Olivier Messiaen: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Messiaen's Works (review)

Abstract

The first thing that strikes the reader about this book is the obvious amount of work that has gone into it: painstaking research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, for example, as well as in "publishers' archives or hire libraries . . . and other public and private collections in France and England" (p. v). Yet there is some confusion from the start. On the spine, the title is First Editions of Messiaen; on the front cover, it is Olivier Messiaen: Catalogue of Works; and on the title page, it is Olivier Messiaen: A Bibliographical Catalogue of Messiaen's Works: First Editions and First Performances. Clearly, the publisher could not put the whole of the latter on the spine; on the other hand, a catalog and a bibliography are two different things. Nigel Simeone tells us in the introduction that this is not a "systematic work catalogue" (p. v), but he does give two purposes for his book: first, "to provide detailed bibliographical information about the first . . . editions of Messiaen's published works," and second, to provide "information about the dates and places of composition, the scoring, and the first performances of Messiaen's works" (ibid.). He achieves both of these objectives admirably.