Chant d'amour et de mort: Amy Moore Presents Messian's Hawari

Radical 20th-century French composer Olivier Messiaen’s obsession with the transformative qualities of music and its power to connect the human soul with distant mysteries of the universe is channelled into his epic song cycle, Harawi.

Featuring Principal Artist, soprano Amy Moore, accompanied by Artistic Director, Antony Pitts, the music and the love poetry were written while Messiaen’s wife Claire Delbos was suffering from serious mental illness. Harawi is infused with a fantastical mix of Peruvian ritual, the grandest and catchiest of post-Wagnerian melodies, and a calm, deep faith in the Eternal.

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) | Harawi

La ville qui dormait, toi

Bonjour toi, colombe verte

Montagnes

Doundou tchil

L'amour de

Piroutcha

Répétition planétaire

Adieu

Syllabes

L'escalier redit, gestes du soleil

Amour oiseau d'étoile

Katchikatchi les étoiles

Dans le noir

Amy Moore, soprano & Antony Pitts, piano

Dates

Tue 22 Sep BMEC City Hall, Bathurst

Thu 24 Sep Newcastle City Hall

Thu 1 Oct Melbourne Digital Concert Hall

Sun 14 February Mosman Art Gallery

Messiaen’s music is full of colour and full of joy and of life, and full of joie de vivre – joy in living itself. His music is also full of extreme passions and contrasts, and some of the colours he creates in his harmony are strange to the point of sounding otherworldly, as if from another civilization... beyond the stars. But he warmly invites the listener (and the performer) to hear the world as he hears and sees it – in the “songs of love and death” of Harawi that means loquacious and audacious birds, forbidding stone statues and ritual dances, and the tenderest affairs of the heart, all in chords and melodies that cross from wartime Paris with its underground jazz (“the symbol of, or the last tie with, the outside free world”) to a Peru of folksong and legend where monkeys jabber, dancers shake their ankle bracelets, and syllables of the Andean Quetchua language are de- and re-constructed.

Harawi takes its title from a type of Peruvian folksong most often lamenting the death of the beloved. Messiaen’s Harawi is a song cycle of a dozen songs, some short and sweet, others long and intense, and tells a story of two lovers fated to love, to die, and to be reunited in their love and death, transcending the limitations of present reality. A surrealist painting by Roland Penrose, Seeing is believing, is, as Messiaen put it himself, “the symbol of the whole of Harawi” – “Two male hands reaching out, then a woman’s head upside down, her hair spreading out upwards from below, her brow, her eyes, her face, her neck, and then the rest of the woman is missing, or rather, she is continued in the sky and the stars.”

For Messiaen himself, love in real life was both intense and complicated: at the time he was writing Harawi his wife Claire Delbos, herself a composer and violinist, had been undergoing very serious mental health issues for a number of years, and would eventually die in a sanatorium. His love for her had been expressed in two earlier song cycles, Poèmes pour Mi (1936), and Chants de Terre et de Ciel (1938), and Harawi appears to reflect the deterioration and eventual parting that the couple faced. At the same time, the woman who was to become Messiaen’s second wife (in 1961, two years after Claire’s death) was already an important part of his life. Yvonne Loriod, a pianist and burgeoning composer, was one of the pupils in Messiaen's first class at the Paris Conservatoire after his repatriation from prisoner-of-war camp in 1941. Even while their relationship was little more than friendship the sparks kindled a blaze of musical outpouring for the virtuoso fingers of the young Loriod, including works from the 1940s such as Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jèsus and Visions de l'Amen.

Messiaen had recently written incidental music for a play based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde where there is a love triangle that results in separation and death. Harawi itself is part of a trilogy of his works directly inspired by the legend (the other two works are the enormous orchestral Turangalîla-symphonie and Cinq Rechants for 12 voices). Messiaen himself pointed to the all-consuming love of

the Tristan story as a positive rather than destructive force, despite the aspects of the mediaeval legend that clearly contravened his own very strong Christian faith; instead, he saw a connection with the love-sacrifice at the centre of the Gospel (although there is no overt theology in Harawi at all). The very earthy, though heaven-bound, love story of Harawi follows the journey of Piroutcha and her un-named lover in two acts, the first leading up to the grand farewell in the seventh song, and the second taking the lovers into a universe that might be a surrealist vision of the afterlife.

The opening song of the first half, La ville qui dormait, toi, introduces the beloved’s mesmeric gaze, while all else sleeps; the stillness is broken by the morning-call of the green dove, a symbol of youth and love in Bonjour toi, colombe verte with the main love-theme that comes back in both the seventh and the final movements of the cycle. The radiant beauty of the green dove gives way to the vertiginous mountain landscape of Montagnes, in which there is a premonition of impending catastrophe. Then it is time to dance with the sound of ritual Peruvian ankle-bells echoed in the onomatopoeic title and refrain of the fourth song, Doundou tchil – the middle section resounds with the lover calling Piroutcha’s name, which is answered by her in the fifth song, L'amour de Piroutcha, a tender love duet in which the lover knowingly talks of the fate that awaits not just her, but him too. Things take a cosmic turn in Répétition planétaire as their love-play is set against the turning forces of the universe with music that is, by turn, hysterical and mysterious, and culminates in a terrifying whirlwind fugue! Adieu ends the first half of the cycle as his “green dove” passes from the lover’s reach with three final crashes on the piano sounding something like an orchestral tam-tam.

The second half begins with Syllabes – a game of number- and word-play consisting of a captivating lovesong addressed to his departed “green dove”, alternating with an extraordinary series of frenetic chases in which the warning “pia-pia-pia” calls of apparently friendly monkeys are overlaid with cascades of chords that go forwards and backwards... and eventually can go no faster! The climactic eighth movement, L'escalier redit, gestes du soleil, celebrates an intimation of a lovers’ ecstatic reunion beyond death, and is thoroughly physical and exhilarating. In the afterglow of Amour oiseau d'étoile the distance between earth and heaven is pictured in terms of the Penrose painting (featured on our program cover) – one of Messiaen’s most enchanting slow movements. Katchikatchi les étoiles expresses the lover’s longing for his departed Piroutcha as a dance that wends its way through the universe – and his own macabre desire to join her. Finally, the vision slowly recedes – for now, at least – with images of her and his own undying love drawn from the preceding movements, ending with an acceptance that his “green dove” has gone into the night – Dans le noir. If there is any guilt in Harawi related either to loss or infidelity, it is totally suppressed and/or transfigured into an overwhelming sense of atonement.