- The Vocal Score for Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise
"When I was ten, he [Jehan de Gibon] also gave me a score of Pelléas et Mélisande. That was something quite unlike the Estampes! A provincial teacher had placed a veritable bomb in the hands of a mere child" (Olivier Messiaen, Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel, trans. E. Thomas Glasow [Portland, OR: Amadeus, 1994], 110). The gift of the vocal score for Pelléas et Mélisande is among the most striking of Messiaen's favored anecdotes from his childhood. The opera was less than two decades old and, as Messiaen recalled in 1952, "at the time it was the height of daring (rather like serial music, or musique concrète, or a sonata by Pierre Boulez nowadays)" (Obituary for Jehan de Gibon in L'echo du Pays de Redon, 26 January 1952, cited by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone, Messiaen [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005], 15). The young Messiaen fell in love with the score, repeatedly playing through it, singing all of the parts, and it became a staple of his classes at the Paris Conservatoire. Nearly a century later, a modern-day Jehan de Gibon could present the vocal score of Messiaen's own opera, Saint François d'Assise, though a ten-year-old might buckle under the weight.
Saint François is a large work in every respect, so it is little surprise that the four volumes of its vocal score collectively tip the scales at eight-and-a-quarter pounds, each coming close to the two-and-a-quarter pounds of the vocal score of Pelléas et Mélisande. Using a more conventional measure, the Saint François vocal score contains just short of 1,000 pages, the volumes consisting respectively of 244, 187, 231, and 269 pages of music along with the initial identical pages listing the characters and providing a brief synopsis. For comparison, the manuscript full score weighs about twenty-five pounds and contains approximately 2,500 pages, while the printed full score (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1988-92) runs to 1,450 pages not including the 20 or so pages in each of the eight...