http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au MAY 2017LIMELIGHT 53
TURANGALÎLAOOlivier Messiaen’s monumentalTurangalîla-Symphoniewas a pivotal work
intheFrenchcomposer’scareer.Angus McPhersonspeaks to his biographer
Peter Hill about the personal pain behind the musical masterpiece
A
fter hearing Stravinsky’sThe Rite of Spring,
Debussy famously wrote:“It haunts me like
a beautiful nightmare, and I’ve been trying in
vain to recapture something of that terrible
impression.”For pianist and Messiaen
biographer Peter Hill, this is the phrase that comes to
mind as we speak about Olivier Messiaen’s monumental
Turangalîla-Symphonie– the French composer’s musical
orgy of love, ecstasy and death, which the Australian
World Orchestra and students from the Australian
National Academy of Music will be performing
in July under the baton of Simone Young.
Premiered in December 1949 by the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, a little under
a decade after Messiaen’s internment in
a German prisoner-of-war camp resulted
in hisQuartet for the End of Time,Turangalîla
was a commission by the orchestra’s famously
creative Music Director Serge Koussevitsky,
though it was a young Leonard Bernstein who ultimately
conducted the first performance after Koussevitsky fell ill.
The commission from Koussevitzky was a watershed
moment for Messiaen. It was his first major commission
and certainly his first overseas commission.“I think he was
on his mettle,”Hill says.“I think he was probably thrilled to
receive this commission and he was determined to
put everything of himself intoTurangalîla.”
“It’s a melting pot of all the techniques that Messiaen
had been developing over the previous 20 years,”he
explains.“I think it reflects to the highest possible
degree the extremes in Messiaen’s musical personality.
A kind of intensity of emotion, a joy, an ecstatic feeling.”
Messiaen made the most of the opportunity, scoring hislargest work to date.“He was writing for a great orchestra,”
Hill says,“and Koussevitsky possibly made the mistake of
putting no limit on the size of the orchestra. So Messiaen
calls for an orchestra of over 100, plus piano soloist and an
ondes martenot – which I’m sure Koussevitzky had not
bargained for. And he didn’t put any limit on the length
of the symphony either, so where one might expect four
movements, he got ten. It’s almost comical.”
The composer’s original conception wasn’t so grand,
however, beginning with a conventional four
movement work – what are now the first,
fourth, sixth and tenth movements – a
stand in for the first movement,scherzo,
slow movement and finale of a traditional
symphony. The work grew with the
addition of the three rhythmic ‘Turangalîla’
movements (the third, seventh and ninth)
followed by the second and eighth, and finally
the fifth movement.
The result is four movements with“love”in the title –
Chant d’Amour(Love Song) 1 and 2,Jardin du Sommeil
d’Amour(Garden of Love’s Sleep) andDéveloppement de
l’Amour(Development of Love) – and three Turangalîla
movements.“So you could experience the symphony as
being the four ‘love’ movements interleaved with the more
abstract Turangalîla movements,”says Hill,“and framed by
the Introduction and the Finale.”At the work’s centre isJoie
du Sang des Étoiles(Joy of the Blood of the Stars).
Messiaen wrote of this movement:“Imagine a theatrical
scene. Here are threepersonnages rhythmiqueson stage;
the first is active and has the leading role in the scene;
the second is passive, acted upon by the first; the third
witnesses the conflict without intervening, being only anLOVE’S
LABOURS WON
opus
Ligeia
© Harry Clarke