The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond

Introduction

Introduction Is what is convincing also true? This classic question often preoccupied me when leaving the concert hall or church where, just before, a work by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (Avignon, December 10, 1908–Paris, April 27, 1992) had been performed. The question seems naı̈ve, because the occasion is so evidently about experiencing a work of art that is manufactured , shaped by human hands, not a religious, sacramental ritual. Nonetheless , the great power of some of Messiaen’s work still forces this question on the listener—and I am not alone in this respect. The euphoric ovations or reverent testimony of the audience of, for example, performances of Messiaen ’s oratory La Transfiguration in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1991, or the concert performance of his opera Saint François d’Assise in 2000 (in the same venue), might point to an experience of something ‘‘other,’’ something that cannot simply be ascribed to musical persuasion.1 The question, then, is whether the musical experience of the work of Messiaen merely results from ingenious rhetorical techniques, or whether something else—or something more—is the matter, and, if indeed something more is the matter, whether this surplus should be understood in terms of Messiaen’s religious program (which the audience is presumably aware of, if not through the music then by means of the program notes), or rather in terms of a surplus in the aesthetic experience, an excess that can no longer be described in terms of beautiful persuasion. In this respect, the words of the (probably) first-century author Longinus provide food for thought. In his tract on the sublime, Peri hypsous, he points to an alternative for persuasion: The effect of elevated language is not to persuade the hearers, but to entrance them; and at all times, and in every way, what transports us with wonder is more telling than what merely persuades or gratifies us. The extent to which we can be persuaded is usually under our own control, but these sublime passages exert an irresistible force and mastery, and get the upper hand with every hearer. Inventive skill and the proper order and disposition of material 1 2 Introduction are not manifested in a good touch here and there, but reveal themselves by slow degrees as they run through the whole composition; on the other hand, a well-timed stroke of sublimity scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt , and in a flash reveals the full power of the speaker.2 With this structure of overwhelming, the sublime seems to show the way to describing the intense experience in listening to Messiaen’s work. Because it is a phenomenon that has always been closely connected to religion, the question of the truth of this experience is easy to understand. The last words in the quotation, however, yet again point to the problematics of answering the question of truth, and now in a more disconcerting and ambivalent way. The conclusion that the whole spectacle reveals the power of the speaker, and perhaps not of (divine) truth, indicates an aporia, because if the force of persuasion still could be reduced to (musical-rhetorical) argumentation , here we have a phenomenon that appears as an enigma, a flash, a thunderbolt. It becomes manifest in the manner of an irrational, (pseudo-) religious revelation; it presents itself as coming ‘‘from the beyond,’’ but it is, according to Longinus, also at once a sign of the force of genius, the speaker, the deft illusionist. The notion of the sublime, which as such seems to be such an apt concept for the music of Messiaen, entails the question of the boundary between truth and technique, between revelation and construction ; and between religion, philosophy, and art. How to decide on the overwhelming of La Transfiguration or Saint François d’Assise as the event of truth, on the one hand, but on the other as a sublime truth effect, the apparent event of truth in the manner of as if? The question of this distinction is central to this book. Is what is musically overwhelming also true? The starting point in elaborating this question is formed by a lecture that Messiaen delivered in Paris, in 1977. Here, he states that a ‘‘breakthrough toward the beyond’’ is possible in music, and in his music particularly. This would be related to seeing colors inwardly when hearing certain chords and clusters (synesthesia), and to the experience of an inner ‘‘dazzlement’’ (éblouissement) that might...