Sospeso presented Messiaen's Le merle noir in a concert devoted to French music in 1998.  

In a sense his life as an artist began before he was born, for his mother, Cécile Sauvage, wrote during her pregnancy a cycle of poems, L'âme en bourgeon, in which her future child is of course referred to. He was proud of this, and in his sixties recorded a sequence of organ improvisations on the poems; he also wrote the preface for a republication of them in 1991. His father was Pierre Messiaen, an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare, from whom he inherited less the language skills (he was a monoglot) than an admiration for Shakespeare's plays, which as a boy of eight to ten he presented in toy theatres of his own devising, with coloured lighting coming through cellophane sweet wrappers, for his younger brother Alain. Between the ages of seven and nine he also began to compose and to play the piano. By this time the family was in Grenoble—except for Pierre, who was on war service in the army— and the young Messiaen gained a lasting love for the mountains of that region. According to his own account, he started in music without a teacher, and he was similarly independent of any prompting in the religious devotion he felt from an early age.

After the war the family was reunited in Nantes. They were there only for six months, but during that time Messiaen met his first teachers: Véron and Gontran Arcouët for piano and Jehan de Gibon for harmony. He was already musically sophisticated: as Christmas presents he had been demanding operatic vocal scores, and was thus familiar with works by Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz and Wagner, as well as with piano pieces by Debussy and Ravel. But de Gibon gave him Pelléas et Mélisande, and that astonished him. In 1919 the family moved to Paris, and he entered the Conservatoire at a remarkably early age: a photograph of Jean Gallon's harmony class of 1923 shows a child in the company of young men and women.

Besides Jean Gallon, and the latter's brother Noël, with whom he had private lessons throughout his Conservatoire years, his teachers included Georges Falkenberg for piano, Georges Caussade for counterpoint and fugue (premier prix 1926), César Abel Estyle for piano accompaniment (premier prix 1927), Marcel Dupré for organ and improvisation (premier prix 1928), Maurice Emmanuel for music history (premier prix 1928), Paul Dukas for composition (premier prix 1929) and Joseph Baggers for timpani and percussion, this last an unusual study, suggesting that he was already—perhaps prompted by Stravinsky's Les noces, which he saw at this time— looking beyond Western norms. Certainly his other teachers might have given him some encouragement in that direction. Emmanuel was an expert on the metres of Greek verse (later a Messiaen speciality) and on the modes of ancient Greece, of folk music and of Christian liturgies; Messiaen recalled how after hearing this teacher's 30 chansons bourguignonnes he was ‘at once converted to modal music’. Dupré and Dukas also pointed towards modality and they were models for their pupil in other ways: Dupré showed that the organ, to which Messiaen would have been attracted as a Catholic composer, could be a virtuoso instrument; Dukas provided an example of artistic conscience.

New music in Paris at this time was represented principally by Stravinsky and by the more prominent ex-members of Les Six: Honegger, Milhaud and Poulenc. Messiaen admired some works of all these composers, and Le sacre du printemps was vital to him. But he had no time for Cocteau-esque urbanity and knew, at this point, almost nothing but Pierrot lunaire of the alternative represented by the new Viennese school. Not surprisingly, he began by staying close to Debussy, whose influence is strong on the set of eight piano preludes he composed in 1928–9. Even here, though— and more so in his first published organ composition, Le banquet céleste (1928)—he was moving within his own modal universe. The organ piece is also unusual in its extreme slowness.

In 1930 he left the Conservatoire and in September 1931 took the post of organist at La Trinité in Paris, where for more than 60 years he had charge of one of the great Cavaillé-Coll instruments. His major works of the next few years were all for his own instrument or for the orchestra—or for both, since L'Ascension (1932–4) was made available in the two forms. Whatever the genre, the declared purpose of his music was the same, and remained the same until his death: it was to manifest the doctrines of the Christian faith. His biggest work of the period was the organ cycle La Nativité du Seigneur (1935); L'Ascension had been preceded by orchestral pieces concerned with sin and redemption (Les offrandes oubliées, 1930; Le tombeau resplendissant, 1931; Hymne au Saint-Sacrement, 1932).

Another theme, after his marriage in June 1932 to the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, was the Christian family. His wedding present to her was one of his very few non-illustrative compositions, the Theme and Variations for violin and piano (1932); he also expressed much more forthrightly, indeed passionately, the bliss of marital love in the Poèmes pour Mi for soprano with piano or orchestra (1936–7), ‘Mi’ being his pet name for his wife. After the birth of their son Pascal (his only child) in 1937 came another song cycle, Chants de terre et de ciel (1938), in which all three members of the family are portrayed. For both cycles Messiaen wrote his own texts as he did for most of his vocal works, exceptions being Prix de Rome competition pieces, an early song to one of his mother's poems, a couple of liturgical settings (so few because he felt that plainsong was the only proper music for the liturgy) and La Transfiguration, for which he compiled an anthology of texts on the subject from the Bible, the Missal and St Thomas Aquinas.

