MESSIAEN: Oiseaux exotiques
Oiseaux exotiques
Olivier Messiaen was born on December 10, 1908, in Avignon, France, and died April 28, 1992, in Paris. Oiseaux exotiques was commissioned by Pierre Boulez for the “Domaine Musical” concerts at the Petit Théâtre Marigny. It was composed between October 5, 1955, and January 23, 1956. The world premiere of the work was conducted by Rudolf Albert on March 10, 1956, at the Petit Théâtre Marigny in Paris, with Yvonne Loriod on the piano, Mm. Deplus and Vacellier the clarinets, and M. Delécluse the xylophone. The work is dedicated to Yvonne Loriod. The first San Francisco Symphony performances, in April 1973, were conducted by Seiji Ozawa, with Peter Serkin as pianist. The most recent performances here, in January 1984, were conducted by Edo de Waart, with Robin Sutherland as soloist. Oiseaux exotiques is scored for piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinets (E-flat, two in B-flat, and one bass), bassoon, two horns in F major, trumpet, piano, and percussion (five players on glockenspiel, xylophone, three temple blocks, wood block, bass drum, three gongs, tam-tam). According to the score, a total of nineteen players is required.
“Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.” For Izaak Walton the birds may have handily trumped human musicians, but composers have been incorporating birdsong into their works throughout history. Think of Mozart’s pet starling chirping away in A Musical Joke, or Beethoven’s careful notation of a nightingale’s song in the Pastoral Symphony. Birds in their exultant variety play a part in Haydn’s late oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, in Heinrich Ignatz Franz von Biber’s “Cock, Hen, and Quail” sonata for violin, in works by Gombert and Vivaldi, and in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Their song inspired Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and Delius’s On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring, while a phonograph recording of a nightingale is specified in the score of Respighi’s The Pines of Rome. Birds sing, chirp, hop, flutter, and fly throughout Western music, popular and classical alike, perennial feathered motifs throughout the many venues of the musical world.
For Olivier Messiaen, birds served not only as representatives of nature’s bounty, but also as powerful symbols of spiritual freedom and renewal. His incorporation of birdsong into his musical language was to prove transformative, but in his prewar music birds were relatively infrequent visitors. During the 1940s Messiaen sailed the high seas of professional and public success, as major works poured from him in a steady stream. First came the landmark 1940 Quatuor pour le fin du temps, written in the prisoner-of-war camp near Görlitz during Messiaen’s captivity. Released in 1941, Messiaen returned to Paris where he resumed his career, now enhanced by the stunning pianism of future wife Yvonne Loriod. The two-piano Visions de l’Amen was a result of Loriod’s inspiration, as was the concert-length solo piano work Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus. After the song cycle Harawi and the Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine, Messiaen topped off the immensely productive decade with the mammoth and lavish Turangalîla Symphony, written for an American commission. Along with his compositional achievements came his appointment as a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, in which capacity he was to exert a powerful influence over European music for decades. Some of Europe’s finest talent came through his studio, including such notables as Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Tristan Murail, then George Benjamin in the 1970s.
His extraordinary success notwithstanding, by the late 1940s Messiaen had reason for some concern in regards to his standing with the leading edge of French music. Although before the War he had been among the cutting-edge Jeune France composers—along with Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur, and Baudrier—he now watched the generational tide turn as younger French composers came under the spell of Schoenberg’s twelve-tonal recasting of Western musical grammar. A disdain for rich harmony, opulent melody, and surface glamour was characteristic of these newer musicians, many of whom had formed a group called Les Flèches (The Arrows) in Messiaen’s composition class at the Conservatoire. Now, rallied alongside the iconoclastic French composer–conductor René Leibowitz, they had become a noisy radical faction notorious for creating public disturbances, such as their disrespectful booing of Stravinsky’s Four Norwegian Moods in 1945. Although as their erstwhile professor Messiaen had been largely exempt from their scorn, in 1948 Flèche leader Pierre Boulez derided his teacher’s Trois tâla, pieces that were to become movements of the Turangalîla Symphony. The group’s militancy played out within an overall atmosphere of indifference or downright hostility to modern music amongst French audiences, a state of affairs that rendered Les Flèches even more stridently radical than they might have been in a more accepting environment.
Messiaen was not about to allow himself to become a whipping boy for the intolerant rhetoric of Boulez & Co. Starting in 1949 he began an astonishing process of reinventing his musical language, not once but twice. The first such development came with the Quatre études de rythme, premiered in 1950, epochal works which demonstrated Messiaen’s current thinking about rhythm, dynamics, and attack—in particular an idiosyncratic method of rhythmic serialism which fed into the emergent “total serialism” of composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen. As influential as these rhythmic studies were, it was his second reinvention that was to prove the most long-lasting and transformative: Messiaen entered a period of rigorous study of birdsong and began making it the primary generator of his musical inspiration.
A fascination with birds and their music was hardly new to Messiaen at this time. Since his childhood the sound of birds had incited his love and attention, and even as early as the organ/orchestral work L’Ascension of 1933 some passages reminiscent of birdsong can be heard. The “Abîme des oiseaux” (Abyss of birds) movement for solo clarinet in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps bears early witness to Messiaen’s belief that “The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.” In the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus birdsong carries on the association with freedom, as the piano periodically erupts into cascades of ‘characteristic birdsong phrases’, as Messiaen puts it. And in the enormous Turangalîla Symphony, stylized representations of birdsongs set for solo piano thread through the vast sonic tapestry, quite memorably in the sixth movement “Jardin du sommeil d’amour” (Garden of the Sleep of Love) in which a nightingale is heard repeatedly.
