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Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography
- GenresMusic
208 pages, Hardcover
Published August 14, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 23, 2025
This is a very concise biography of the great French composer, just 187 pages of text all told, and on many of those pages photographs take up space. For someone already familiar with Messiaen’s life and work, it can be read in a single sitting. Perhaps this book does serve a need for a short biography, but it feels slight next to Peter Hill & Nigel Simeone’s Messiaen, and the collection of interviews with Claude Samuel where the composer talks about his own work and aesthetic. That said, many of the photographs here I had seen nowhere before.
The subtitle “A Critical Biography� means two things. Firstly, there is a tiny bit of airing of dirty laundry. For example, Messiaen’s mother, the poetess Cécile Sauvage has generally been spoken of in reverent terms, but here Sholl tells of how she had an longstanding affair with a man other than her husband and was aloof from her children for some time. Secondly, instead of describing Messiaen’s music in solely positive terms, like some earlier treatments that tend towards the hagiographical, Sholl discusses some of the critical response to Messiaen’s music at the time of its premiere. In particular, the works of the early 1940s were far more polarizing to audiences and Messiaen’s peers than I had hitherto been aware.
The subtitle “A Critical Biography� means two things. Firstly, there is a tiny bit of airing of dirty laundry. For example, Messiaen’s mother, the poetess Cécile Sauvage has generally been spoken of in reverent terms, but here Sholl tells of how she had an longstanding affair with a man other than her husband and was aloof from her children for some time. Secondly, instead of describing Messiaen’s music in solely positive terms, like some earlier treatments that tend towards the hagiographical, Sholl discusses some of the critical response to Messiaen’s music at the time of its premiere. In particular, the works of the early 1940s were far more polarizing to audiences and Messiaen’s peers than I had hitherto been aware.
April 21, 2025
Robert Scholl is a Messiaen expert and in this short and concise biography he provides an accessible, always interesting account of the composer. His approach he says is to move 'between biographical, musical, theological, philosophical, psychoanalytic and aesthetic thinking' and although that might sound daunting he wears his learning lightly and uses those different threads judiciously so that they are always expounded in service of the reader. I particularly enjoyed the second half of the book where Messiaen's influence as a teacher is explored as well as his increasing tendencies towards what we might call 'monumentalism'. This would be a very good place to start for those who have heard some of Messiaen's music and would like to learn more but it has a lot to offer those who may have read other books and studies too. Hugely interesting and refreshingly accessible.
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