REACHING FOR MESSIAEN’S DREAM:
ET EXSPECTO ON LA MEIJE
Note: I was asked to write this as a guest blog for Ashgate (publishers), and I though I'd share it here too. It's my personal account of the extraordinary concert on 18 July 2015 at the Festival Messiaen au Pays de la Meije (Hautes-Alpes) at which Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum was to have been played at an altitude of 2,400 metres, in front of the glacier on La Meije. Read on...
On board the boat from Yvoire to Nyon on 17 July,
the day we travelled from Geneva down to La Grave.
In 1963, André
Malraux gave Messiaen a commission from the French government for a work to
commemorate the dead of the two World Wars. According to a note the composer
made after their meeting, Malraux asked for ‘a work that was simple and solemn’
(‘une œuvre simple,
solenelle’), with powerful sonorities. After initially contemplating
a piece with large chorus, Messiaen finally settled on an unusual formation of
woodwind, brass and metallic percussion. The result was Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (‘And I await the resurrection
of the dead’), first performed for an invited audience at the Sainte-Chapelle
in Paris on 7 May 1965, and given on 20 June 1965 in Chartres Cathedral with General
de Gaulle in attendance.
In the preface
to the published score (Leduc, 1967), Messiaen wrote that he conceived the work
for performance ‘in vast spaces:
churches, cathedrals and even in the open air and on mountain tops’, adding
that he had composed Et exspecto ‘in
the Hautes-Alpes, in front of the solemn and powerful landscapes
which are my true home.’ When Jacques Longchampt
reviewed the Chartres performance of Et
exspecto for Le Monde (24 June
1965), he was more specific, revealing that ‘Messiaen hoped that it could be
heard in front of the mountain of La Meije, in the Alps’; the composer repeated
the same wish in conversation with Claude Samuel, declaring that his wanted to
hear it ‘at La Grave, facing the glacier of La Meije’.
La Meije, overlooking the village of La Grave in the Hautes-Alpes,
stands at 3,983 metres (over 13,000 feet), and its most prominent feature is the
magnificent glacier mentioned by Messiaen. He visited La Grave on many
occasions, including a trip on 2 August 1964, while he was hard at work on Et exspecto. Since 1998, this village
has been home to the annual Festival Messiaen au Pays de la Meije, the
brainchild of Gaëtan Puaud, planned by him each year with vision and daring to
focus on different facets of Messiaen’s music. I’m very fortunate to have been back
every year since 2005, invited by Gaëtan to talk about an aspect of Messiaen’s
life and work that reflected the festival programme.
2015 is the 50th anniversary of Et
exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum; in January, Gaëtan Puaud asked if I’d be
willing to give a talk on its genesis and early performance history. I was
delighted to accept, particularly as he told me that he planned an open-air
performance of Et exspecto on the
large plateau at the téléphérique station situated at 2,400 metres, with the
glacier as a stupendous backdrop: a vast and savage space. It was a bold and grandiose
celebration of the half-century of Et
exspecto. The performers were the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg,
Les Percussions de Strasbourg (whose original members had played in the 1965
première), and the Slovenian conductor Marko Letonja, the orchestra’s Music
Director since 2012.
Tickets for the concert and the téléphérique
The morning of 18 July 2015 was overcast but pleasant in La Grave, and
by the time I started my pre-concert talk on Et exspecto at 11 a.m. in the village’s Salle des fêtes, the sun
was starting to break through. Afterwards, I sat outside the Hotel Castillan
(which faces the glacier), talking to French and Belgian friends, and the mood
was one of the keenest anticipation for what was to come later in the day: even
the most jaded concert-goer could hardly fail to be excited by the prospect of
hearing one of Messiaen’s greatest works performed in such a fabulous setting.
Our lunch was also enlivened by the unusual spectacle of very large instrument flight
cases being airlifted up to the venue by helicopter. Except for experienced
mountain walkers, the only realistic way to the glacier is by téléphérique, and
the small cabins of the cable cars are not up to moving the vast array of
percussion – including three very large tam-tams, a whole family of gongs
and three large sets of cencerros (cowbells), all of which play an essential
part in Et exspecto. The orchestral
players made their way up the mountain soon afterwards to rehearse, and to film
a complete cover performance of Et
exspecto for Arte TV, which was there to record the concert for later
broadcast.
