Review

Author(s): Richard Taruskin

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Music & Letters, Vol. 88 No. 1, ? The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Roots of the Classical: The Popular Orizgins of 14estern in serious trouble', he fails to take into account
Music. By Peter Van der Merwe. pp. xxiii + the intrepidly complacent reckoning of the
558. (Oxford University Press, Oxford and Rosens, Whittalls, and (Paul) Griffithses, not to
New York, 2004, ? 105. ISBN 0-19-816647-8.) mention the legions of latter-day Adornians who
probably account for the majority of readers of
Here is a book that is just crying out to be an academic journal like this one, who take that
patronized by the likes of me. Its author, a South loss as validation. And when he protests at all the
African librarian, is a self-taught, amateur musi- 'articles and books . . . written, committees
cologist with an eccentric vocabulary and a pro- formed, laws passed, syllabuses drawn up, cul-
pensity for overstatement that he is loath to tural commissars appointed, money extracted
restrain. Its thesis is uncontroversial but the from the pocket of the taxpayer, for the benefit of
author is naive enough to believe that he is set- art in general and modern art in particular'
ting the world on its ear with it. Its method is (p. 467), he sounds like your average blowhard
cheerfully 'verificationist' or confirmation- politician hoping to win votes by running against
biased, and it uses its debased standards of proof 'elitists' and 'transgressors'. One can actually
to advance historiographical absurdities. Its cul- agree with all of these propositions and still
tural attitudes are middlebrow, and its resent- regard their latest indignant assertion as the
ment against the academy is flagrant. height of banality.
Never mind. This is a marvellously stimulating Of course a good history of that severing and
and important book: a masterpiece of canny loss, as distinct from dirges and remonstrations,
observation, a miracle of effective organization, a would be very valuable. It is a remarkable story,
model of colourful, pungent writing, and an ear- in which a philosophical doctrine that posited the
opener that should be read and pondered by all autonomy of beauty and the disinterestedness of
scholars and musicians who deal with music of artists, and thus vouchsafed an unprecedented
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centu- artistic flowering in the eighteenth and nine-
ries in any and all of its genres. teenth centuries, underwent a metamorphosis in
What have mainly attracted attention up to the nineteenth and twentieth through which
now are the author's anti-modernist jeremiads. autonomy shaded into irrelevance and disinter-
He is one of the many who have argued that over estedness into indifference, and the flowering
the course of its Romantic and modernist phases went to seed. To tell it would require a far wider
(the latter, in the words of Leonard B. Meyer, the perspective than this book, closely focused on
'late, late romantic' phase), classical music sev- musical idioms and their evolution, can supply,
ered its nourishing roots in popular music and in and to the extent that Peter Van der Merwe
consequence has lost both its creative vitality and thinks he's telling it, the book is a laughable failure.
its audience. So what else is new? I guess there But what this book does supply in great abun-
are still those who see creative vitality in the aca- dance and with great success is a picture of music
demic music being written today-the 'grammar before the Great Divide (in Andreas Huyssens's
schoolboy' music, in Dai Griffiths's cheeky formula- all too quotable phrase) that segregated the 'ser-
tion that alas has no apt American equivalent-but ious' from the 'popular', the 'high' from the
nobody could possibly disagree about the loss of 'low', the 'literate' from the 'oral'. The glory of
the audience. So when the author writes in the book is its astounding wealth of examples,
summation (p. 466) that 'for the general public, hundreds of them, culled with great discrimina-
'classical music' belongs mainly to the eighteenth tion from a fantastic variety of sources, always
and nineteenth centuries, carries on with rapidly pointed, shrewdly if idiosyncratically described,
diminishing vigour into the first few decades of coordinated and cross-referenced with immense
the twentieth, and has ceased to exist by 1950', sagacity and skill, which at last provides richly
and stands back rhetorically as if expecting an detailed evidence of the premodernist condition
uproar of rebuke, the effect is that of a damp of music, evidence that can support an infinite
squib. When he adds, 'by any reckoning an art number of hypotheses and interpretations, but
that has lost touch with its public to this extent is which collectively demonstrates beyond any

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shadow of doubt the way in which the different po~wer in nineteenth-century European music. This
registers of musical discourse infiltrated and rein- judgement of course contradicts terrestrial opinion,
forced one another before purist ideals gained which awards Germany that honour. Certainly, there
is no denying either the great achievements of German
ascendancy. Adulteration and mongrelization
composers during this period, or their immense pres-
have never received a more ringing affirmation.
tige. But prestige is one thing, influence quite another.
