I didn’t know quite what to think, afterwards. It was as if another kind of knowledge – insubstantial, impossible to formulate – barged out what I felt I knew. It all came back, but that feeling, with all the strangeness of a photograph’s caught time, framed and hanging in a corner of my head, remained with me, however much suspicion with which I regarded that moment of emptiness. It was a summer evening much like any other; the curtains were drawn, the radio on, as if I’d returned to the habits of my adolescence, a look of earnest concentration on my face as I listened.
The next morning, as I was cycling the usual route to work, cresting the hill that descends towards the town centre, I was struck, as if lanced, by the sun moving out from behind the church clocktower. I remembered, then, how I should have formulated last night’s thoughts: that I knew, now, what revelation was.
***
On the other end of the broadcast were the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, two further choirs, and seven soloists, at the leviathan carcass of the Albert Hall, playing Olivier Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ. Given the continued public distrust of funding for ‘experimental’ music, this was a vast mobilisation of forces: the BBC were seemingly prepared to shell out for the public service commitment of celebrating Messiaen’s centenary year. Performances and recordings of La Transfiguration are rare as snow leopards; I was left with only this first, astonished listening, onto which ideas and memories fixed themselves, barnacle-like.
It came, of course, with its own history. By the time it was first performed, at the Coliseu dos Recreios, Lisbon, on 7 June 1969, it had given its composer more trouble than any other work he had written, vastly delayed – taking four years to complete, instead of the initially-agreed nine months – constantly expanding – it was originally intended to run a mere forty-five minutes, consist of nine movements, as opposed to the final fourteen, and utilise smaller forces – and plagued by structural problems. At the premiere, the renowned Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, stricken with fever, had to be firmly coaxed from his hotel room to play his solo part, shivering in a cold sweat, to a crowd who had already been kept waiting. The struggles, it seems, were in proportion to the cumulative power of the final product.
The biblical narrative of the Transfiguration takes place at the peak of a mountain, the disciples looking on, catching their breath, as Jesus ascends into the air to converse with the apparitions of Moses and Elijah. Messiaen, a keen mountaineer, was partially drawn to the subject by the thought of “the awesomeness of the place of Transfiguration”. We can almost hear him, gasping, overwhelmed, on the summit.
***
La Transfiguration is a strange piece of work: though closest in form to oratorios such as Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, it is still not simply ‘Transfiguration: The Musical’. It is framed as a series of ‘meditations’ on the event, an extreme musical gloss on the Latin texts – selected from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, the Old Testament and Aquinas’ Summa Theologica – declaimed by the vast choir, illuminating and extending it into the aural dimension. The structure is cyclical: the opening Récit Évangélique – a cavern of sonorous percussion textures, punctuated by the ping of temple blocks – is followed by two movements from the Gospel narrative, another Récit, two Gospel episodes, and a chorale; this structure of seven movements, or ‘septenary’, is repeated. The number itself is emblematic of Messiaen’s programming of religious symbolism into every aspect of the work, rhyming with the seven Spirits of God seen in Revelation, the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Joys of Mary; three, associated with the Trinity, manifests in the triple blasts of the horns. This is an eternal return: just as the text weaves back and forth through the chronology of the Transfiguration, it re-presents variations on the same musical material. In Messiaen’s music time is strange, pliable: the Almighty never stoops to mere linearity. In Quator de la Fin de Temps, the whimsically flitting melodies seem to defy any progress; the vast chromatic blocks of his organ works are like immovable ziggurats. Every sound is no longer a mere pinprick in space-time; it resonates out into the metaphysical. Instead of seeking to explain, it actively amplifies the impenetrable mystery of His transformation, and the appearance of the Trinity – the three distinct beings in one.
Listening, I’m struck by the mounting power and strangeness of the music, as it cycles back, again and again, towards these moments, when the Divine made itself plain: its oscillations between serene plainchant, slowly arcing strings, and the woodwinds’ birdsong cacophonies, the brass’s apocalyptic blurts, the choir’s soaring shouts; its swaying movements between dissonance and collective tonal amalgamation. Then, in the calm of the mountain-peak, resonating with the foggy harmonics of tam-tam and cymbal, a voice, announced by alien chorales on the violins, trilling metallics, and an explosion from the timpani, issues from the cloud. “He is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him”.
