Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen wrote a quartet in a prisoner-of-war camp, transcribed birdsong for forty years, and taught most of the post-war European avant-garde. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at eleven and became organist at the Trinité in Paris at twenty-two, a post he held for sixty-one years. He was captured in 1940 and wrote the Quatuor pour la fin du temps at Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz for the four instruments available - violin, cello, clarinet, piano - and it was first performed to prisoners and guards in the cold in January 1941. His Catholicism was the explicit subject of most of what he wrote. He built a system of modes of limited transposition and non-retrogradable rhythms, used Indian rhythmic patterns, and heard colours when he heard chords, which he described precisely and which appears to have been genuine synaesthesia. From the 1950s he notated birdsong in the field across France and abroad and built whole works from it. His analysis class at the Conservatoire taught Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis. Turangalîla is ten movements long. His pupil Yvonne Loriod became his second wife. Loriod premiered most of his piano music, including the twenty pieces of the Vingt regards sur l enfant-Jesus, and the Catalogue d oiseaux runs to about three hours of birdsong for solo piano. Saint Francois d Assise, his only opera, took eight years and lasts more than four. He was appointed to teach harmony in 1941 and the analysis class only later, and he taught it unpaid at first in a private flat. The Quartet was played on instruments in poor repair, including a cello said to have had three strings, though he later disputed some of the details that had grown around the story. He is buried at Petichet in the Alps.

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