2. Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)

Cinq rechants

Cinq rechants for twelve singers is the final component of Messiaen's trilogy of works embracing the Tristan myth and, especially, the simultaneous fulfillment of love and death. This trio of works, including the song cycle Harawi (1945) for soprano and piano and the vast, orchestral Turangalîla-symphonie (1946-48), diverge from the religious focus of most of Messiaen's other devout, non-liturgical Roman Catholic works. Messiaen composed the Tristan trilogy when his wife, Claire Delbos, was institutionalized because of a mental breakdown until her death in 1959. Meanwhile, Messiaen and his student, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, fell in love. Their relationship remained fulfilled only musically until their marriage in 1962.

The medieval tale of Tristan and Isolde derives from an anonymous twelfth-century French poem. One of the poem's earliest elaborations was Gottfried von Strassburg's medieval masterpiece written around 1210. Essentially, the tale is about unsatisfied love. The handmaiden Brangaine impetuously serves a love philter to the protagonists, previously abhorrent to each other. The resulting passion ends in tragic death. Whereas Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde (1859) ushered in the decay of tonality through irregularly resolving tritones, Messiaen stepped further, using tritones as melodic or cadential intervals throughout and even employing parallel tritones in harmonic fauxbourdon.

Messiaen used the title "rechants" (refrains) in homage to the similarly structured Le Printemps by the Renaissance composer Claude le Jeune (1529-1600), who like Messiaen composed vocal music transcribing word stress into rhythmic proportions. Each of Messiaen's five movements consists of an introduction, alternating refrain and verse, and a coda. Most often, the refrains repeat exactly and the verses recur layered with additional material. The coda usually repeats music from the introduction or the verse.

Messiaen's melodies, in the style of Peruvian harawi and medieval European alba love songs, are meant to recall the voices of spirits warning lovers that their night of passion is nearing its end. His rhythms come from provincial Indian decî-tâlas and his own non-retrogradable and additive inventions.

Messiaen himself wrote the poetry by combining surrealistic French and made-up pseudo-Sanskrit syllables that he chose for their softness or explosiveness of attack. The French parts of the poetry are ripe with amorous references to affairs both mythic and tragic: Tristan and Isolde, Viviane and Merlin, Orpheus, Bluebeard, Perseus and the Medusa.

I.

Messian begins Cinq rechants by invoking Brangaine, the bearer of the love philter to Tristan and Isolde. Messiaen orchestrates the unison refrain, quickly passing the melody from voice to voice resulting in prismatic changes of vocal color. The images in the poetry recall paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Marc Chagall.

The verse of the opening movement cycles through isorhythmic melodic and rhythmic material in much the same way as "Liturgie du crystal" from Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940). Three sopranos and two altos repeat their undulating melodies out of time with each other like a floating musical mobile. At the repeat of the verse, the women sing exactly as before, while two basses add a new isorhythm and the tenors speak pseudo-Hindu syllables as if intoning a spell to create Brangaine's love philter. The basses evoke Bluebeard, the villain of Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale, who murdered his wives and hid their bodies in a locked room.

II.

The quasi-palindromic solo melodies of the second movement stir up passionate flirtations. The melodies repeat for the second verse over the incantation-like pseudo-Hindu in the deep male voices.

III.

The central movement is the crux of Cinq rechants and contains its most erotic music as well as its most virtuosic passages. The poetry hints at the Arthurian legend of the loving sorceress Viviane, who enclosed Merlin in a prison of air. The verses contain additive and subtractive rhythmic patters over quickly chanted pseudo-Hindu that propels the music forward. A virtuosic twelve-part canon leads to a tremendous climax. After a brief silence, the coda sensuously quotes the love theme from the "Jardin du sommeil d'amour" movement from the Turangalîla-symphonie for the text "tous les philtres sont bus ce soir encor."

IV.

The fourth movement begins with a vigorous unison refrain. In the verses, two bass soloists passionately sing tritone fauxbourdon against a monotonously regular unison accompaniment. The coda begins like the verses, but the basses puncture the fabric of the monotony and a rhapsodic soprano solo springs free. The movement finally ends with softly glowing tonal sonorities.

V.

The final movement mingles words of love and death, light and dark, past and future. The melodies are more angular and cover wider ranges than any other movement of Cinq rechants. Spoken incantations spastically punctuate the multihued, disjointed texture.

Cinq rechants ends sublimely, incompletely, and almost inaudibly with a muffled tritone cadence for the words "dans l'avenir."