The composer
Olivier Messiaen was an early starter. Born in Avignon, southern France, in 1908, by the age of 11 he had entered the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Dukas, Dupré and Widor. In 1931, he was appointed organist at Paris’s Église de la Saint-Trinité, a post that he would go on to hold for 60 years – a spell only interrupted when, serving as medical auxiliary in the Second World War, he was captured and imporisoned for a year in Stalag VIII-A. There, he composed his Quartet for the End of Time, scored for the instruments available to him. He died in 1992, aged 83.
Building a Library is broadcast on Radio 3 at 9.30am each Saturday as part of Record Review. A highlights podcast is available on BBC Sounds.
The work
What must Christmas have been like in the Messiaen household? True, the French composer’s organ cycle is populated with piping shepherds, excitable angels and the stately caravanserai of the Wise Men. But it’s also a work full of is no be-tinselled festive offering in the spirit of the 18th-century French organ Noëls. It is subtitled ‘Nine meditations’ and, like JS Bach who knew a thing or two about embedding coded messages in his music, Messiaen has a complex cosmology up his sleeve as he unwraps a thoroughgoing interpretation of the mysteries of the Incarnation.