How lovely that the author hails from the old
bastion of apartheid.
The way in which Van der Merwe presents his Having just reviewed two big 'Cambridge His-
cornucopia of examples should become a model tories' that together demonstrate just how woe-
for further comparative investigations. All the fully pervasive Germanocentrism remains in
examples are presented in the key of C (and Anglophone musicology (see Richard Taruskin,
described as if they had been written in C), with
'Speed Bumps', Aineteenth-Century Music, 29
the interval of transposition indicated so that the (2005-6), 185-207), I was of course tickled to
original key can be identified. This technique, read this. It comes at the beginning of the next-
common in studies of folk music, where field- to-longest chapter of the book, called 'The
recorded examples are graphically represented Nineteenth-Century Vernacular', which attempts
according to a single conventional pitch stand- a comprehensive description of the state of Euro-
ard, ensures a maximum of uniformity, which pean music from the 1840s to the 1870s, just
enables both similarities and differences to before the Great Divide began to take hold. The
emerge with maximum relief and precision. That description is broken down into categories that
insistence on as far as possible comparing apples reflect the book's characteristic preoccupations,
with apples, rather than with oranges or categories that had been identified and substanti-
kumquats or Polynesian breadfruits, is already an ated over a dozen chapters leading up to this cul-
indication of the author's Enlightened-that is, minating one. A survey of its contents will
anti-Romantic-bias, since the Romantic therefore give the gist of the book's argument.
impulse is always to fetishize difference and pos- Following that I will offer what I hope will be
tulate uniqueness. Those who, like me, identify a seen as a constructive critique of the argument's
scholarly attitude with a sceptical one-sceptical flaws, so that its virtues may emerge all the more
in the first instance of fetishes-will applaud such strongly.
a bias, for it makes informed, demystifying com- Without due consideration to the Italianate
parative observation possible. Those wedded to operatic strain that 'runs through nineteenth-
mystiques of various kinds-and there are many century German music even at the highest and
in today's academy-will be politically opposed most self-consciously Teutonic level', the author
to such a deconstruction of uniquenesses, and insists, 'one cannot begin to understand
will condemn this book for the very reasons I Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn,
welcome it. Richard Strauss, or for that matter Wagner'.
Van der Merwe no doubt knows what to The resolute neglect of this strain, especially
expect. He did something similar in his first from consideration of Schubert, had been one of
book, Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of
my strongest objections to The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Centuy Popular Music (Oxford, 1989), Nineteenth-Centuy Music, and so I applaud the
but from the opposite standpoint, showing how assertion. But what distinguishes Van der
thoroughly suffused the American popular music Merwe's treatment of the issue from mere com-
of the twentieth century was with an inheritance plaints like mine (albeit somewhat amplified by
from the European nineteenth. It was a strong positive example in ch. 34 of my Oxford History of
blow against Afrocentrism, and probably gar- Western mIusic) is that he not only shows the
nered more real antagonism than its superficially Italian influence at work on the Germans, but
more audacious sequel will do. In his second also parses the Italian idiom into its own eclectic
book Van der Merwe again takes aim at an eth- components, which draw not on 'the traditional,
nocentrism, but this time it is Germanocentrism- often extremely archaic music of the Italian
a centrism that is, unlike Afrocentrism, more countryside' (the way an Eastern European, a
tacitly assumed than openly asserted, one that Spaniard, or even a German might have drawn
will take more guts to defend in today's intel- upon the local countryside, precisely 'to escape
lectual environment, and one that often does not from the pervasive Italian style'), but rather on
speak its name but hides behind 'universal' val- 'popular' idioms, urban rather than rural (for all
ues. He writes (p. 271): that they usually issued from the mouth of a 'rustic
