Incarnation and Eschaton in Olivier Messiaen's Le Verbe

When asked about the sorts of impressions that French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) wished to communicate in composing, and the impressions he wanted to convey to those who listened to his work, he replied that "the first idea I wanted to express, the most important, is the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith.. . . The illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and no doubt the most useful and most valuable—perhaps the only one I won't regret at the hour of my death."¹ One need only view Paul Festa's independent film, Apparition of the Eternal Church, to recognize that Messiaen's music successfully accomplishes his mission. In the film, Ron Gallman, then director of education for the San Francsico Symphony and a featured voice in Festa's book, Oh My God: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever,² states, while listening to Messiaen's composition Apparition de l'Église Éternelle, "It evokes, on the one hand, something very earthy, and earthly, yet even as deep as it is, it also in a strange way evokes something celestial."³ As the film further demonstrates, Gallman is by no means alone in his impressions. In an essay treating Messiaen's 1969 Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité, Ingolf Dalferth suggests that the "rich musical tapestry full of symbolic meaning" that is present in the music is not immediately accessible to the listener. What we hear is magnificent music, not a musical treatise on (natural) theology. The listener does not hear the elaborate symbolic structures that underlie this music. It is beautiful, it moves the heart and it creates feelings that may be described as religious. But it does not convey the theological information that has gone into its composition, and only those who have studied its "grammar" will actually realize what has gone into the music and what is going on in it.⁴

Few studies, however, have been directed toward the theological content of Messiaen's work, and as such, its single-most important element, Messiaen's theological compositional intent, remains underappreciated by those who hear and perform it.⁵ The theological study of one of Messiaen's scores, however, is a rather daunting undertaking, and not necessarily one for which most musicians are readily trained. What follows in this article, therefore, is an attempt to render the theology and music of one work in such a way that on the one hand, musicians might better understand what Messiaen was attempting to accomplish in his composition, and on the other hand, that theologians might better understand how Messiaen accomplished his task.⁶ That work is Le Verbe, a musical essay on the Incarnation, Christology, and eschatology, and which serves as the fourth meditation from Messiaen's 1935 organ composition, La Nativité du Seigneur: Neuf Méditations pour Orgue.

As is the case with the majority of Messiaen's published organ compositions, Le Verbe is introduced by a scripturally based preface: "The Lord said to me: You are my Son. From his bosom, before the dawn existed, he engendered me. I am the Image of the goodness of God, I am the Word of life, from the beginning" (Ps 2, Ps 109, Wis 7, and 1 Jn).⁷ In general, the prefatory texts are attempts by Messiaen to direct the listener and performer not just through the performance of the piece, but as John Milsom has suggested, "through the music towards a deeper communion with the divine."⁸ The preface for Le Verbe is no exception. The music attempts to describe the relationship of Christ, the Word, to the Father as well as to the world into which the Word enters. Messiaen articulated this belief well:

Christ appeared in order to lead us from the visible to love of the invisible. Christ the man can be represented, not Christ the God. God is not representable. He is not even expressible. When we say, "God is eternal," do we think about the significance...