It's been 100 years since the French composer Olivier Messiaen was born, and musical groups around the country are using the centenary as an occasion to play his works. In a sense though, it's surprising that there's anyone left who wants to play Messiaen. His music is so radical ' so unhinged from the rules of classical composition that he successfully alienated conservatives. And liberals tend to hate him because he ladled his work with gobs of regressive religiosity. Yet there's some quality of Messiaen's music that has allowed it to transcend these divisions. San Francisco filmmaker Paul Festa has created a documentary that seeks to explain the extreme reactions to his music simply by focusing a camera on the faces of listeners. Nathanael Johnson has the story.
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Piece Description
It's been 100 years since the French composer Olivier Messiaen was born, and musical groups around the country are using the centenary as an occasion to play his works. In a sense though, it's surprising that there's anyone left who wants to play Messiaen. His music is so radical ' so unhinged from the rules of classical composition that he successfully alienated conservatives. And liberals tend to hate him because he ladled his work with gobs of regressive religiosity. Yet there's some quality of Messiaen's music that has allowed it to transcend these divisions. San Francisco filmmaker Paul Festa has created a documentary that seeks to explain the extreme reactions to his music simply by focusing a camera on the faces of listeners. Nathanael Johnson has the story.
Broadcast History
Broadcast locally on KALW
Transcript
It?s been 100 years since the French composer Olivier Messiaen was born, and musical groups around the country are using the centenary as an occasion to play his works. In a sense though, it?s surprising that there?s anyone left who wants to play Messiaen. His music is so radical ? so unhinged from the rules of classical composition that he successfully alienated conservatives. And liberals tend to hate him because he ladled his work with gobs of regressive religiosity. Yet there?s some quality of Messiaen?s music that has allowed it to transcend these divisions. San Francisco filmmaker Paul Festa has created a documentary that seeks to explain the extreme reactions to his music simply by focusing a camera on the faces of listeners. Nathanael Johnson has the story.
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COMPOSER Olivier Messiaen has always provoked strong reactions. Messiaen was a fundamentalist Catholic who said Jew...
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James Reiss
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 05:40 AM | Permalink
Review of Messiaen at 100: Apparition of the Eternal Church
Years ago I purchased a CD of Olivier Messiaen's "Eclairs sur l'Au-Dela" ("Illuminations of the Beyond"). I became so obsessed with the composition's fifth movement, "Demeurer dans l'Amour" ("Abide in Love"), that I made a cassette of its 10 glorious adagio minutes for violins, violas and cellos, and I rigged the cassette so that it played over and over. Worse, I subjected a couple of my friends to Messiaen's rising and falling chords with perhaps one whistleable motif moving from dissonance to resolution with all the inevitability, I thought, of Evolution or Intelligent Design.
Needless to say, my friends were not rapt. As producer Nathaniel Johnson points out in this terse cutaway, most classical music buffs aren't aficionados of the French composer whose hundredth birthday awaits us this December 10th. He may have been a nice guy in person, but his anti-Semitism was as loathsome as his Roman Catholic piety was legendary. Nevertheless, as Johnson makes clear, one of Messiaen's devotees, Paul Festa, is a secular Jew who fell under the spell of OM -- no pun on the Sanskrit mantric syllable!
Accordingly, Festa, a San Francisco filmmaker, has put together a documentary film recording various listeners' reactions to OM's organ extravaganza, "Apparition of the Eternal Church." Curiously, as Festa says, "Almost to a person, listeners start talking about Jesus when they hear this music, even though they don't know what it is. And the Christianity they describe is a religion not represented by the Cross but by a gory crucifix, a religion twined with torture."
For example, Yale professor Harold Bloom opines, "If I were put down in the Inferno and was told that for all eternity I was going to be listening to this, I would repent me of all my sins."
Fascinated by the "intersection between spiritual ecstasy and physical violence" -- witness ultra-religious suicide bombers -- Festa concludes that "non-believers [gay men and Jewish intellectuals] liked the music best."
To have filled this piece with more samples from OM's "Apparition of the Eternal Church" would have been counterproductive. As it stands, Johnson's cutaway uses just enough background music to probe its complex, transcendent spirit.