or lower-class character, singing in an idiom sub-
To a musicologist from another planet, gifted with tly different from that of the gentlefolk'). These
boundless analytical insight but free from earthly pre- idioms included 'modal inflections, pentatonic
judice, it would be obvious that Italy was the principal figures, cross-rhythms (especially the hemiola),

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and repetitive dance basses', as the author lists construction of Van der Merwe's hypotheses,
them on page 273, naming features that had pre- since oral traditions are by virtual definition
viously been the subjects of whole chapters. But poorly documented (and, as I will be shortly
above all: grumbling, this author's speculations can easily
run amok), but he has scoured the musicological
The popular features were not always native. Italian and ethnomusicological literature with impres-
composers were anything but puristic (one of their sive if occasionally tendentious thoroughness for
eighteenth-century virtues), and happily drew on for- whatever documents exist. The survey of melodic
eign genres. It was largely a craving for variety that led pentatonicism in places both obvious and unsus-
them to embrace new dances like the waltz, polka, pected is at once the book's most original contri-
polonaise, bolero, habanera, or tango, and to cling to bution and its most problematical one (not an
old ones like the jig or minuet; and the same motive
uncommon combination). It is so copious,
accounts for much of the picturesque colour of nine-
though, that it must alter any reader's perception of
teenth-century opera. Peasants and gypsies were not
only amusing in themselves; they also presented the musical style and conception of musical history.
composer with an opportunity for jigging rhythms and Van der Merwe's definition of pentatonicism
hemiolas. In the same way, military scenes provided an is more comprehensive than the usual one, and
excuse for marches, church scenes for hymns and may not convince everybody. He posits a 'penta-
chants, old-world ballroom scenes for minuets and tonic seventh' (in the C major of his graphic rep-
gavottes. (p. 273) resentations, a-c-e-g) at the heart of most
ostensibly diatonic melody, and certainly demon-
This neatly links matters of topos, more gener- strates the prevalence of melodies defined by an
ally invoked these days as an aspect of herme- ambitus of a-e within harmonic contexts empha-
neutics, with matters of stylistic diversity and the sizing c-g. Both ingeniously and regrettably, he
influence of vernacular on cultivated genres. Dis- calls this 'tonal counterpoint', and finds trench-
cussion of the waltz leads from opera into oper- ant examples in Rossini and Chopin, thence
etta, and into the world of Offenbach and Wagner and Liszt, Mahler and Elgar, Debussy
Johann Strauss, Jr., composers who are given far and Sibelius. He further posits, on a latter-day
greater prominence in this book (particularly the Guidonian analogy, a 'hard' variant of the penta-
latter, whose index entries dwarf those for Richard) tonic seventh (e-g-b-d) and a 'soft' one (d-f-a-c),
than they usually command, but whose centrality and relates many post-diatonic constructs like
to the musical language of their time is convinc- whole-tone and octatonic scales to chromatic
ingly established. The discussion of Strauss links inflections of the pentatonic seventh (a6-c-e-g#
up with a previous chapter, on 'The Dances of for the former; a-c-e,- g, for the latter). These
Central Europe', in which Strauss's notoriously inflections, which may be observed as early as
free handling of the sixth degree of the scale is Rossini and Donizetti (particularly in 'monoter-
provided with copious antecedents in Haydn, tial' relations, as christened by Anatoly Leikin,
Beethoven, Schubert, and Hummel, among others whereby parallel passages in, say, A minor and A
(one begins to see how wide a net the author has flat major, sharing a third in common, are juxta-
cast), and linked with contemporaneous examples posed), eventually afford a bridge connecting
not only in opera composers like Tchaikovsky and some forms of early modernism back to vernacu-
Delibes but in lower-class dance music as well. lar idioms, thus to pinpoint the more accurately
Strauss emerges as a crucial channel from low to the moment when classical music untied its
high (and I wish Van der Merwe, who of course moorings to the popular (or, in terms of the
mentions Brahms's admiration for Strauss-and book's title, cut off its roots).
