Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise by Vincent Perez Benitez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise by Vincent Perez Benitez Melissa Cummins Olivier Messiaen's Opera Saint François d'Assise. By Vincent Perez Benitez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [xxii, 302 p. ISBN 9780253042873 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780253042880 (paperback), $38; ISBN 9780253042903 (e-book), $18.99.] Notes, music examples, dramatic synopsis, glossary, bibliography, index. Speaking about using Oliver Messiaen's own commentary to aid in analyzing the composer's music, Roger Nichols advised the reader to "above all, not [take] all Messiaen's own remarks about his music at face value," because his "apparently compulsive explaining … was designed as a kind of smokescreen. All the things he says about his music are true, as far as they go, but really that's not very far" ("Performance Reviews," Musical Times 135, no. 1812 [February 1994]: 117). Acknowledging this and other limitations, Vincent Perez Benitez crafts a comprehensive tonal and coloristic analysis of Messiaen's opera Saint François d'Assise out of the composer's many birdsong notebooks, observations on philosophy, notes on the opera, and thoughts on color associations, to name a few sources. Benitez states in the introduction that the two interrelated purposes of the book are to "[examine] Saint François d'Assise from both theological and musical-analytical perspectives in order to interpret how Messiaen achieves his stated goal of expressing the depth of his Catholic theology through a work that contains all his harmonic techniques and sound-color harmonies. … [A]nd more importantly, … to better understand his compositional practice from larger theological and musical perspectives" (p. 2). He sees this analysis as necessary, as the opera "has yet to see such a book-length study in English that offers an extended analytical treatment of both its theological semantics and musical language, along with its contextualization as an opera" (p. 3). Benitez also sees his book as adding to the writings that analyze twentiethcentury opera. The author makes clear that a history of the opera is not included nor is an "accounting of the dramatic, psychological, and structural functions" of the opera's themes (p. 4). Before the introductory chapter, Benitez devotes four pages to general "Notes on the Text," in which he explains capitalizations, recommends having a version of the opera score handy (as he refers to it and includes only greatly reduced versions of musical passages), and explains the various didactic and primary sources referred to, including interviews and lectures by Messiaen. It should be mentioned that Benitez uses extensive endnotes throughout the text not only for citations but more often to provide a further explanation of or expansion on an idea mentioned in the main narrative. Flipping back and forth to these endnotes provides a complete overview of some of the more technical points in the document. Benitez provides an overview of the eight chapters, a very brief background of the opera's history, and an explanation of Messiaen's specific type of synesthesia in the introduction. In chapters 1 and 2, he discusses philosophical and theological connections to the symbolism in the opera and the connection between Saint François and earlier operas and French religious works. He continues in chapters 3 and 4 with an overview of Messiaen's ideas of overall form and the connections he made between chords, chordal structure, and colors. Music analysis dominates the final four chapters. In chapter 5, the longest section at fifty-seven pages, Benitez explains the opera's musical language, using four analytical approaches that he identifies as precompositional, referential, transformational, and additive pitch designs. He states that these terms "encompass aspects of post-tonal theory … and contextualize compositional designs suggested by Messiaen's aesthetics" (p. 135). These varied techniques are needed, Benitez admits, because "the sheer complexity of this music makes [analyzing Messiaen's] work as a harmonist, in particular, a challenging proposition" (p. 135). Birdsongs and their symbolism in the theological message of the opera are discussed in [End Page 256] chapter 6. In chapter 7, Benitez breaks down Saint François scene by scene with a tonal and color-association analysis of the saint's spiritual journey. He also provides links to theology and symbolism...