There is nothing here without meaning: La Transfiguration is remarkable for the mirroring of its grand arc in the microcosmic details of its sound-world. Messiaen made frequent use of a signature technique: the seemingly random melodies emanating from the soloists are in fact lovingly-notated birdsongs; by now an expert ornithologist, he could pick favourite birds for each occasion. Thus, the ‘Song of the Eternal Church’ is accompanied by birds from Europe, Brazil, Africa and Canada, and the appearance of the Trinity is precipitated by the staccato rasp of the noble peregrine falcon. Now, I stop at intervals whilst walking to catch these details, part of our everyday sonic fabric – wagtails, blackbirds, finches, wrens. They summon with them the air, light and colours of the open field – in abundance in the countryside around his birthplace of Avignon – which Messiaen saw as one with the Light of God.
This is not figurative. Debussy’s influence made Messiaen a primarily chromatic composer. Whilst loving melody, he revelled in the timbre of strings and horns, thickening and layering harmonies, like paint squirted and trowelled onto canvas. In conversation with Claude Samuel, he spoke of the work in synaesthetic terms: “Gold and violet, red and violet purple, bluish-grey studded with gold and deep blue…” Its fabric can be better compared with visual art – Gauguin’s exotic visions, the unearthly radiance of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, the light-flooded hallucinations of filmmaker Stan Brakhage – than most music. As the church organist, for sixty years, of the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, he thought of the blinding light of revelation in terms of the sonic white-out of its thundering pipes.
He was first drawn to the subject after hearing a sermon, at his summer home of Petichet in the French Alps, on the Transfiguration as the encapsulation of Christ as the True Light – the image of Jesus as “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light”, joined in the wholeness of the divine Trinity suddenly invading our world; an illumination of the beyond. The enormous thirteenth-movement climax of La Transfiguration comes with three minor crescendos, announcing the members of the Trinity; with a sudden dip, the music seems to gather like a tidal force, rushing in to a blazing, sustained E-Major – the traditional chord of paradise – the entire ensemble lighting up like a nocturnal city. The final movement, ‘Chorale of the Light of Glory’, entirely defying musical common sense, is one last sighing love song to the Saviour – tender, joyful. As Christopher Dingle puts it, “We are beyond the restrictions of reason and are now in eternity.”
***
I was fifteen when I stopped believing in God. Becoming haltingly aware that the constant, stifling pain my peers spent their days inflicting on me was, in fact, a general condition, I resolved that no God could sanction such an existence. Reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline and listening to the scourging wrath of Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible, I conceived formulations of God’s essential absence, a sucking void at the heart of life. When, during my last months at secondary school, I slashed my wrists so deeply I left a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, it seemed merely a confirmation.
Three years later, in a cold March classroom, halfway through my second year of Sixth Form, I was reading, under the table, an article about the singer Joanna Newsom. The writer, Frances Morgan, was being almost frighteningly candid about the almost supernatural effect of her work, its dreamlike resonances, vibrating towards – what? The metaphysical?
It was a thought, at first ridiculous, that wouldn’t leave me. Already listening to explicitly religious recordings – John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Beethoven, Buddhist ceremonial music, Qawwali – it was perhaps inevitable that La Transfiguration would leave a mark on me. Before this consideration, of course, were other reasons: its sprawling fecundity of ideas, almost unrivalled in 20th century music, the eclecticism of one who loves too much of the world; its natural confidence; its total modernism, allied to the most plain and sincere of belief in the truth of a two-thousand year-old religion. Perhaps most of all, the fact that its at-times-overwhelming beauty is not in spite of its religious purpose, but directly because of it. Like the medieval and Renaissance piétas and crucifixions which so fascinated me, its strange transmutations – rendering the most arcane of theological events into the two dimensions of a picture, or the sound of a choir – seemed to radiate something all the more significant for being inexplicable. Whatever else becomes of it – whether the unknowable truths at the heart of La Transfiguration are, in fact, the ‘truth’, whatever that might mean – it will have done what Messiaen purposed: to touch and shake a life.
