La Nativité du Seigneur

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La Nativité du Seigneur: neuf méditations pour orgue (Eng. "The Birth of the Lord: Nine Meditations for Organ") is an organ work by Olivier Messiaen , which he wrote in Grenoble in 1935 at the age of 27 . The premiere of the nine-part work with a playing time of approximately 55 minutes took place on 27 February 1936, the organ of La Trinité (Paris) instead. The interpreters at the world premiere were Jean Langlais , Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur and Jean-Jacques Grunenwald .

structure

The work is divided into nine movements - Messiaen calls them "meditations":

  1. La vierge et l'enfant (Eng. "The Virgin and the Child")
  2. Les bergers (Eng. "The Shepherds")
  3. Desseins éternels (German "Eternal Councils")
  4. Le verbe (Eng. "The Word")
  5. Les Enfants de Dieu (Eng. "The Children of God")
  6. Les Anges (Eng. "The Angels")
  7. Jésus accepte la souffrance (Eng. "Jesus accepts suffering")
  8. Les mages ( Eng . "The Wise Men")
  9. Dieu parmi nous (Eng. "God among us")

According to Messiaen, there are five theological ideas:

  • Our Predestination Realized by the Incarnation of the Word (No. 3)
  • God Who Lives Among Us (No. 9), God Who Suffering (No. 7)
  • The three births: the eternal of the Word (No. 4), the temporal Christ (No. 1), the spiritual of the believers (No. 5)
  • Creation of the Christmas story and the epiphany: the angels (no.6), the shepherds (no.2), the wise men (no.8)
  • Honor of the motherhood of Mary, which is expressed by the number of nine sentences.

Compositional characteristics

Messiaen himself later described the work as the first composition that was particularly characteristic of his musical language. These characteristics include the fact that time divisions remain latently effective, but are obscured by adding small note values ​​- such as a four-four time to which an additional sixteenth note has been added. Since this changes with every measure, Messiaen does not use any time indications - in contrast to his organ cycle L'Ascénsion , composed two years earlier ; the bar lines only fulfill a formal function of structuring.

La Nativité du Seigneur is Messiaen's first composition to be largely based on Modi . These are scales systematically used by Messiaen which - unlike the traditional diatonic scales - can only be transposed two to six times, i.e. consist of a regular sequence of whole and semitone steps repeated several times in the octave. Messiaen explains their harmonic possibilities in a detailed foreword to the work.

The melody is inspired by Gregorian in two movements . In addition, there are also folk songs, Greek meters and Indian rhythms as material.

Messiaen was a synesthete and formulated his color ideas for two parts of the work. In Les Bergers he describes the impression of a church window that consists of blue-violet, red, gold and silver color spots.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dietrich Gall, Paul Klimsa, Hans-Jürgen Freitag: Experiments for Color Hearing ( Memento from January 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

literature

  • Rudolf Faber, Philip Hartmann (ed.): Handbook of organ music . Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel / Stuttgart, Weimar, 2002. ISBN 3-7618-2003-8
  • Rudolf Innig : La Nativité du Seigneur - To the music of Olivier Messiaen . Musica sacra 103 (6), 1983, pp. 445-452.
  • Olivier Messiaen: La Nativité du Seigneur: neuf meditations pour orgue . Leduc, Paris 1936. 4 booklets.
  • Richard Franko Goldman: Messiaen: La Nativité du Seigneur by Simon Preston . In: The Musical Quarterly . Vol. 53, No. 2, 1967, pp. 290-293.

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