La Nativité du Seigneur

La Nativité du Seigneur: neuf méditations pour orgue (engl. "The Birth of the Lord: Nine Meditations for Organ" ) is an organ work of Olivier Messiaen, the this 1935, in Grenoble at the age of 27 years. The premiere of the nine -part work with a playing time of approximately 55 minutes was held at the organ of La Trinité (Paris) on 27 February 1936. The performers of the premiere were Jean Langlais, Jean -Yves Daniel - Lesur and Jean -Jacques Grunenwald.

Structure

The work is divided into nine sets - Messiaen calls them " Meditations ":

According to Messiaen underlie five theological ideas:

• Our predestination, realized through the Incarnation of the Word ( # 3 )
• God who lives among us (No. 9), God who suffers (No. 7)
• The three births: the eternal of the word ( No. 4), the time of Christ (No. 1), the spiritual of the faithful (No. 5)
• Figures of the Christmas story and the Epiphany: The Angels (No. 6), the shepherds (No. 2), the wise (No. 8)
• Tribute to the motherhood of Mary, which is expressed by the number of nine sets.

Compositional characteristics

Messiaen himself described the work later as the first composition that is particularly characteristic of his musical language. These characteristics include the fact that clock dividers indeed remain latent effective, but are obscured by added small note values ​​- such as a four-four time, which an additional sixteenth was added. Since this varies with each clock, Messiaen omitted - in contrast to his two years earlier composed organ cycle L'Ascension - quite on time signatures; the bar lines meet only a formal outline feature.

La Nativité du Seigneur is the first composition Messiaen, which is largely built on modes. These are systematically used by Messiaen scales, which - unlike the traditional diatonic scale - are just two to six times transposed, that is, from one in the octave several times repeating regular sequence of whole and half steps are made. Your harmonic possibilities are presented by Messiaen in a detailed preface to the work.

The melody is inspired Gregorian in two sets. Alongside these, as a material but also folk songs, Greek meters and Indian rhythms.

Messiaen was synesthetes and formulated to two parts of the work, its color ideas. In Les bergers he describes the impression of a church window consists of blue-violet, red, gold and silver color stains.