In the breadth of its worldview and the intensity of sensual experience that it contains – not to mention the sheer artistic audacity of its creator – Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise occupies a position in the second half of the 20th century akin to that of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in the 19th. It, too, is a major work of music history – indeed a key work of its time. These two stage works are also linked by the theme of love. It is in each case an immeasurable love that culminates in death, though in Wagner it is the love between a man and a woman, whereas in Messiaen it is the love of a man for Jesus Christ.
Even when he was a child, Messiaen was deeply religious and felt closely connected to the Roman Catholic Church. While his compositions were being performed by the most renowned orchestras of Europe and the USA, Messiaen spent decade after decade playing the organ for the services at the church of La Trinité in Paris. Throughout his life, he remained committed to this dual identity as a joyfully adventurous composer and a Christian steeped in his faith. We can already observe this duality in his outstanding piano cycle Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Twenty contemplations of the Infant Jesus), which lasts over two hours and was composed in 1944, almost 40 years before the world premiere of his Saint François d’Assise.
But there was a third dimension to Messiaen the composer: his passion for ornithology. In 1952, he began to write down the music of birdsongs in what became dozens of little notebooks. He travelled across the continents, searching all the while for new birdsongs. They became a source of inspiration in his compositions for piano and for orchestra, and ultimately also – in their most perfect manifestation – in his only opera, which is appropriately dedicated to the saint who spoke to the birds.