Score: Alphonse Leduc, 1966

Of all Messiaen’s works, Couleurs de la cité céleste is the most challenging to conduct. Once mastered, the techniques involved can be usefully applied to all of the composer’s works. It is difficult to think of a piece that is more punctuated by silences. The numerous sections are very much in block formation, each one being quite short but very contrasting in tempo and character, but introduced in quick succession. To gain an overall view of the structure of the work, Robert Sherlaw Johnson’s book on Messiaen is invaluable.19 His Table IX (on p. 180) shows how these block formations relate to each other. Such a vision of the piece is essential to formulating the gestural vocabulary required to conduct it. In spite of the silences punctuating the work, the performance must sustain a fundamental coherence. It is likely that such a design would fail with another composer, but in Messiaen it becomes a successful hallmark.

The symbolism which motivates all Messiaen’s works relates to religion in some, nature in some and number in others. But Couleurs de la cité céleste contains a synthesis of them all, hence the abrupt and extreme contrast of substance. While Messiaen insists that ‘life reveals itself if the work is successful without identification being necessary’,20 I consider it important for a conductor to sensitise the significance of the symbols, in order to characterise the music. Messiaen describes them in conversation with Claude Samuel: ‘there is in my music this juxtaposition of Catholic faith, the Tristan and Isolde myth and a highly developed use of bird song’.21 In Couleurs de la cité céleste we can add the rhythmic structures of Indian tâlas, Greek pulses and exotic colours, which feed into the three main symbols. ‘Catholic faith’ is explained by Messiaen as ‘the first aspect of my work, the noblest and, doubtless, the most useful and valuable’.22 He associates the Tristan and Isolde myth with love in these words: ‘I’m sensitive to human love … the greatest myth of human love [is] Tristan and Isolde.’23 Birdsong is related to his ‘profound love of nature’.24 In combining these symbols with rhythm and texture Messiaen explains that ‘rhythm is music inspired by the movements of nature, movements of free and unequal durations’.