Olivier Messiaen
Le Banquet Céleste
“He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him.” (John 6:56)
Musical Affect takes central importance in the complex music of twentieth-century French organist and composer Olivier Messiaen, whose strong catholic faith is evident in almost his entire oeuvre. His first published work for organ Le Banquet Céleste (‘The Celestial Banquet’) is accompanied by the epitaph: “He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him” (John 6:56). As the title denotes, the work regards Holy Communion, the point in time where we most regularly use the text of the Agnus Dei, bringing to mind Jesus’ role as the Paschal Lamb.
One of the most striking primary observations is the incredible slow tempo of the work, marked Très lent, extatique (‘very slow, ecstatic’); it is only 25 bars long yet takes 7-8 minutes to perform. Indeed the tempo is so slow that each chord seems to become its own unit of eternity rather than as part of a linear development, creating for Messiaen a much desired effect of timelessness. For Messiaen the organ was the perfect instrument to create such an effect, devoid of human reliance (such as bowing on a stringed instrument or blowing on a wind instrument) the sound is perfectly static, if you like, in the same way as silence is. In fact the uninterrupted flow of sound throughout the whole of Le Banquet Céleste is as all-encompassing as complete silence, effective in evoking the total coverage of silence over the listener – a paradox closely related to that theological paradox that most fascinated Messiaen: the dogma of the incarnation of God in Christ, the fusion of the Eternal with the temporal.[14] To Messiaen time was not only the most wonderful creation of God, but also constituted an aesthetic and compositional preoccupation of his: the desire to create this sense of total timelessness. In doing this he was well aware of the time theory of French philosopher Henri Bergson, who convincingly demonstrated that the traditional concept of time, founded in the one-dimensional, abstract time of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic physics, could not explain multi-faceted time experience. Thus, Bergsonian time theory introduces the concept of durée vécue (‘lived duration’) to indicate subjective time experience. It uses a familiar premise: when, for example, you have to wait five minutes at the station and you are bored, time will be experienced as passing slowly. When, however, you are at a party, the same five minutes will generally be experienced as passing quickly. In the same way as Herr Kircher maintained that dissonant intervals slow down life processes and hence induce sadness, the same can be applied to the powerful emotional effects of the sense of timelessness in Messiaen’s music – in the case of Le Banquet Céleste to express most of all the love God has for us by sacrificing his Son.
This sense of timelessness in Le Banquet Céleste is accompanied by an almost ethereal sound world. In the hands, the voix celeste (‘celestial voice’) stop, combined with another 8’ string stop creates a light, slightly wavering, otherworldly quality. Messiaen in addition marks the score at the start lointain, mystérieux (distant, mysterious). Not only is the timbre in this sense heavenly but the harmonic language is hugely colourful, written in an octatonic scale, one of Messiaen’s so-called ‘modes of limited transposition’, using all three possible transpositions of the mode to avoid harmonic monotony. Messiaen himself experienced musical ‘colours’ more acutely than most of us, thanks to suffering from synesthesia; he exploits this in many of his works, for example in his late orchestral work Des Canyons Aux Étoiles, where he evokes the colours of the canyons of Utah with rich and complex harmonic language. He is creating an Affect to match the powerful religious setting of the Eucharist, the great paradox of Christ and the mystery of the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic elements from bread and wine to the Body and Blood.
The pedal part enters 12 bars into the piece and is registered with a combination of high-sounding stops (flute 4’, nazard 2 2/3’, doublette 2’, piccolo 1’), continuing the hovering, ethereal sound world. The pedal part is marked by Messiaen staccato bref, à la goutte d’eau (‘short staccato, like water droplets), representing Christ’s blood “shed for us for the remission of sins”. Just as the piece seems to come out of nothing at the start, it ends pianissimo, on a long, un-resolved dominant seventh chord. In a traditional musical sense there is no ‘full-stop’ resolution to the piece; rather Messiaen wishes to maintain the timelessness of the celestial banquet, which lasts eternally, thanks to the one last ultimate sacrifice of Christ himself, Lamb of God.
Frederick Frostwick, April 2020
Footnotes
[14] N. Losseff and J.R. Doctor, Silence, Music, Silent Music, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007
Bibliography
Górny, Rhetorics of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Orgelbüchlein’: An introduction with a Case Study of BWV 614, transl. by Z. Wachocka, 2017
Remes, Textual illustration in J.S. Bach’s settings of ‘O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig’, 2015
Losseff and J.R. Doctor, Silence, Music, Silent Music, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007
Organduo.It
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