The Poèmes pour Mi, frankly self-expressive and exuberant in their orchestral colouring, make a creative demonstration of Messiaen's opposition to the neo-classicism prevailing in Paris, and in the year of their composition as piano songs he founded a group with André Jolivet, Daniel-Lesur and Yves Baudrier: La Jeune France. Their aim was to re-emphasize passion and sensuality in music, and they presented several concerts of their works in Paris between 1936 and 1939. No doubt they influenced one another. Messiaen could, for example, have picked up from Jolivet the use of irrational values to loosen his rhythm, and he may have been stimulated too by the visits made to Paris in the 1930s by Varèse and Villa-Lobos. In 1936 he began teaching, at the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Schola Cantorum. The next year he wrote Fête des belles eaux for six ondes martenot (his first use of this electronic instrument), to accompany a display of fountains on the Seine at the 1937 Paris Exposition.

Soon after the outbreak of World War II he was called up for military service, and in May 1940 was captured and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp at Görlitz in Silesia. There, during the winter of 1940–41, he completed the Quatuor pour la fin du temps for himself to play with a violinist, a cellist and a clarinetist he had found among his fellow inmates. It was his most ambitious work so far, a sequence of eight movements in which ‘the end of time’— meaning the end of orderly progressive time— is conveyed sometimes by non-developing textures of ostinati, sometimes by very slow music, sometimes by sudden interruptions, sometimes by dances in irregular rhythm. The first performance took place at the camp, before a huge audience of prisoners in the depth of winter.

After his release in the spring of 1941 he was appointed to teach harmony at the Conservatoire. Paris was now an occupied city, and perhaps the becalmed condition of musical life there had a part in rendering him musically silent for almost two years. Other factors would have been his work on an outline of his composition methods, Technique de mon langage musical, and the extraordinarily gifted circle of students that was gathering around him, among them Boulez, Serge Nigg and Yvonne Loriod. His wife had by now succumbed to illness and entered a sanatorium, where she remained in steadily diminishing health until her death in April 1959. During this difficult period Loriod, an outstanding pianist, became the focus of a love that could be expressed only in music: in the Visions de l'Amen (1943) he wrote for the two of them to play, in the Trois petites liturgies (1943–4) where she had the solo part, in the recital-length Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (1944) and in a third song cycle, Harawi (1945), which itself became the first ‘act’ in a trilogy of works on the Tristan legend, the others being the ten-movement Turangalîla-symphonie (1946–8) and the Cinq rechants for 12 mixed voices (1948).

Turangalîla—his biggest work so far, scored for a large orchestra with abundant percussion and solo piano (again a Loriod part) and ondes martenot—was commissioned for the Boston SO by Koussevitzky, who, being ill, had to yield the first performance to Bernstein. Despite the difficulties in presenting a work on such a scale, Turangalîla was soon being widely played and making Messiaen known to a large international audience. Reactions to it were divided. Its rapturous love music, exultant dances, scintillating colouring and extraordinary images appealed to many; others were appalled by what they considered its vulgarity. Boulez, who had followed rehearsals for the first performance of the Trois petites liturgies with keen enthusiasm, was dismissive of the new piece, and for a while there was a breach in the friendship between master and pupil.

Messiaen had Boulez in his class for part of the time when, between 1943 and 1947, he had given private lessons in composition and analysis outside the Conservatoire, introducing his pupils not only to his own methods but to those of the Second Viennese School (Berg's Lyric Suite had been among the scores in the portable library he took with him to Görlitz). The atmosphere was that of a revolutionary cadre, consciously opposed to the Conservatoire's academic rigidity, and the pupils called themselves ‘les flèches’ (the arrows) to indicate their determination. Boulez and Nigg produced the first French serial compositions, and Messiaen began in parts of Turangalîla to apply 12-note methods to rhythmic values. (These sections, Turangalîla I, II and III, were perhaps the only movements of which Boulez approved; certainly they were the only ones he ever conducted.) Teacher and pupils stimulated one another, and for a short time it seemed that Messiaen was about to join his younger colleagues on the road to and through total serialism. His piano piece Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, which he wrote while teaching at the Darmstadt summer course in 1949, allots a particular duration and a particular dynamic level to each of the just 36 notes in play; it had a crucial impact on both Boulez and Stockhausen. He also used abstract numerical procedures in a tape-music project, Timbres-durées (1952), and in some movements of the Livre d'orgue (1951), in other movements of which, as in the whole of the Messe de la Pentecôte, he formalized what he had learnt in two decades of improvising at La Trinité. With the exception of a Conservatoire test piece, Verset pour la Fête de la Dédicace (1960) and the only posthumously published Monodie (1963), he wrote nothing more for his own instrument until the end of the 1960s.

