French composer O. Messiaen rightfully occupies one of the honorable places in the history of musical culture of the XX century. He was born into an intelligent family. His father is a scholar-linguist, Flemish, and his mother is the famous South French poet Cecil Sauvage. At the age of 11, Messiaen left his native city and went to study at the Paris Conservatory - organ playing (M. Dupre), composition (P. Duke), music history (M. Emmanuel). After graduating from the Conservatory (1930), Messiaen
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French composer O. Messiaen rightfully occupies one of the honorable places in the history of musical culture of the XX century. He was born into an intelligent family. His father is a scholar-linguist, Flemish, and his mother is the famous South French poet Cecil Sauvage. At the age of 11, Messiaen left his native city and went to study at the Paris Conservatory - organ playing (M. Dupre), composition (P. Duke), music history (M. Emmanuel). After graduating from the Conservatory (1930), Messiaen took the place of organist of the St. Trinity Church in Paris. In 1936-39 he taught at the Ecole Normale de Musique, then at the Schola cantorum, since 1942 he has taught at the Paris Conservatory (harmony, musical analysis, musical aesthetics, musical psychology, since 1966 - professor of composition). In 1936, Messiaen, together with I. Baudrier, A. Jolivet and D. Lesure, formed the group “Young France”, which sought to develop national traditions, to direct emotionality and sensual completeness of music. "Young France" rejected the ways of neoclassicism, Dodecaphony, and folklore. With the outbreak of the war, Messiaen went to the front as a soldier, in 194041 he was in a German prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia; there he composed the Quartet at the End of Time for violin, cello, clarinet and piano (1941) and his first performance took place there. In the postwar period, Messiaen achieved worldwide recognition as a composer, performs as an organist and as a pianist (often together with the pianist Yvonne Lorio, his pupil and life partner), wrote a number of works on music theory. Among the students of Messiaen are P. Boulez, K. Stockhausen, J. Xenakis. Messiaen's aesthetics develops the basic principle of the group "Young France", which called for the return of music to the immediacy of the expression of feelings. Among the stylistic origins of his work, the composer himself calls, in addition to French masters (C. Debussy), Gregorian chorale, Russian songs, music of the Eastern tradition (in particular, India), singing of birds. The works of Messiaen are permeated with light, a mysterious radiance, they sparkle with the brilliance of bright sound colors, contrasts of a simple but refined intonation of a song and sparkling “cosmic” prominences, bursts of boiling energy, serene voices of birds, even bird choirs and ecstatic silence of the soul. In Messiaen’s world, there is no room for everyday prose, tension, and conflict of human dramas; even the harsh, horrific images of the greatest of wars are not etched in the music of the Quartet at the End of Time. Rejecting the low, everyday side of reality, Messiaen wants to affirm the traditional values of beauty and harmony, high spiritual culture that oppose it, and not “restoring” them through some kind of stylization, but generously using modern intonation and appropriate means of musical language. Messiaen thinks in "eternal" images of Catholic orthodoxy and pantheistically colored cosmology. Affirming the mystical purpose of music as an “act of faith”, Messiaen gives his works religious titles: “Vision of Amen” for two pianos (1943), “Three Little Liturgies to the Divine Presence” (1944), “Twenty Views on the Infant Jesus” for piano (1944), “Mass on Pentecost” (1950), oratorio “The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (1969), “Tea of the Resurrection of the Dead” (1964, the 20th Anniver of the End of the Second World War). Even birds with their singing – the voice of nature – are mystically interpreted by Meesian, they are “servants of the immaterial spheres”; such is the meaning of bird singing in the works “Awakening of Birds” for piano and orchestra (1953); “Exotic Birds” for piano, percussion and chamber orchestra (1956); “Catalogue of Birds” for piano (1956-58), “Blackbird” for flute and piano (1951). Rhythmically sophisticated "bird" style is found in other works. Often Messiaen and elements of numerical symbolism. Thus, the "Trinity" permeates the "Three Little Liturgies" - 3 parts of the cycle, each three-part, three timbre-instrumental units, the unisonable female choir is sometimes divided into 3 parties. However, the character of the musical imagery of Messiaen, the French sensuality characteristic of his music, the often “acute, hot” expression, the sober technical calculation of the modern composer, who establishes the autonomous musical structure of his composition, all this comes into a certain contradiction with the orthodoxy of the titles of works. Moreover, religious subjects are found only in parts of the works of Messiaen (he himself finds an alternation of music "pure, secular and theological"). Other aspects of his figurative world are captured in such compositions as the Turangalila symphony for piano and marteneau waves and orchestra ("Song of love, hymn to the joy of time, movement, rhythm, life and death", 1946-48); "Chronochromia" for orchestra (1960); "From the gorge to the stars" for piano, horns with orchestra (1974); "Seven haiku" for piano and orchestra (1962); "Four rhythmic etudes" (1949) and "Eight for piano" (1929); A theme with variations for violin and piano (1932); the vocal cycle "Yaravi" (1945, in the Peruvian folklore of yarawi - a song of love that ends only with the death of lovers); "The Feast of Beautiful Waters" (1937) and "Two Monodies in Quartertons" (1938) for the waves of Martino; "Two Choirs of Joan of Arc" (1941); "Canteiojaya", rhythmic etude for piano (1948); "Tembras-duration" (concretesional music, Assyats, 1952). As a music theorist, Messiaen relied mainly on his work, but also on the work of other composers (including Russians, in particular, I. Stravinsky), on Gregorian chorale, Russian folklore, on the views of the Indian theorist of the XIII century Sharngadeva. In his book The Technique of My Musical Language (1944), he expounded an important theory of modal modes of limited transposition and a refined system of rhythms for modern music. Messianic music organically carries out the connection of times (up to the Middle Ages) and the synthesis of cultures of the West and the East.