observer and not stirring. In the same way three
rhythmic groups are in action: the first augments (this
is the attacking character); the second diminishes (this
is the character who is attacked); the third never
changes (this is the character who stands aside).”
It is hard not to draw parallels between this musical
triangle and one that was going on in the composer’s
personal life. Messiaen describedTurangalîlaas the second
work in hisTristantrilogy – which began with his 1945
work for soprano and pianoHarawiand ended with
theCinq Rechantsfor 12 unaccompanied voices – works
inspired by the tragically ill-fated love of Tristan and Isolde.
“Harawiis the story of a doomed love,”Hill explains.
“The lovers in the cycle are fated to be parted in death,
but being Messiaen of course, they will meet again
and be reunited somewhere beyond the stars.”
Messiaen’s fascination with doomed love stemmed, in
part, from the condition of his wife Claire Delbos.“The
evidence is clear that from the early 1940s onward she was
developing a serious mental condition, probably an early
onset dementia,”explains Hill.“We can seeHarawias being
Messiaen’s impassioned farewell to a wife who is slipping
away from him, into a world of her own.”
To complicate matters further, Messiaen met the pianist
Yvonne Loriod, who would go on to be the soloist in the
premiere ofTurangalîla, and whom Messiaen would one day
marry. “He met Loriod in 1941 when he started to teach at
the Conservatoire. He’d been sent back after nine months
as a prisoner of war,”explains Hill. “He was completely
bowled over by her piano playing, and I think we can safely
say that he fell in love with her. She confirmed that to me
when I asked her, and there’s no doubt in the photographs
- the private snapshots taken of them at the time. They’re
just going for a walk in the country but there’s a kind of
complicity between them, which suggests they were in love.”
“So there was this triangle going on,”says Hill,“and
one can well imagine there was a tremendous sense of
guilt about it because Messiaen was a devout Catholic,
as indeed were Loriod and Claire. There was no question
of being unfaithful – sexually unfaithful – to his wife, but
there was no doubt that he was in love with two women.”
The guilt comes through in the music.“Harawihas
within it this terrific sense of threat and doom and these
images, for example, of decapitation and the threat of
the mountains,”Hill explains.“The claustrophobia, the
dark shadows that fall over the music and the lovers.”
This sense of guilt and horror carries over into the
second work in the Tristan trilogy as well.“Of course
there are no words, but there is a sense of almost manic
activity inTurangalîla, which is relieved by these colossal
outbreaks of joy, passion and ecstasy,”says Hill.
“Loriod was still very, very young,”Hill explains.“She
was 21 in January 1945, a few days before she gave the
premiere of theVingt Regards, which is pianistically, still,
an almost superhumanly difficult piece. And she could
do it. This was somebody full of vitality, youthfulness,
abundance of talent, tremendous intelligence, energy,
everything. Whereas the poor first wife was slipping away
into the darkness of dementia. It’s quite a dramatic story.”Messiaen brings this drama into the music, drawing on
two works by Edgar Allan Poe. In the seventh movement,
Turangalîla 2, there is a theme made up of chords.“As the
theme is repeated in a kind of rotation,”Hill explains,
“the value of the rests between the chords diminishes
progressively, and the later chords get swallowed up by
the earlier chords, as if they were consumed.”
“Messiaen tells us that he was imagining Poe’s storyThe
Pit and the Pendulum,”Hill says,“whereby the prisoner is in
this torture pit and the walls are too hot to touch, and they
are gradually closing in on him, millimetre by millimetre.
And above is a pendulum on the end of which is a knife
or a scimitar, which is again millimetre by millimetre
descending towards him. And he’s trapped.”
The troubling beauty of the sixth movement,Garden
of Love’s Sleep, also owes something to Poe.“It has this
gorgeously lush love song at the beginning with the strings
and the ondes martenot, and wonderful lush Messiaen
harmonies,”Hill says.“And then the piano has these slow-
motion bird calls, which in fact quote the nightingale music
from the first movement of theQuartet for the End of Time.”
“Meanwhile the woodwind solos have these slow
motion traceries, which could be birdsong melodies or
delineating plants and flowers in the enchanted garden,”
he says.“And finally, in the second half of the piece, you
get these processes on percussion which travel forwards
and are then retrograded – you hear them backwards – so
it’s as if time goes forwards and then time goes backward.”
This distorted sense of time is explained by a reference in
Messiaen’s notes to Poe’sLigeia, a tale in which a nameless
narrator marries a beautiful and intelligent woman – Ligeia- who eventually falls ill and dies. The narrator remarries,
but his second wife, Rowena, soon falls ill and she too
THEPRISONERISINTHISTORTUREPIT
ANDTHEWALLSARETOOHOT,ANDTHEY
ARE GRADUALLY CLOSING IN ON HIM
Above: Salvador Dalí’s
Tristan and Isolde (194 4)54 LIMELIGHT MAY 2017 http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au
OTURANGALÎLA