#messaien

Olivier Messaien, Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (1944) Robert/Clara, Barenboim/du Pré, Chopin/Sand, the Mahlers, and hey, Britten/Pears, why not?—likewise Messaien/Loriod as muse and musette, angel and prophet, these pairwise “definitions” blurred and shifting, each half-erased into the other’s substance, indistinguishable. This was, is, Turangalîla recrystallised, shorn of all orchestral pomp and vaguery so as to clarify its mystic figures, e.g. compare the Symphonie’s Joie du Sang des Étoiles with the tenth contemplation, de l'Esprit de joie, and its “air de chasse”—and hear the same ecstasy pierced through both. And compositionally Turangalîla and the Vingt regards both involve the exploration, throughout the work’s length, of a set of themes, and but so consider the latter’s Thème de Dieu as a consonant sibling of the former’s statue theme—though one is no doubt more menacing, both are equally monumental.

Alban Berg, Piano Sonata (1910) No wonder Gershwin did balk before Berg for even in the Op. 1 we find those distant kin of the dominant seventh that came to characterise le Jazz hot and the 30s showtunes that were to follow: ninths straight, flat, sharp, raised elevenths, etc. (tritones abundant) and but plus the obligatory Second Viennese complexity. And then formwise you could reveal without too much effort a sonata-allegro proper with first and second subject, though over a harmony that does to Tristan what Tristan did to cadential resolution—where Wagner defied catechism by witholding arrival until Isolde’s Liebestod, three hours after the Tristan chord was posed, Berg here, with a chord of his own (C#-G-B-F#, see measure 1.1), defies Wagnerian extenuation and crafts not temporal distance but extreme harmonic distance, a drawing far, far out, even beyond harmony itself, before returning and resolving C#-G-B-F# to a B-minor in mock excuse for the otherwise utterly useless key signature, comical against the forest of accidentals and deviant spellings of basic triads—a parody that was to foreshadow Boulez’s attempt to “destroy the first-movement sonata form” (given the nature of the Deuxième sonate, the violence of phrase here is apt, if not still wanting).

Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben (1898) Horn players owe much to, for one, Joseph Leutgeb, for whom Mozart wrote his four seminal horn concertos, and for another, whomsoever it was that coaxed the young Brahms into learning the natural horn—and for a third take Franz Strauss, perhaps fourth in the hierarchy of musically renowned Strausses, but yet father to (I would argue) the first, and also a horn player, this being one of the reasons the son Richard wrote so favourably for the instrument in compositions not just limited to the two concertos, for particularly in the tone-poems there unfolds line after line of sublime horn figures both in tutti and in solo, and Ein Heldenleben is no exception, e.g. the opening motif tracing E-flat major up two octaves and a third (precisely the range and tonality of the opening to Das Rheingold—shuddering drone in the primeval depths, Wagner’s very own Creation) before leaping a resplendent fifth (you could, perhaps should, play it on one harmonic, you know, let loose the F-side’s brazen upper register)—how many do you need; what numbers will suffice for this chilling tutti? As many as Don Juan? Or six horns? Eight?

Alexander Scriabin, Prométhée / Le poème du feu (1910) Was the (comparatively) tamer Poème de l'extase merely a flexing of the mystic vice that was yet metastasising headwards, the madness advacing synapse by synapse over the Russian’s mind? From those glittering motifs to these sinuous trails so wicked, indulgent, languishing, daemonic; a thoroughly Romantic treatment of dissonance left unresolved and begging for a full 20 or so minutes, to close on an F#-major sonority, this sole consonance robbed by all preceding of any harmonic meaning; a resolution that should have carried all the gratification of a V-I but which context-less, key-less, was only more sound, brighter-timbred, yes, but still only noise—and this was Scriabin’s atonality (kin with Debussy, Bartók).

Quatuor pour la fin du Temps: V. Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus - Olivier Messaien

"Praise to the eternity of Jesus", for cello and piano.

Jesus is considered here as the Word. A broad phrase, "infinitely slow", on the cello, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of the Word, powerful and gentle, "whose time never runs out". The melody stretches majestically into a kind of gentle, regal distance. "In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God." (John 1:1 (King James Version))

(Wiki/translation of Messaien’s preface to the score)