also Wagner's-had gone further and identified Van der Merwe can be unconvincingly lenient
the first movement of Brahms's Third Symphony, in his definitions, as when he relates Otello's final
alongside that of Tchaikovsky's Fourth, as the line ('un altro bacio . . .') to a single whole-tone
magnificently swaggering symphonic waltz that it scale, ignoring the crucially changing cadential
is, rather than contrasting Brahms's 'placid landler' harmony (p. 290), just as he can be unconvinc-
with Strauss's spicier fare). ingly and arbitrarily restrictive when that serves
But that discussion is linked, in turn, with his short-range purpose: see, for example, his
much earlier chapters that document the persist- definition of tonality on page 71, which allows
ence of pentatonic melody--and even more him to pinpoint the factitious 'moment' of its
'primitive' artefacts like children's chants ('it's 'discovery' for literate music in Joan Ambrosio
raining, it's pouring')-as a theoretically under- Dalza's lute suites, published in 1508. But just as
or even unacknowledged strain linking oral tradi- often he hits on novel and convincing connec-
tions with literate ones. Here a certain amount of tions, as between the pastoral plagalism of the
speculation necessarily plays a part in the early Romantics (noted by Charles Rosen,

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among others) and the 'progressive tonality' (with 'The Debt to the East'), the 'Phrygian fringe'-
progressive understood in two ways, one descrip- Asian vernaculars as brought to Europe, in the
tive, the other prescriptive) associated with first place, by Gypsy musicians (the term Van der
Mahler and other early modernists. On the way Merwe uses in preference to Roma, precisely
he cites the transition from the prelude into the because it is the one used in casual and colloquial
first scene of Das Rheingold and that between the speech). With his wonted eagle eye, he draws
verse and the refrain of the 'galop infernal' (a.k.a. many parallels, by turns obvious and startling,
the cancan) in Offenbach's Orphee aux enfers. between this material and music of the European
Other features of Van der Merwe's nineteenth- classical tradition. Earlier in the book, when
century vernacular include what he calls the developing his theories of pentatonicism, he cites
'ragtime progression' (approaching the tonic a range of even more primitive musical utter-
through a circle of applied dominants beginning ances, beginning with 'The Children's Chant', to
with III7/#(or even VII7/5#/#, mislabelled VI in which he devotes the whole of his third chapter
one of the very few typos I've managed to find (the first to deal with actual observations rather
in this extremely well-proofread book), and what than preliminary theorizing) full of two- and
he calls the 'cadential climax', meaning succes- three-note melodies (calls, spells, hollers as well
sive reapproaches to a cadence in ever stronger as actual songs) from many parts of the globe.
