Customer Reviews

Messiaen

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This book is a five star joy. The authors certainly have the chops: Professor Hill is an accomplished musician whose recordings of Messiaen's piano works are top flight, and Professor Simeone previously wrote the standard bibliography of the composer's works. Their access to Messiaen's previously unavailable letters and notebooks, together with their ability to condense that material into coherent story lines, means that every chapter (there are 14) has irresistible nuggets of revelation about Messiaen's music.

One good way to judge a critical or biographical book is whether it makes you - the reader - seek out or revisit the works of the book's subject. With this book, I practically stopped reading after every chapter to play a recording of one or more of Messiaen's works, because my interest had been sparked, or re-sparked, by something I had just read.

The book focuses on the process by which Messiaen composed his works, and it is fascinating to learn about the inner workings of his particular genius. The authors essentially show that Messiaen was an astonishing omnivore, taking just about everything in his mind and heart and combining that with what he saw and heard to produce an enormous catalog of amazing music over an approximately 60 year period (circa 1930 to 1990).

Although the book is full-length and very detailed, the authors indicate in their introduction that they could not include information about, for example, the initial public reaction to each and every Messiaen composition. This is understandable, given the focus on how the music was composed.

Also understandable, given the amount of primary material (the letters and notebooks) they had at hand, is the authors' decision to limit their own inferences and opinions (although those that are included suggest that it is well worth considering the views of Hill and Simeone about most things related to Messiaen).

The book also includes hundreds of black and white reproductions of photos, ephemera, and a few bits of musical scores. These reproductions would be much better if larger, and if the later photos were in color. Of course, doing those things probably would have doubled the book's cost. On balance, it's great to have so many reproductions just as they are; they definitely liven up what might otherwise come across as a too dense mass of facts.

I read this book carefully, and did spot a couple of minor errors. Perhaps the biggest howler is the authors' suggestion (see footnote 24 at pages 157 and 393) that a book by Andre Breton about surrealism and painting that Messiaen read in 1945 was the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism." The authors missed the obvious here: the book by Breton about surrealism and painting that Messiaen read was most probably - er, um - "Le Surrealisme et la Peinture" ("Surrealism and Painting"), first published in 1928 with a new edition published in, yes, 1945.

In a book this size, presenting so much information, such errors are inevitable and don't at all mar the authors' stupendous achievement. I strongly recommend this book, particularly to those who know Messiaen's work and would enjoy learning more about how his marvelous music came to be.

Olivier Messiaen is one of my favorite composers. I have performed, studied, and listened to his music avidly ever since I "caught the bug" during college. Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone's book was fascinating to read because it gave me a more complete picture of Messiaen the man: his personal habits, his compositional methods, his day-to-day activities, etc. Messiaen himself wrote copiously about his works, but he most often passed over the sorts of details that fill the pages of this book.

As such, I would not recommend "Messiaen" to those who have only a passing curiosity in the man or his music. The authors seem to presuppose at least some familiarity with most of his compositions, and they discuss several of his self-analytical theories (e.g. modes of limited transposition, "rhythmic personnages," "color" chords) without further explication. Fortunately, Messiaen spared no detail in explaining these and other concepts in numerous treatises, prefaces to scores, and program notes.

For those who already know and love Messiaen's music, though, this book will be a goldmine full of insights. After reading it, I listened with new ears to even my least favorite among Messiaen's works, such as "Livre d'Orgue" and "Chronochromie." As a performer, I am now eager to dive into more of his organ and piano pieces. My renewed enthusiasm for Messiaen's music is a testament to the authors' successful way of assembling many and various details into a compelling narrative.

In addition to this book, I would recommend Rebecca Rischin's "For the End of Time" to those who are especially interested in the "Quatuor pour la fin du temps" and Messiaen's time in a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Rischin tells the story of all four performers from the 1941 premiere (not just Messiaen himself) and gives a fuller picture of camp life at Stalag VIIIA than do Messiaen or Hill and Simeone. (Be forewarned, however, that her musical descriptions often come across as unsophisticated, especially in comparison with Hill and Simeone's--her book would rate at 4 stars versus their 5.)

Chances are that Hill and Simeone's "Messiaen" will reach its target audience without my help, but if you are a Messiaen fan and are still unsure whether you will enjoy this book, I cannot recommend it more highly.

Over a nearly 70-year career the French composer Olivier Messiaen gave the world a number of monumental works, usually ascribing their quality to divine inspiration. While Messiaen was one of the major composers of the 20th century, he really let little slip about his personal life or the process of composition. After his death in 1992, his widow Yvonne Loriod began to open up his archives, revealing the inner man behind the hype. MESSIAEN (Yale University Press, 2005) by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone is the first biography to take into account Messiaen's private papers and a great number of never-before-seen photographs. It vastly expands our knowledge of Messiaen's life and work.

Hill and Simeone have really succeeded in writing an exemplary musical biography, giving equal attention to the life of the composer and the specifics of his musical output as it relates to his life. The musical details are described in terms understandable by the layman with some minimal level of musical education, and except for the composer's manuscripts used as simple illustrations, there are no score samples used. Furthermore, while even new musical biographies (e.g. Kurtz's Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography) treat only the composer's journeys to and opinions of concert performances, Hill and Simeone give abundant space to recordings of Messiaen's music.

The new light shed on Messiaen here includes details of the creative process from the abundant notebooks he kept. We can finally see the steps towards masterpieces like "Oiseaux exotiques" or "Chronochromie". Information on the writing of "La Transfiguration" is augmented by the exhaustive correspondence between Messiaen and his exasperated patroness at the Gulbenkian Foundation. The most noteworthy of the information Hill and Simeone provide on Messiaen's personal life is the story of his first wife Claire Delbos' early breakdown and death, apparently some kind of terrible physical neural degeration instead of the usual rumour of garden-variety madness.

I've often found Messiaen's works challenging, with his monumental structures and arcane religious themes being somewhat daunting compared to the total abstraction and conciseness of other avant-garde composers. This biography by Hill and Simeone has helped me become more comfortable with Messiaen's oeuvre, and so as a musical biography I think it immensely successful.

The content is comprehensive, while narrating the life of Messiaen, it gives all the background of when, where, and why works were written. It makes sense for a performer, it helps a performer to really connect with the composer. Easy to read and very accurate. Highly recommended!!