The note-by-note procedures of the Mode de valeurs and a few other works of this immediate period did not fit well with his urge to write illustrative music, and after 1952 he combined them with broader kinds of material or else used them, though only rarely, to evoke a bleak or menacing atmosphere (as in the owl portrait La chouette hulotte or the stigmata scene in Saint François d'Assise). The other effect of his abstract phase was to leave him suspicious for a while of melodic-harmonic invention, for which he found an alternative in listening to birds. His interest in ornithology dated back to his student years, and he had imitated birdsong in a generalized way in La Nativité, the Quatuor and Visions de l'Amen. Now, starting with the Conservatoire test piece Le merle noir for flute and piano (1951), he devoted himself to copying the songs of particular species he had heard in nature, and from this point on he journeyed throughout France—and later throughout much of the world— collecting birdsongs by ear. In adapting the songs and calls to traditional instruments, to 12-note temperament and to a human timescale, he had to adjust them, and often a greater or lesser hint of his modal practice would creep in, if only in the favouring of the tritone. His birds are recognizably his, but they are also recognizably themselves, and his efforts to reproduce nature, maintained for 40 years, brought from him music of great variety and often dazzling brilliance. It is not just the songs of birds that are projected through this music but also the intense colours of avian plumage, and the awe Messiaen felt for birds as being, like angels or resurrected souls, free in flight and at one with God.

Only the first of his larger birdsong compositions, Réveil des oiseaux (1953), was based on this material exclusively, presenting a speeded-up picture of the period from midnight (with nightingales alone) through the dawn chorus to mid-morning silence. By now he was doing much of his composing during summer holidays spent at his own property in Petichet, near Grenoble, amid the birds and the mountains, though for the immense Catalogue d'oiseaux for solo piano (1956–8) he travelled all over France so that he could portray his chosen birds in their native habitats, in compositions that last up to half an hour and are patterned in typical verse-refrain forms. Oiseaux exotiques (1955–6) is based largely on the loud cries of tropical birds from the Americas and Asia, recreated in the same kind of block-built structure and by what became a characteristic ensemble of solo piano with a small group consisting mostly of wind and percussion. The culmination to this birdsong period arrived in Chronochromie for large orchestra (1959–60), where songs and shrieks appear alongside impressions of the rocks and streams of high mountains, and sometimes also with abstract quasi-serial formulations. Chronochromie was commissioned by the Donaueschingen Festival, the principal showcase for the international avant garde, while Oiseaux exotiques and its two successors for similar formations, Sept haïkaï (1962) and Couleurs de la Cité Céleste (1963), were composed for Boulez's Domaine Musical concerts. (In 1955 the Domaine had decamped to La Trinité to hear the composer play his Livre d'orgue.)

Sept haïkaï was the souvenir of a first visit to Japan that Messiaen had made in 1962 with Loriod, whom he had recently married. Couleurs marked a return to Catholic subject matter after a dozen years of celebrating God almost exclusively as the creator of the natural world, the only exception having been the little organ Verset. Next came Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum for symphonic wind and percussion (1964), commissioned by the French government for performances in the Ste Chapelle and Chartres Cathedral, lit by the medieval stained-glass which Messiaen adored and took as his highest example of art: an art of pattern and colour, in which figures and narratives are irradiated by light. He often spoke of seeing colours internally when he heard or imagined sounds, and he was consistent in the correspondences he described or tried to create: the A major chord with added 6th, for example, was always bright blue, the blue of Chartres, of the Mediterranean and of heaven.

After Et exspecto he gave himself largely to the composition of huge works, each a concert in itself, drawing on everything he had discovered hitherto: the modal melodies, sumptuous harmonies and driving or static rhythms of his pre-war music, the abstract speculations of the period around 1950, the birdsongs and the colours. The first of these grand summations was La Transfiguration de notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1965–9), for seven instrumental soloists, choir and large orchestra. Des canyons aux étoiles… for piano and orchestra (1971–4) was commissioned by Miss Alice Tully of New York, and Messiaen used the occasion of his first American commission to render the canyons and birds of Utah. Saint François d'Assise (1975–83), his unexpected single exercise in music theatre, was written for the Paris Opéra and followed swiftly by the Livre du Saint Sacrement (1984), a last organ work (commissioned by the city of Detroit and the American Guild of Organists). Finally, after several small pieces, came Eclairs sur l'Au-delà… (1988–92), scored for an enormous orchestra, a commission from the New York PO.

In 1978 he was obliged by the Conservatoire's age rules to retire. He had been teaching analysis since 1947 and composition since 1966, and his pupils had included Barraqué, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Goehr, Murail and George Benjamin. He loved teaching, loved his pupils and kept in contact with many of them. But retirement gave him more opportunity to travel the world in pursuit of performances and of birds, and he became a familiar figure in concert halls: benign, gently smiling, accompanied always by Loriod, attentive and courteous to any who came to ask him questions or request an autograph, habitually tieless except when evening clothes were required. Among the many honours bestowed on him during his last quarter century was the naming of a Utah mountain Mount Messiaen.

Paul Griffiths, from the New Grove.