August 4
The Twittering Machine, 1922 (watercolor and ink) by Paul Klee. Museum of Modern Art/Wikimedia Commons.
Catalogue of Wonder:
Messiaen’s Spiritual Ecology
By Thomas May
“We are all in a profound night,” Olivier Messiaen declared to his composition students at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1950s, “and I don’t know where I am going.” Yet the natural world of birdsong provided a lifelong source of illumination. Across the span of Messiaen’s career—from specific movements in his early Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) and his first major cycle for solo piano, Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944), through the epic Des Canyons aux étoiles… (1971–74) to his only completed opera, Saint François d’Assise (1975–83), and his final completed composition, Éclairs sur l’Au-Delà… (1987–91), an orchestral meditation on eternity and the afterlife—birdsong served not only as a recurring motif but as a central pillar of his musical theology.
That avian inspiration held such a persistent presence for this devoutly Catholic composer is hardly surprising. Messiaen’s reverence for birdsong exemplifies how he drew on what the musicologist Robert Fallon describes as “sensible reality to intimate a higher, hidden reality,” thereby reflecting theological ideas about the inherent goodness of nature.
At the same time, Messiaen combined this potent spiritual symbolism with an astonishing realism. A serious ornithologist, he spent countless hours in the field amassing observations that he experimented with transcribing into performable notation—work that required both acute aural sensitivity and inventive adaptation to the timbral resources of whichever medium he was composing for, whether piano, ensemble, or orchestra. From the 1950s until the end of his life, Messiaen compiled some 200 manuscript notebooks filled with birdsong transcriptions and interspersed musical sketches. The result is a far cry from the stylized, picturesque—and often sentimental—depictions of nature found in the works of so many earlier composers.
Catalogue d’oiseaux represents Messiaen’s most extended and concentrated engagement with the subject, anchoring this dual commitment to the empirical and the transcendent in a pianistic universe of boundless musical imagination. Drawing on an outline he had jotted down as early as 1953, he began gathering material in 1954 (staring with a sketch for the Golden Oriole) and completed the cycle in 1958; actual composition from Messiaen’s transcriptions proceeded relatively quickly.
Messiaen created the cycle for the virtuoso pianist Yvonne Loriod, his student at the Conservatoire in the early 1940s, who became his muse and most significant interpreter; they married in 1961. Not only a tireless champion of his music, Loriod accompanied Messiaen on the birdwatching expeditions throughout France that form the larger background to Catalogue, part of which she premiered in 1957; she gave the first performance of the complete cycle in the spring of 1959.
Lasting approximately two-and-a-half hours, Catalogue d’oiseaux comprises thirteen individual pieces for solo piano grouped into seven books. Each movement bears the name of a bird species found in particular regions of France and conjures not only its song but the full tapestry of its surroundings: the contours of its habitat, the presence of other birds, the hour of day or night, the shifting seasons. Messiaen’s poetically vivid commentaries, both lyrical and precise, set the stage with a wealth of sensory detail—geography, time of day, light, atmosphere, symbolic resonance, and even the colors he perceived in particular harmonies. His synesthetic imagination renders, for instance, the Blue Rock Thrush, Cetti’s Warbler, and Black Wheatear in layered hues of indigo, slate, satin, and deep sapphire.
The longest piece, devoted to the Reed Warbler, comprises the whole of Book IV and stands apart in both scale and conception. Set in the marshlands of the Sologne region south of Orléans, it traces a full twenty-seven-hour cycle of avian and environmental activity, beginning with “the midnight music of the lakes.” Rather than a concentrated series of close-up snapshots, this music unfolds as an immersive, time-lapsed panorama. The warbler’s insistent, rasping song recurs throughout, alternating with contributions from an astonishing array of other birds—including the bittern, blackbird, redstart, pheasant, and nightingale—and the sounds of frogs and insects, all set against the changing light.