In effect Messiaen was seeking musical inspiration in the juxtaposition of rigorous logic (as embodied in his rhythmic studies) against the natural flow and freedom represented by birds. Following the Quatre études de rythme, beginning in 1952 Messiaen devoted himself to the cataloguing, study, and notation of birdsong. Throughout the decade to follow the bulk of his works would be inspired almost entirely by birds—Réveil des oiseaux (Awakening of the birds) in 1953, Oiseaux exotiques in 1955-56, and the enormous Catalogue d’oiseaux of 1956-58 for solo piano. Although Messiaen’s compositions from the 1960s onwards were less specifically bird-oriented, they nonetheless made extensive use of birdsong (as well as natural avian settings), with the 1985 piano work Petites esquisses d’oiseaux continuing the tradition even in the final period of Messiaen’s life.
To a lifetime of bird–watching Messiaen now added formal training as he studied with leading ornithologist Jacques Delamain, who taught him to recognize birds solely through their sounds, and not only via their plumage or body shapes. Messiaen began keeping a series of notebooks, in which he would meticulously notate each birdsong together with descriptions of plumage and coloring, kept with a record of the location and the time of the observation. To his own personal collection he added recorded anthologies of birdsong, most importantly American Bird Songs, six 78-rpm discs produced in 1942 by the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University.
At some point in 1954 Pierre Boulez approached Messiaen to write a new work for Boulez’s recently established contemporary music society Domaine musical. Messiaen began by revising his birdsong studies, adding observations of tropical birds including the Indian shama and the red-billed mesia, and becoming increasingly familiar with the North American birds from the Cornell recordings. According to Messiaen, the actual composition began on October 5, 1955. He drew up a sectional blueprint of the work that follows a roughly binary-arch shape, beginning and ending with similar material (the cry of the Indian mynah and the radiant warble of the wood thrush), the whole made of interludes, medleys, and piano cadenzas. As was usual with Messiaen, the nature and even the title of the new work were kept secret until the premiere itself on March 10, 1956, at the Petit Théâtre Marigny under the direction of Rudolf Albert. Happily, the meticulously prepared performance, executed by the cream of Parisian instrumentalists including Yvonne Loriod on piano, was recorded in high-quality monophonic sound, initiating a surprisingly abundant series of recordings of this now-popular work.
Oiseaux exotiques is scored for a chamber–like ensemble, heavy on winds and percussion and devoid of traditional strings. Although the piano is given extensive solo passages throughout, including two substantial solo cadenzas, the work is far from being a mini-concerto for piano, but rather operates as a seamless blend of spectacular and sometimes hauntingly beautiful sounds. The ultra-sensualist Messiaen of Turangalîla is very much in evidence throughout Oiseaux exotiques, as not only the cries of birds, but also their habitats and their colors, are arranged in a vibrant polychromatic landscape that is gently propelled by rhythms based on Greek and Hindu models.
One need not be a bird-watcher or ornithologist to enjoy Oiseaux exotiques; it is a musical composition, not a lecture–demonstration. Messiaen’s focus on Asian and North American birds creates a fantasy tapestry of sound that could not occur naturally in the wild. Thus it is that the sharp swooping cry of the Indian mynah opens the work, while the Himalayan laughing thrush ends it; along the way we hear forty-eight different species altogether, including the Virginia cardinal, Baltimore oriole, American robin, Chinese red-billed mesia, and the Indian shama. Two birds are of particular interest. The American prairie chicken was irresistably fascinating to Messiaen, what with its odd gurglings (produced by air sacs) that contrast sharply with the bird’s shrill natural call. The prairie chicken is the star of the Interlude that occurs about four minutes into the work, those delectable gurgles murmured in clarinets and oboes and reinforced by low rumblings in the tam-tam. The other critically important bird is the American wood thrush, captured memorably in the first piano cadenza, its luminous call harmonized with heavily pedalled, solid chords that will remind listeners of those shimmering harmonic structures of Turangalîla or the Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Both birds make notable appearances later in the work, with the wood thrush singing one final time before the series of hammer blows (based on the Himalayan laughing thrush) that bring Oiseaux exotiques to its conclusion.
Olivier Messiaen was a man of faith, not only in the spiritual sense, but also as a life–affirming creator who brought his love for the natural world into his technically sophisticated and opulent musical language. In the years following Oiseaux exotiques he was to demonstrate that faith in a series of concert-length works that blended his deep Christian conviction with his unquenchable love for nature. “Music is everywhere not just in melodies; music can be heard in the singing of birds, or the loving babble talk of little babies,” says Byron Pulsifer. One can imagine Messiaen smiling in happy agreement with this sentiment, and perhaps adding that one “finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”
—Scott Foglesong
Scott Foglesong, Chair of the Department of Musicianship and Music Theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, is a contributing writer for the San Francisco Symphony’s program book and a regular speaker at SFS pre-concert talks.
More About the Music
Recordings: Yvonne Loriod with Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain (Naïve) | Paul Crossley with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the London Sinfonietta (CBS Masterworks) | Peter Donohoe with Reinbert De Leeuw conducting the Netherlands Wind Ensemble (Chandos) | Sylvain Cambreling conducting the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra (Hänssler Classic) | The premiere recording is available in the Hill-Simeone monograph listed below.
Reading: For a monograph on the work, including a CD of the premiere recording and recordings of bird calls studied by Messiaen, check out Olivier Messiaen: Oiseaux exotiques, by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone (Ashgate) | Messiaen, by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone (Yale University Press) | The Messiaen Companion, edited by Peter Hill (Faber and Faber)