Audio Introduction

Paul Schiavo, program annotator for the Seattle Symphony and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, talks about Messiaen’s innovations in the use of rhythms, harmony, and instrumentation in Turangalîla-symphonie.

A vast polyphony of rhythm

Splashes of aural color

› Get inside each movement of Messiaen’s
Turangalîla-symphonie with musical examples.

Messiaen in Love

“Superhuman, overflowing, dazzling, and abandoned.” Heady stuff, and you might think it’s immodestly heady when you hear that Olivier Messiaen used it to describe one of his own works: the kaleidoscopic Turangalîla-symphonie. But after listening to this adventurous, ecstatic work in praise of love, you’ll understand.

Almost everything Messiaen heard could become part of his music. Cooing songbirds, exotic Far Eastern and Indian musical traditions—even the clicks and whistles of an often poorly maintained organ—are all sounds that inspired the composer to write colorful, individualistic works.

Such originality shines through in the Turangalîla-symphonie, a series of love songs without words whose title fuses the Sanskrit turanga (“time”) and lîla (“play”) and means “love song and hymn of joy, time, movement, rhythm, life, and death.” It explores love in many guises, spiritual and worldly, frenzied and tender.

A Program of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.

Sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

Programs of The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall are generously supported by the City of New York: Office of the Mayor, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council; and by the New York State Council on the Arts.