The concert was due to start at 5:00 p.m., and at 3:45, I set off in one
of the cable cars with my wife Jasmine, and three friends who were also in La
Grave for the performance: Tom Owen and Jess Jevon from England, and Lucie
Kayas from the Paris Conservatoire – the leading authority on the music of
Jolivet and a treasured friend who made the French translation of the Messiaen
biography I co-authored. By the time we reached the station at 2,400 metres,
the sky was slate-grey, and the clouds were looking ominous. But what we saw
and heard – with the audience finding places to sit on the grass, and the
glacier as a breathtaking natural stage-set behind the orchestra – was both elemental
and extremely moving. The orchestra was rehearsing the third movement, and it
was a wonderful experience to hear Messiaen’s sets of giant cowbells played on
a mountain in the Alps – an artistic, gamelan-inspired reimagining of something
that has always been such an essential part of the Alpine soundscape. After the
third movement, we heard a complete run-through of the fifth and final
movement, inspired by a verse from the Apocalypse: ‘Et j'entendis la voix d'une
foule immense…’ (‘And I heard the voice of a great multitude’). Messiaen’s
scoring here is brilliantly effective for the outdoors: the incessant beats of
the tuned gongs, punctuated by tubular bells and tam-tams, combined with the
splendid austerity of the broad theme announced by bass saxhorn, tuba,
trombones and horns. It was a mighty and imposing sound that became still more electrifying
when the woodwind and trilling cencerros added their jubilant descants. The
final, heaven-storming resolution seemed to mirror the sublime grandeur of the
landscape itself.
The initial sights and sounds as we arrived on the mountain:
a breathtaking spectacle. Rehearsing the third movement of Et exspecto.
The Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg and Les Percussions de Strasbourg conducted by Marko Lentonja in the last movement of Et exspecto.
All this was an enticing avant-goût of what should have followed.
With about 15 minutes to go, the orchestra cleared the stage and all seemed set
for a memorable occasion. But five minutes later a light drizzle began to fall;
as a precaution, the librarian collected the orchestral parts off the stands,
and the instruments still on the stage were covered. Before long, the drizzle
turned into a sustained downpour, and by the scheduled start time of 5:00 p.m.,
thunder could be heard rumbling in the mountains, quickly followed by flashes
of lightning. There was some uncertainty about what was going to happen, but by
about 5:15 it was clear that the concert couldn’t take place (not least because
there was no covering for the orchestra), so the players packed up their
instruments, and the large audience (my ticket was No. 564) either headed
straight for the téléphérique, or took refuge in a mountain barn. With heavy
hearts, we finally joined the long queue to go back down the mountain once the
concert had been definitively abandoned.
Waiting in the rain for the cable-car back down the mountain
We reached the foot of the mountain at
about 7:00p.m., by which time the helicopter had already airlifted most the large
instruments back down, their flight cases swaying at the end of a long cable.
A helicopter airlifting large instruments from the mountain back to La Grave.
The weather is notoriously capricious in the Alps, with sudden and completely
unpredictable changes, and nobody would have foreseen what happened next: within
half and hour the sun was shining in La Grave and on the glacier, and it continued
to do so for the rest of the evening. This photo was taken from the terrace in front of the Hotel Castillan at about 7:30 p.m.
By then, players and audience could only
watch the virtually cloudless sky with poignant regret for what might have been.
But it was too late: the treacherous Alpine weather had won, and Messiaen’s
dream remained unrealized, at least for the time being.
There had always been an
alternative plan: to give the work indoors at the splendid Collégiale
Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Nicolas in Briançon. Had the weather been bad the day
before (in fact it was perfect), or had there been a seriously threatening
forecast, no doubt it would have been relocated there. But the concert could
not be moved anywhere once the orchestra was already installed on the mountain.
While that turned out to be a risky decision, nobody I spoke to at lunchtime
thought there was a serious threat of rain: on the contrary, the consensus
among experienced alpinistes was that
the omens were good. The timing could not have been more unlucky: had the
concert been scheduled for an hour earlier – or two hours later – it would
have taken place. My fervent hope is that Arte’s film is sufficiently complete
for them to be able to broadcast the performance recorded at the rehearsal
earlier in the afternoon: it should be an unforgettable communion of Messiaen’s
music with nature at its most majestic.
Nigel Simeone
20 July 2015
Finally, here's a nice news report on the concert from TF1, broadcast during the evening news on 19 July.
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