voicings, which often reinforce the 'tonal coun- So far so good, but the crucial misstep is
terpoint' of pentatonic melody and diatonic har- proudly asserted at the very outset of chapter 3:
mony. Like so many other aspects of nineteenth- 'The best place to reconstruct the evolution of
century 'vernacular' usage, he traces them both melody is the nursery' (p. 27). This is an inver-
back, in literate tradition, to Rossini, and for- sion of the old biologist's bromide about ontog-
ward to the end of the century or even beyond. eny recapitulating phylogeny. By turning a
One particular device, related both to the penta- horizontal axis of simple-to-complex into a verti-
tonic and to the cadential climax, he traces (pp. cal axis of early-to-late, the author thus presumes
316-18) from a Haydn quartet to Verkldirte Nacht, to deduce phylogeny from ontogeny, as if the
by way of the ubiquitous Rossini, then Liszt, Bizet, first music produced by infants represents, in
and an Anglican hymn harmonization. Another, actual historical terms, the infancy of music. But
which he provocatively christens 'the blue there is absolutely no evidence to substantiate
seventh' in anticipation of its appropriation in such a purely conceptual assumption. A range of
American popular music, is traced from Donizetti music from the children's chant all the way to
and Meyerbeer in the 1830s to Bizet in the 1870s. Elliott Carter and Harrison Birtwistle can be
The culminating example of the nineteenth-century observed at the present moment. A comparable
vernacular is the prelude to Carmen, the very range could have been observed during the
piece Nietzsche would have chosen, in which infancies of Carter and Birtwistle, when those
practically every device passes one last time in worthies were themselves presumably confined
review. Apris lui, le deluge. to children's chanting. And as early as there are
Both the extraordinary, demystifying range of written records of music, there is evidence of a
reference informing Van der Merwe's demon- broad stylistic range. The earliest deciphered
strations, and his unsentimental, equally demysti- musical notation, the 'Hurrian' (Sumero-
fying way of discussing musical style in terms Babylonian) hymn transcribed by Anne
(recalling Russian formalism) of pragmatic Draffkorn Kilmer and Richard L. Crocker in
devices and procedures-the mot juste would be 1974 and dated somewhere between 1225 and
the German Gebrauch-rather than holistic 1400 BCE, in no way conforms to the children's-
national or spiritual essences, will be apparent by chant model. It is polyphonic and fully diatonic
now. Both are heady and productively thought- (i.e. with semitones).
provoking, and can be easily detached from the The prejudice that equates simpler with
polemics that constitute the last, and least signi- older, or pentatonic with ancient/prehistoric,
ficant, quarter of the book. has long been outmoded. No wonder Van der
What then of the flaws that I have promised to Merwe's opening scholarly reference is to a
expose? sixty-three-year-old publication by Curt Sachs.
The most glaring vice is a naive propensity to It so happens that his seventh reference, still on
turn synchronic observation into diachronic nar- the question of Ur-Musik (or, as he puts it, 'a
rative by, as it were, verticalizing a horizontal glimpse of prehistoric European song') comes
axis. The author has surveyed a great deal of from a twenty-three-year-old publication of
transcribed folk music (both field-collected and mine, in which I translated a passage from Izaly
arranged by composers), especially from eastern Zemtsovsky's Mlelodika kalendarnikh pesen (Melodic
Europe and what he calls (in his longest chapter, Characteristics of Seasonal Songs (Moscow,

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1974)) describing the vesnyanka, the Russian 'call where even the naive Western listener can detect an

to the spring' that Stravinsky imitated for the ancestral likeness to the Spanish guitar on the one
'Action rituelle des ancetres' in Le Sacre du hand and the Hungarian cimbalom on the other.
Probably the first great composer to use this type of
printemps. This genre of Russian folksong does
sequence, silence and all, was Haydn [here the
conform to the 'children's song' model, but its
example is called out]. But the man who really made it
antiquity is posited on the same flimsy assump- his own was Beethoven.
