This chapter details the history of Messiaen’s family. It examines Messiaen’s relationships with his parents, Pierre Messiaen and Cécile Sauvage, his two wives, Claire Delbos and Yvonne Loriod, and his son Pascal. It reveals that Messiaen’s private life was complex and sometimes difficult, but also that these relationships had a profound effect on his understanding of himself as a composer, his compositions, and the performance of his music.

Messiaen’s music is rhythmically and harmonically complex. It reflects, as he affirmed, the miraculous beauty of God’s Creation. By the early 1940s, he had developed a musical language of religious symbolism comprising a variety of components. The building blocks on which this language is based and the contents their inventor intended them to represent were clearly defined, and hardly changed in the course of the composer’s long life. This article gives an overview of this symbolism and discusses the prevalent devices Messiaen used, along with the religious concepts informing each of them.

Messiaen is famous for the length of his tenure as titular organist at Sainte-Trinité, which lasted from 1931 to his death in 1992. This chapter explores his appointment, details of his duties, and notable events during his career. It discusses the relationship between him and other prominent organist-composers during this period, including Franck, Tournemire, and Langlais. It deals in detail with the Cavaillé-Coll Grand Organ in La Trinité and how this may have influenced not only his organ compositions, but also his other works; it also refers to the importance of the recordings he made on the instrument, playing his own works.

This chapter examines the way in which the idea of a European avant-garde is formed in the wake of Messiaen’s thought and the ways in which this reflexively informed Messiaen’s own work. It focuses in particular on the theoretical achievements of Ligeti, Stockhausen, and Xenakis and how formed a new ways of thinking about music.

Since the death of Pierre Boulez in 2016, the historiography of contemporary music has begun to confront the completion of one of the most remarkable careers affecting the character and context of musical life since 1945. This chapter examines the changing nature of the relationship between Messiaen and his most distinguished student. It examines Boulez’s critiques of Messiaen, and it creates a dialogue between aspects of classicism and modernism in the thinking of both composers, establishing their distinctiveness and relevance to the continuing evolution of compositional practice in the present day.

This chapter examines Messiaen’s pianistic techniques and virtuosity in Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944). In particular, it focusses on Yvonne Loriod, who gave the first performance of the work at the Salle Gaveau in March 1945 at the age of only twenty-one, and whose phenomenal virtuosity enabled Messiaen to explore new complexities of musical thought and pianistic expression. It demonstrates how Messiaen’s pianistic style can be understood as part of a tradition reaching back to Chopin, Liszt, and Mussorgsky, while also exploring its parallels in Albéniz and Ravel.

This Introduction configures Messiaen’s life and works, and the culture, aesthetics, and legacy of his art in terms of various kinds of images. In particular, this chapter focuses on the complexity and construction of these images, which are sometimes surprising and contradictory, to reveal the ‘contexts’ that inform this book.

Messiaen is arguably more acclaimed in China’s art music circles than many of his contemporaries. Chen Qigang (b. 1951), a private student of Messiaen, stands out as a torchbearer among this generation of Chinese composers. That Chen was a student of Luo Zhongrong (b. 1924), one of the most revered Beijing-based composers, further connects the two vastly different musical worlds. What contributed to Messiaen’s stature in China may also be traced back through a monograph on Messiaen by Yang Liqing (1942#–2013), president of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and also an eminent composer, to Yuri Kholopov’s O tryokh zarubezhnïkh sistemakh garmonii of 1966.

The chapter examines the work of a composer Jean-Louis Florentz, whose work has perhaps a greater affinity to that of Messiaen than works by the more well-known triumvirate of spectralists (Grisey, Murail, and Levinas). Florentz’s works are distinguished by their originality and are notable for their use of world music, in particular Ethiopian liturgical music. The study evaluates the connections between the two men, the proximity and distance of their techniques, their musical aesthetics, and the spiritual approaches of these composers.

Messiaen’s relationship with the press and, to some extent, with the wider musical culture within which he lived and worked, can be divided into the period before, and after, ‘Le Cas Messiaen’ in 1945#–6, in which critical responses to his Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine and Vingt Regards sur L’enfant-Jésus sharply divided critical and popular opinion. In this chapter, I explore Messiaen’s early reception in the French press of the 1930s an‘ early ’40s, up to and including ‘Le Cas’, paying particular attention to two particular concerns: the way the critics of the time chose to understand his music as a feature in the landscape of the French music of the time, and the way his public persona, including his own journalism, intersected with that understanding.

Messiaen was inspired by a pantheon of saints and theologians that were important to him: Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and then Ernest Hello, Dom. Columba Marmion, Romano Guardini, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This chapter focusses in particular on St Thomas Aquinas, whose work exerted the greatest influence on Messiaen’s understanding of Christian doctrine. It examines the way this shaped his language, and assesses the range of the symbolic manifestations of Aquinas’s thought in his art.