Messiaen uses this expansive structure to evoke a living ecosystem in flux—vivid with dawn choruses, midday heat, and nocturnal stillness—demonstrating the full extent of his ambition to render nature as a multidimensional musical and spiritual habitat: not merely a setting for birdsong, but a space of divine resonance, where Creation itself becomes a form of praise for the intricate, sacred web of life.
Instead of a linear narrative or progression, the cycle takes shape as a series of self-contained tableaux, each capturing a microcosm. Some birds reappear or are echoed across multiple movements, such as the black-eared wheatear in Mediterranean settings, or the nocturnal voices of the tawny owl and woodlark (both in Book III), or, in the final scene, “the lament of the curlew repeating as it flies far away” against “cold black night, the splash of surf.”
Alongside its detailed evocation of natural soundscapes, Catalogue d’oiseaux reveals Messiaen’s singular approach to rhythm and musical form. In lieu of conventional development or thematic transformation, musical ideas are presented through juxtaposition, accumulation, and layering. The overall temporal sensibility is not goal-directed but contemplative—music that breathes and flows in accordance with natural rhythms rather than conventional formal schemes. Messiaen’s episodic designs are shaped by shifts in light, mood, or habitat, which he described as “paroxysms” or “tableaux.” With regard to harmonic language, Messiaen is fond of piling chords together for their resonance of color, juxtaposing them like brushstrokes on a canvas to evoke radiant landscapes.
Messiaen also draws on a wide range of rhythmic devices, including non-retrogradable rhythms (which read the same forwards and backwards), additive processes, and complex groupings derived from Hindu and Greek meters. These techniques produce music that often feels suspended, asymmetrical, and unmoored from regular pulse, echoing the irregular pacing and unpredictable patterns of birdsong with uncanny precision while also suggesting a deeper, sacred sense of time outside human measurement.
“These pages of immaculate, poetic freshness are also those of an acute, well-organized observer, who chooses to call this series of contemplative tableaux a catalogue,” writes Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who learned this tradition directly from Yvonne Loriod herself as a student at the Paris Conservatoire. “Messiaen’s desire to imitate the timbre of each bird inspired him to develop acoustic coloration techniques that fully redefined the sonorous identity of the piano.” But beyond the realm of music, he adds, works like Catalogue d’oiseaux have a special meaning for our current age of existential anxiety about humanity’s destruction of biodiversity and assaults on nature itself: “This cycle stands out as a musical refuge, resonating with an audience that is increasingly concerned, expanded, and moved.”
— © Thomas May
Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the recipient of the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize and the Leonie Sonning Music Prize. Widely acclaimed as an authority on the music of our time, he has collaborated with leading composers including Helmut Lachenmann, Elliott Carter, Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marco Stroppa, and Olivier Messiaen. In 2024–25 Pierre-Laurent celebrates the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel with ensembles such as Bern Symphony, Teatro alla Scala Orchestra, SWR Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Czech Philharmonic. He marks the centenary of his teacher and close friend Pierre Boulez by appearing as a soloist with HR Symphony Frankfurt, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and L.A. Philharmonic, and in recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Vienna Musikverein, Auditorium National de Lyon, Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical in Madrid, and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. Other highlights of 2024–25 have included the late Peter Eotvös’ Cziffra Psodia with Berlin Philharmonic, world premieres of works by Mark Andre and George Benjamin, appearances with Tamara Stefanovich in Leipzig and Zurich, and a performance with actor Mathieu Amalric at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Aimard features prominently throughout the season at festivals including Musikfestspiel Berlin, Prague Spring Festival, and Klavierfestival Ruhr. His recital schedule includes Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam Muziekgebouw, Seoul Arts Centre, Tokyo’s Bunka Kaikan, Konzerthaus Dortmund, and Alte Oper Frankfurt. In late 2024 Aimard released Schubert: Ländler, the latest in a series of critically acclaimed albums that also features Messiaen’s magnum opus Catalogue d’oiseaux (2018).