tions Van der Merwe has used to reconstruct
musical prehistory. The folklorists of Stravinsky's
But of course the 'naive Western listener' is the
time assumed that anhemitonic folksongs with a
tiny ambitus were 'older' than diatonic ones with champion of all detectors, and scholars ought to
larger ambitus, and Stravinsky (probably advised operate on a far more sceptical plane. The first
half of Roots of the Classical is so full of naive neo-
by Nicholas Roerich) appropriated the 'oldest'
type to give a romantic aura of prehistory to his primitivist solecisms like this that I was sure I
neoprimitivist ballet. Van der Merwe's appropri- would give it the patronizing treatment it cried
ation of it as historical documentation is just out for, until I began to be won over, in the
another example of romantic neoprimitivism. second half of the book, by the author's genius
Seven pages later, the author cites another Russian for drawing connections and making illuminat-
folksong from my published work, but this time ing comparisons, and realized that these were
the song cited is one transcribed by Rimsky- entirely separable from the dubious historical
Korsakov in 1875, not from a peasant informant, claims. Had I not been obliged by my agreement
but straight out of the score of Tchaikovsky's to review the book, I might have given up and
opera The Oprichnik, premiered the year before. written it off. To reap its rewards, the reader
Tchaikovsky's source had been a collection by must be prepared to forgive the author such
Konstantin Vil'boa (or Villebois), compiled in excesses as this one, which manages to bring out
the Edward Said even in me: 'Gretchen, after all,
the late 1850s by a composer whose treatment of
the native artefacts was even more nonchalantly is a simple girl of the people, which to Schubert
modernizing than Tchaikovsky's. would have meant that she came from a partially
The upshot of all of this, obviously, is that the Oriental culture' (p. 177). Or even this one, which
unless I restrain myself, could deflect this review
big, uniform folk-genealogy of European music
on which Van der Merwe relies for his historical into a rant: 'This [German] inclination towards
deductions is a great big fiction, and a rather silly the East is especially obvious in the realms of
one; and so, therefore, is the implicit claim of the abstract thought, and it is surely not coincidental
book's subtitle, which purports to uncover 'The that so many eminent German thinkers-Marx,
Popular Origins of Western Music'. That big Freud, Einstein, Popper, and Schenker, to name
untenable claim is mirrored myriads of times in only a few-have been Jewish, at least by origin.
the text, whenever the author claims to be trac- But it is almost equally evident in music' (p. 145).
ing one of his shrewdly observed devices to its O Oxford, Oxford, where are thy editors?
origin (especially its 'Eastern' or 'Oriental' ori- And for a final caveat, beware of any book
gin), or wherever he claims to demonstrate 'deri- that purports to reveal the origins of anything, or
vations' of literate practices from oral or to identify the classical. The popular traditions
Van der Merwe recounts, however speculatively,
prehistoric lore. These claims can be pretty star-
tling. My favourite, just to give an idea of how were undoubtedly real, and their interface with
extreme they can be, concerns a passage the literate tradition has indeed gone underre-
(described on pp. 188-9) in the second move- ported for far too long. His imputation, in one of
ment of Haydn's Quartet in F minor, Op. 55 No. his numerous polemical asides (pp. 151-3), that a
2, where a Neapolitan relation (obviously a 'deri- 'conspiracy of silence' has kept the story he is tell-
vation' from the 'Phrygian fringe') is preceded by ing under wraps, is no hyperbole. But it is not the
a three-bar general pause. Of such transpositions whole story. A book as long as his could very well
to the upper semitone, Van der Merwe notes be written-if no one else volunteers, perhaps I'll
write it-about the esoteric and elitist traditions
'their connection with string technique', and
continues: of Western music, which certainly did not begin
with modernism. Their recorded European his-
tory probably begins with the theorists of ancient
Like other Fringe sequences, but more frequently than
Greece, whose chromatic and enharmonic genera
most, they may include dramatic silences between the
steps. These give the player a moment to slip the hand had little enough to do with what the dancing
up or down a semitone, and may also have something girls were singing in the agora; it continues
to do with the silences in the Muslim call to prayer. through trobar clus and ars subtilior, musica reservata
Whatever their origins, they are an arresting feature of and stylus gravis, Netherlandish artifice and
classical Arabic 'ad (lute) and qantn (psaltery) music, Baroque contrivance, all manner of ricercate and

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Kiinste der Fuge (not a single example in Van der biography, then-unless the decision to end the
Merwe's tome comes from J. S. Bach!), before book (rather abruptly) with the tribute paid by
reaching Romanticism and hooking up with the Pierre Boulez the day after Messiaen's death
story Van der Merwe does tell. His concluding aims to indicate that a subtext of reservations
chapters would look mighty different from that and criticisms exists beneath the reverential sur-
perspective. face. Given Boulez's remarks elsewhere (e.g. in
Who needs such a book? you may be thinking. the Conversations with Cilestin Delidge), comments of
What else do music historians write about? Yes, his quoted by Hill and Simeone on the occasion
and that is why Van der Merwe has such a good of Messiaen's 70th birthday-'beneath the very
point. But what if the alternative history I am real complexities of his intellectual world he has
imagining were told as the history of the 'anti- remained simple and capable of wonder-and
popular origins of Western Music'? That history, that alone is enough to win our hearts' (p. 322)-
too, in other words, could be a social history. We can be read as ambiguous, even sarcastic.
