A few months ago, I got furious at Gustav Mahler. In hindsight, the fault was mostly my own. I voluntarily attended a performance of his second symphony with no intermission, no legroom, and no way to escape.
To divert my mind from the double assault of leg cramps and sleep, I attempted to engage with the music. But each bland melody I tried to follow was quickly overtaken by other themes that were equally uninteresting. They could have been clever variations of each other, but honestly, who cares?
As the concert dragged on, I decided to focus on the percussion section and their amusing logistics of striking the proper noisy apparatus at the right time. But even that wore off after ten minutes.
When the full-scale choir started their pompous preaching about redemption and resurrection, I well and truly had enough.
Herr Mahler, I adore your fourth symphony, most of your sixth and parts of your fifth. But your continuous refusal to cut down your works to human proportions means you will always be no more than a ‘composer who has his moments’ to me.
Also, adding more exotic instruments to a symphony adds novelty value, not substance. The chance I will ever listen to your fabled ‘symphony of a thousand’ is no higher than 0.1 percent.
“Dear Lord, how could I forget the motor horn! Now I have to write another symphony.”
Finally, what also doesn’t alleviate my boredom or back pain while listening to your output is the philosophical guidebook that comes with it. Why burden your audience with your perennial woes about life and death? Just tell it to your shrink.
All right, maybe I just wasn’t in the mood that night. And perhaps I should have acquainted myself with the work before going to a concert.
Nevertheless, I can’t imagine I’m the only one with mixed feelings about these monstrous compositions that make up a big chunk of the classical repertoire – massive ideas that can only be expressed through colossal orchestras that go on endlessly.
That’s partly because our listening habits have changed over the last century. A live oversized symphonic orchestra must have made an overwhelming impression on ears unprepared for anything larger than a small ensemble.
We, on the other hand, are so accustomed to the most exotic of sounds directly entering our ear canals at all volumes and all times of the day that some wonder if we’re not already too deaf to enjoy non-amplified music properly.
Similarly, our on-the-go listening behavior doesn’t prepare us for concentrating on a piece of music for longer than five minutes, let alone for more than an hour.
However, we shouldn’t be too hard on our MTV/TikTok brains (depending on which generation you identify with). Consuming the ‘masterworks’ in easily digestible chunks was common throughout history. The idea that isolating a pretty adagio from an overall dull string quartet is as uncivilized as licking the frosting from a carrot cake is an invention as recent as the late 19th century.
More recent, in fact, than the invention of carrot cake.
The unlimited musical resources behind Turangalîla
All this is to say that I hesitated to listen to Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie for a long time, despite its reputation as one of the 20th century’s musical masterpieces.
It was commissioned by conductor Serge Koussevitzky shortly after the Second World War. Koussevitzky explicitly said there were no limits on the length or the number of instruments.
Messiaen eagerly complied by writing a work of eighty minutes for an orchestra that includes – on top of the standard strings, woodwinds and brass – a percussion section of a vibraphone, glockenspiel, triangle, temple blocks, wood block, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, maracas, snare drum, tabor, bass drum, tubular bells and celesta.
The last empty corner of the stage is filled with a solo piano and an Ondes Martenot. This early electronic instrument makes the fweet sound like a radio dial going through different frequencies. That’s how Maurice Martenot came up with the idea during the war.
As expected, that big sound comes with big ideas. The Turangalîla-Symphonie is inspired by Tristan and Isolde and deals with romantic love and death – you can’t go much bigger than that. The name comes from two Sanskrit words:
Turaṅga means time that flows and refers to movement and rhythm.
Līlā means play of life and death, and of love.
All this – especially the Tristan and Isolde part – immediately brings the aforementioned 19th-century romanticism to mind.
But while Turangalîla displays the same level of excess, it holds back on the pomposity. This is an entirely different sound world from that of Wagner or Mahler. While the latter can display some ironic, even wry, humor, he’s never what you would call playful. And that’s precisely how I would describe Messiaen’s Turangalîla.
Because of the peculiar instrumentation and Messiaen’s tendency to mix styles, the work sounds like a toy symphony for grown-ups. You’re transported from dissonant passages over fevered, irregular dances to sweet Hollywood-esque chords. And everything’s pervaded by a light, jingly sound that informs you that nothing, not even excruciating beauty (and Turangalîla has that in spades), must ever be taken too seriously.
The man and the music
Maybe the composer’s personality has something to do with it. Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) is portrayed by those who knew him as an almost comically good-natured man. Despite spending two years as a prisoner of war during the Second World War, he seems to have been free from existential torments.
A devout yet tolerant catholic and passionate ornithologist, he looked at the world with a mixture of old-man wisdom and child-like curiosity. This quote nicely sums up his outlook on life:
“I am convinced that joy exists, convinced that the invisible exists more than the visible, and that joy is beyond sorrow, and beauty is beyond horror.” Olivier Messiaen, source
Although respectful of the man, avant-gardists such as Pierre Boulez despised Messiaen’s “sentimental” streak when it seeped into music – as it does profusely in Turangalîla.
That doesn’t mean Messiaen’s music is always easy on the ears. His melodies and harmonies touch familiar ground. But his rhythms are often very complex. Influenced by the tala structures of Indian classical music, he avoids regular meters. Instead, he likes to string together rhythmic cells of different lengths – which can be disorienting.
All in all, I would describe his music, in a musicological wholly unsound way, as frisky Stravinsky.
Two Turangalîla highlights to listen to
Turangalîla is an exuberant ode to life and love that I enjoyed more than I expected. Nevertheless, I couldn’t listen to it for more than 20 minutes. Not because it’s boring (mostly), but because it’s just too much. Too much noise, too many instruments, too many style changes. In short, at the risk of sounding like a complete oaf, too many notes – at least to be born for 80 consecutive minutes.
I therefore urge you to shamelessly lick some frosting from the carrot cake. Start with the two final movements, for example.
Turangalîla 3 is a set of variations that starts modestly with woodwinds and percussion. Gradually, the whole orchestra joins in, to which you can devote all your attention because the melody remains unchanged. Moreover, this happens to be a movement that uncharacteristically sticks to a regular 4/4 meter. It’s the perfect introduction to this remarkable sonic universe.
You’re then properly warmed up for the madness of Turangalîla’s Final, which starts like a drunken mariachi band and only further spins out of control. The rhythmic drive is characteristically irregular but also irresistible.
Around the fifth minute, you get a short moment to breathe, with extended treacly chords in the strings and the Ondes Martenot soaring high above it. Then, the whole thing climaxes with some more organized chaos and an extremely noisy final chord.
As you pick yourself up from the ground, you might agree that a little bit of Turangalîla goes a long way. But if you’re hungry for more, there’s another hour to set your teeth in. Bon appétit!
Classical Musings 