to realize his understanding of nature and the divine in the basic structures of his music. In fact, it is often difficult to separate Messiaen’s writings about his belief from those about his technique. Perhaps this is part of the reason that, though he was a teacher to and profound influence on post-war composers such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, he has largely been exempt from the polemics surrounding these composers.

Regarding this link between the spiritual and the structure of Messiaen’s music, Anthony Pople writes:
Messiaen’s calling was more that of the medieval religious craftsman: seeking technical perfection in the tangible phenomena of nature, he adopted no less factual a tone when writing about theological matters. The details of the afterlife were as real to him as the harmonic series and the ‘mysteries’ of prime numbers, and his works deal with all these things on an equal footing. 5
Messiaen on music and the divine:

“The first idea that I have wanted to express…is the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith…That is the first aspect of my work, the most noble, doubtless the most useful, the most valuable, the only one, perhaps, that I will not regret at the hour of my death.” 1

On the Quatuor:

“Its musical language is essentially immaterial, spiritual and Catholic. Modes which achieve a kind of tonal ubiquity, melodically and harmonically, here draw the listener towards eternity in space or the infinite. Special rhythms, beyond meter, contribute powerfully in dismissing the temporal.” 5

“With regard to the apocalyptic character (of the Quatuor), to regard the Revelation merely as an accumulation of cataclysms and catastrophes is to understand it poorly; the Revelation also contains great and marvelous lights, followed by solemn silences. Moreover, my initial thought was of the abolition of time itself, something infinitely mysterious and incomprehensible to most of the philosophers of the time, from Plato to Bergson…” 5

Concerning his pre-concert lecture given in the stalag:

“I told them first of all that this quartet was written for the end of time, not as a play on words about the time of captivity, but for the ending of concepts of past and future: that is, for the beginning of eternity, and that in this I relied on the magnificent text of the Revelation…” 5

Rhythm as cosmology:

“Suppose that there were a single beat in all the universe. One beat; with eternity before it and eternity after it. A before and an after. That is the birth of time. Imagine then, almost immediately, a second beat. Since any beat is prolonged in the silence that follows it, the second beat will be longer than the first. Another number, another duration. That is the birth of Rhythm.” 5

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