Sept Haïkaï, Esquisses japonaises (Seven Haïkaï, Japanese Sketches)
Olivier Messiaen
O livier Messiaen (born December 10, 1908,
in Avignon, France; died April 28, 1992, in
Paris) was born into a culturally inclined fam-
ily — his father was an English-French transla-
tor, his mother, a poet — and at age 11 he began
studying at the Paris Conservatoire, where he
earned premiers prix (“highest honors”) in
organ, piano accompaniment, improvisation,
and composition. In 1931, the year after he left
the Conservatoire, he was named organist at
the Église de la Trinité in Paris, where he served
for the rest of his life. Young composers flocked to
his classes in France, Germany, and America —
Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis among
them — ensuring that his very personal aesthetic
would leave a mark apart from his own output.
Rollo Myers, writing in Modern French Music
(1971), observed:
What distinguishes his music from that of
other contemporary composers is, above all,
its extraordinary blend of cerebrality and
sensuality, of violence and insipidity all
wrapped up in an elaborate web of rhythmic
and harmonic complexities not always intel-
ligible to the ear.
Messiaen’s particular hallmarks include an
obsession with Roman Catholic theology, com-
plicated meters, and birdsong. He began notat-
ing the last of these outdoors in 1923, and
through the years he traveled widely to observe
birds in their native habitats, transcribing their
calls to knit into his compositions.
In 1962 Messiaen traveled to Japan, where,
amid musical duties, he spent some time in a
nature preserve, trailed by a NHK television
crew. The sights and sounds of the trip gave rise
to Sept Haïkaï, which he began plotting “on
site” and finished shortly after he returned to
France. Of the seven movements, the first and
last serve as formal bookends, described in the
score as “elaborate and grimacing like the
guardian kings that frame the entrance of Bud-
dhist temples.” The five “principal” movements
relate to specific Japanese scenes or experi-
ences, all described in some detail in the
score’s preface. In “Nara Park and the Stone
Lanterns,” Messiaen writes of “the sun which
glimmers among the cryptomerias” and the
“three thousand stone lanterns squeezed to-
gether as far as the eye can see.” The park of
“Yamanaka,” on the slopes of Mount Fuji,
teems with forest sounds, culminating in ex-
tended passages for the solo piano; “Gagaku”
captures sounds of ancient imperial court
music (with trumpet, two oboes, and English
horn doubling to suggest the acid bite of the
hichiriki, a Japanese instrument); “Miyajima
and the Torii in the Sea” portrays “perhaps the
most beautiful landscape in Japan … an island,
a mountain covered with Japanese pines … a
Shinto temple … a great red door of the torii.”
“The Birds of Karuizawa” includes the songs
of 23 separate birds that Messiaen notated at
that inland park.
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