Olivier Messiaen, 83; Faith Guided Composer’s Music

Olivier Messiaen, considered France’s greatest living composer for his melding of Oriental music, avian singing and exotic rhythms influenced by his deep faith, died Tuesday.

Associates said the 83-year-old had undergone surgery Monday at a Paris hospital. Details of his death were not immediately available.

Messiaen’s work has been described by adjectives ranging from “voluptuous and contemplative” to “mystic and austere.”

His lexicon of music, begun with a simple song when he was only 8, mushroomed to fugues, chants, Masses, tone poems and operas, perhaps the best known of which is “St. Francois d’Assise,” a lengthy, complex 1983 work praised by many critics.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who will conduct a performance of the work in Salzburg this summer, said on learning of Messiaen’s death:

“Olivier Messiaen was one of the great independent spirits in the history of music. . . . Unaffected by the mainstream of the avant-garde, he always pursued a singular musical and spiritual goal, qualities which for him were inseparable.

“It feels very difficult to imagine life in a world where we now no longer await the prospect of hearing a new Messiaen piece.”

Religion was considered the single greatest motivator for Messiaen’s music, in his secular as well his many sacred compositions. He had vowed as a youth to make Roman Catholic dogma the basis of all his work.

Beyond Messiaen’s writing was his teaching.

As a professor at the prestigious Paris Conservatory for nearly four decades, he left an indelible mark on some of the 20th Century’s leading musical figures, including his students Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Tuesday, Boulez called Messiaen the “greatest musician of his generation.”

Messiaen was born in Avignon into an intellectual family--his father was a translator of English literature and his mother a poet who composed a book of verses for her as yet unborn son.

He had mastered the piano at a young age and at 11 enrolled at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied organ, improvisation and composition, winning first prizes in all three categories.

He graduated in 1930 and was named organist of the Church of the Trinity in Paris in 1931.

There he shocked the traditional parishioners with his highly emotional style of playing psalms.

“My music was far below the violence of the psalms they were reading,” he said.

At about this time Messiaen began delving into the exotic music of the Greeks and Hindus and the rhythms of China, Japan, Bolivia and Bali.

He was developing a lifelong belief that music was closely linked to other disciplines, including philosophy, religion and folklore.

He also noted and classified by species and habitat the singing of birds, traveling widely to record the sounds that often became parts of his sometimes perplexing scores.

With Andre Jolivet, Yves Baudrier and Daniel Lesur he organized a group called La Jeune France, which promoted modern French music. But World War II interrupted his writing and in 1939 he joined the French Army.

He was an early prisoner of war and while in a German camp wrote and performed with three fellow prisoners his “Quartet for the End of Time.”

He wrote later that the perpetual undernourishment gave him “colored dreams” full of “halos and strange swirls of color.”

Messiaen was repatriated in 1941 and permitted to resume his organist post at the Church of the Trinity. He became professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatory in 1948 and that year came to the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, Mass., where young American composers fell under his influence.

In 1978, more than 100 concerts of his work were given around the world in a period of three months.

His best-known works include “L’Ascension” for orchestra (1935), “La Nativite du Seigneur” (1936), “Le Banquet Celeste” (1936), “Le Corps Glorieux” for organ (1939), “Visions de l’Amen” for two pianos (1943), “Oiseaux Exotiques” (1956) and “Turangalila” (1946-48), a symphony in 10 movements regarded as one of his most elaborate expressions of religious faith.

Messiaen’s last composition was an eight-minute work called “Sourire,” written last year to commemorate the bicentennial of Mozart’s death.

Although he had achieved fame, Messiaen lamented what he saw as a lack of public understanding of his music.

“I speak about faith to people who don’t have any, about birds to people who don’t like them, about rhythm to people who understand nothing, and about sonorous colors to people who see nothing,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death.

Messiaen was married to the pianist Yvonne Loriod, a principal interpreter of his work.