By Paul Griffiths

Released from prisoner-of-war camp in 1941, Messiaen was slow to get going again as a composer in occupied Paris. The stimulus he needed came from Yvonne Loriod, who arrived as one of his students and was to become his second wife; almost at once, he wrote Visions de l’Amen (1943) for the two of them to play. Her part, according to his note in the published music, has “the rhythmic difficulties, the bunches of chords, everything concerned with speed, allure, and quality of sound”; while to himself, at the second piano, he allotted “the principal melody, the thematic elements, everything demanding emotion and power.” The two pianos together become a percussion orchestra, akin to the gamelans of Indonesia, to which the music seems to look also in its frequent moments of pentatonic character. Its principal key, A major, was for Messiaen the tonality of luminous blue, of the sky, of Paradise.

From the mystical writer Ernest Hello came the four meanings of “Amen,” which again are outlined in Messiaen’s preface: the Amen uttered by the Creator in creating, the Amen of obedience to the divine will, the Amen of longing for union with God, and the Amen of the eternal consummation of everything in Paradise. These meanings can be associated in turn with the first, third, fourth and last movements, but the fundamental sense of “Amen,” as a gesture of assent, can be felt throughout the work, for the most obvious musical image of assent is the cadence, and the whole cycle is founded on a “theme of Creation,” which is an enlargement of a pentatonic cadence.

The following notes are adapted from the composer’s own.

I. Amen de la Création (“Amen of Creation”). The first piano plays a double rhythmic pedal in carillon style, on non-retrogradable (i.e. palindromic) rhythms. The second piano expresses the theme of Creation. The whole piece is a crescendo.

II. Amen des étoiles, de la planète à l’anneau (“Amen of the stars, of the ringed planet”). The second piano projects the theme of the planets’ dance. There are three developments, then a varied repeat of the planets’ dance.

III. Amen de l’agonie de Jésus (“Amen of the Agony of Jesus”). The form is that of a Greek triad: strophe, antistrophe, epode. Strophe: Jesus alone on the Mount of Olives. Three musical motifs: the Father’s curse on sin, a cry, and a tearing lament on four notes. Antistrophe: the same music, more developed, with the addition of low rhythmic ostinatos suggesting the sounds of gongs and tam tams. Epode: recollection of the theme of Creation. A long silence, broken by pulsations, evokes the suffering of this hour.

IV. Amen du désir (“Amen of Desire”). There are two themes of desire. The first is slow, ecstatic; the second much more vehement. In the coda the two main voices seem to intermingle.

V. Amen des anges, des saints, du chant des oiseaux (“Amen of the Angels, of the Saints, of Bird Song”). At first the song of the angels and saints is uncomplicated, very pure. Then a middle section on birdsongs requires a more brilliant style of keyboard writing. Following this is a varied reprise of the song of the angels and saints, with a canon in non-retrogradable rhythms on three levels. Brief coda on the birds.

VI. Amen du jugement (“Amen of Judgement”). Three frozen notes, like the bell of evidence.

VII. Amen de la consommation (“Amen of Consummation”). The second piano takes up the theme of Creation and draws from it a long chorale of glory. The first piano, at both extremes of the keyboard together, creates a ceaseless carillon of chords and brilliant, scintillating rhythms, in increasingly crowded rhythmic canons: sapphire, emerald, topaz, jacinth, amethyst, sardonyx—the whole rainbow of precious stones mentioned in the Apocalypse, sounding, jarring, dancing, colouring, and perfuming the light of eternal life.