do need it. But in the meantime we can royally Given the richness of archival sources, it might
amuse ourselves with-and learn lots from-- still be too soon to attempt a fully balanced
Peter Van der Merwe's hyperbolic, sloppy, and assessment of strengths and weaknesses in
inspired work. Messiaen. But the authors cannot be accused of
RICHARD TARUSKIN suppressing expressions of doubt, especially those
doi: 10. 1093/ml/gcl09 1 voiced during the years of the Tristan trilogy
(1945-8). They are also willing to give space to
such shrewd, detached remarks as Virgil Thom-
Messiaen. By Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone. son's from 1949: 'what is a little surprising in so
pp. xii + 435. (Yale University Press, New scholarly a modernist is the literalness of his reli-
Haven and London, 2005, ?29.95. ISBN gious imagination. But there is no possibility of
0-300-10907-5.) suspecting insincerity. His pictorial concept of
religion, though a rare one among educated
The stark one-word title is immediately striking. men, is too intense to be anything but real.
Given the book's tendency to discuss compos- Messiaen is simply a theologian with a taste for
itions in summary form rather than in great the theatrical' (p. 187). In turn, this seems like an
analytical depth, it would scarcely be appropri- elegant expansion of Roland-Manuel's neat pre-
ate to add 'life and works' to the title, though sentation of the paradox in April 1945: 'every-
the emphasis is not exclusively biographical, thing which an impressionist sensuality uses to
and there are some illuminating reproductions express earthly delights, Olivier Messiaen devotes
of sketch materials, particularly for the opera to the praise of the divine' (p. 146).
Saint Franfois d'Assise. 'A documentary biogra- As Thomson adds, 'I once described this religio-
phy' might have been a less misleading subtitle, musical style as the determination to produce
though even this could have created expecta- somewhere in every piece an apotheosis destined
tions of the kind of comprehensive citation of at once to open up the heavens and to bring
letters, diaries, and other archival materials down the house' (p. 187). Thomson was writing
which it is probably still premature to aspire to without experience of the tougher profile of
in Messiaen's case. Documentation is extensive, Messiaen's later compositions, but he touches here
nevertheless, its primary source being the on a fundamental quality which will be acknow-
archives currently under the control of Yvonne ledged by enthusiasts and detractors alike. When
Loriod-Messiaen. Messiaen was a 9-year-old, his mother reported
Just as Messiaen himself was deeply dependent his comment that 'I prefer things which are
on Loriod for virtually half a century, so Hill and frightening' (p. 11), and this idea of the sublime,
Simeone could have done little or nothing with- as opposed to the (merely) beautiful, does much
out her active cooperation. It's tempting to draw to give Messiaen's music its arresting qualities. In
analogies with Cosima Wagner as the jealous 1961, at the time of Chronochromie, Claude
guardian of the Master's heritage, fighting to Rostand offered a florid description of Messiaen
ensure that only the most flattering portrait as 'a man of the Dauphine: he loves and fears its
emerges, and to be sceptical of the authors' dec- mountains, which are both so beautiful and so
laration that 'Mme Loriod-Messiaen has given us terrible, the Meije massif before which he so
every possible assistance, without at any time often composes, dizzy in front of its sheer cliffs
seeking to guide or influence our work and our and avalanches of scree, among the raucous and
conclusions' (p. vi). Such influence was scarcely ferocious and shrill cries of mountain birds'
needed, given their transparent concern to por- (p. 239). As Hill and Simeone observe, with ref-
tray Messaien as hero and genius. Not a 'critical' erence to 1952: 'a battle was going on between

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