Olivier Messiaen

About Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist whose singular musical language made him one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century music. Born in Avignon in 1908 to a poet mother and a father who translated Shakespeare, he entered the Paris Conservatoire at eleven, studying with Paul Dukas, Marcel Dupré and others, and swept the conservatoire's major prizes before graduating in 1930. In 1931 he became organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, a post he held for sixty-one years, and from 1941 taught harmony and later composition at the Conservatoire, numbering Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis among his pupils. 

Captured during the Second World War, he composed his celebrated Quatuor pour la fin du temps in a German prisoner-of-war camp, where it received its premiere in 1941 before fellow inmates. Messiaen's mature style drew on self-devised "modes of limited transposition," non-retrogradable rhythms, Hindu and Greek rhythmic patterns, and above all the birdsong he painstakingly transcribed on expeditions worldwide and incorporated into works such as Catalogue d'oiseaux. A devout Catholic, he also experienced synaesthesia, associating chords with colour, an experience central to large-scale works including the Turangalîla-Symphonie and his opera Saint-François d'Assise. Messiaen died in Clichy in 1992, honoured with the Erasmus Prize and the Wolf Prize among many distinctions.