Like his religious works, Messiaen’s declaration of love to his first wife, violinist Claire Delbos, ‘Poems pour Mi’ (‘Mi’ being the composer’s affectionate pet-name for Delbos) is far from conventional, filled as it is with shrieking wails from the soprano and dissonant orchestral passages. Indeed, Messiaen’s refusal to clearly distinguish between tonality and atonality, to explore these areas harmoniously, and to use dissonance to evoke settings and emotions that stretched beyond – even antithetical to – traditional expressionist descriptions of terror or angst, was arguably his most radical gesture.
So with the ‘Poems’ for soprano and orchestra Messiaen creates a slow moving, evocative tapestry whose planes shifts from post-Debussyian impressionism into moments of jagged tension, hardly a sentimental vision of romance. Throughout the music seems to hang suspended, drifting through moods much like the minds of lovers, with soprano Anne Schwanewilms floating ethereally above. ‘Le collier’, the penultimate movement, implies a peaceful resolution, although this is disrupted by the closing ‘Prier exaucee’, brash points of brass echoing Schwanewilms’ impassioned delivery. In Messiaen’s first published orchestral work, ‘Les Offrandes Oublies’ of 1930, his distinctive style is already clearly apparent. Shimmering, unsettling chords proceed from slow, plodding caution through to a central segment of jagged rhythms recalling Stravinsky, and back again. ‘Un Sourire’ is Messiaen’s answer to a commission for a work in the spirit of Mozart. Again, it’s all moody, probing chords, drifting glacially, very much what Takemitsu would go on to sound like.
Joshua Meggitt
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