Background

My personal history with the Livre du Saint Sacrement goes back to its premiere in Detroit on July 1, 1986, when I was part of the audience as a member of the American Guild of Organists (AGO). Since that time, I have served 12 years as an AGO national councillor, and I have written a monthly commentary for The American Organist magazine from 2004 to 2006 and from 2014 to the present. More pertinent to this book, I was the coordinator of the 1998 AGO national convention in Denver. For one of our major programs, we engaged Yvonne Loriod to perform her husband’s Des canyons aux étoiles . . . with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. A handwritten thank-you note from Mme. Loriod-Messiaen now sits in a frame on my desk.

As a part-time organist, I have tried to learn as many of Olivier Messiaen’s works as I could. I was fascinated by the Livre du Saint Sacrement from the start, and I purchased the score as soon as it was available. In 1988, when I was serving as dean of the AGO’s Denver Chapter, we presented Jon Gillock in the Colorado premiere of the Livre – the 37th official performance.¹ That spurred me on to learn several of the individual movements and later to play excerpts in concerts and church services. Still, I thought five or six of the movements were too difficult to learn. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, and suddenly I had nowhere to play the organ except on my little three-rank practice instrument at home. I now had time to spend working on pieces I had always wanted to play but didn’t have time to practice, and foremost among them was the Livre.

This work is so vast and intricate that I wanted to improve my knowledge of Messiaen’s techniques and influences as I studied the score. I already owned several important references, including Gillock’s essential Performing Messiaen’s Organ Music, but there didn’t seem to be a complete musico-theological analysis of the Livre. I remembered having met a graduate student from the University of North Texas, Lerie Dellosa, at an AGO convention a few years earlier and getting into a discussion about Messiaen. She had written her dissertation on the “Combat de la mort et de la vie” from Les Corps glorieux,² and she subsequently e-mailed me a copy. This beautiful analysis was just the kind of thing I was looking for, so I asked Dellosa if she had encountered anything similar on the Livre. She did a library search and came up with a 2015 book derived from a dissertation by Dorothee Bauer. It looked interesting enough that I checked the preview on the publisher’s website, which enticed me to order the digital version. I could immediately see this was information I needed for my study of the Livre, so I made a rough translation of the main text. I then felt it was a book that everyone studying the Livre (or even Messiaen’s organ music in general) needed to have, and that it should therefore be made available in English. I obtained Bauer’s e-mail address from the publisher and asked whether she would be amenable to the project. She was overwhelmed to learn that someone would be eager to take on a translation of her book, and thus began a frequent correspondence. When I finished my initial draft – which could be considered a literal translation – we sent it to the publisher and a few knowledgeable colleagues in Vienna and the United States. That resulted in a green light for us to proceed.

Style and Text Versions

At this point, we needed to make some decisions regarding style and language. Because I wanted to use an accepted American style for the footnotes and bibliography, we agreed to rely on The Chicago Manual of Style (online edition), which was somewhat different from the style of the original book. It seemed logical that if a source was originally in English, we would quote the English version; if there was a standard English translation of a source from another language (especially a theological source), we would use that English text and cite it accordingly. If a quotation was originally in French or Latin and there was no available English translation, I generally translated it from the German version of the original book. I followed the author’s lead in leaving some quotations in French or Latin within the footnotes.

A difficult choice arose when considering Messiaen’s introductory commentary and epigraphs for the individual movements in the Livre du Saint Sacrement. There is no authorized English version; moreover, Messiaen tends to use French translations rather freely, adapting them to his own purposes. Even for the scriptural quotations, Bauer has been unable to identify specific Bible editions quoted by Messiaen.³ The introductory commentary was supplied in a typed manuscript by Messiaen to the program committee for the Detroit AGO convention, along with an English translation by Almut Rössler’s personal assistant, Nancy Poland. That translation was somewhat erratic, however, so it was slightly modified by the committee’s resident translator, Gale Kramer (who was also the organist at Metropolitan Methodist Church, where the Livre was premiered).⁴ Kramer’s version was credited to Poland in the program and subsequently reprinted in the liner notes for Rössler’s recording of the Livre.⁵ My strong opinion, supported by Bauer, was that we should adhere as closely as possible to Messiaen’s original text for the commentary and quotations. I therefore tried to preserve the composer’s style and syntax – even though it is a bit quirky at times – so that we would have a faithful English version, which is now included in the appendix to this book, to be used by future performers and scholars (with proper credit, I hope). The same translations are used throughout the book; in cases where they differ from the standard English translations (as with Thomas Aquinas and Thomas à Kempis), the modifications are acknowledged in the footnotes.

The Commission and Premiere

As a former AGO convention coordinator, I have never been satisfied with the published history of the Livre’s commission. The definitive biography by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone has much to say about Messiaen’s creative process, but little to say about the commissioning process.⁶ Luke Berryman was able to obtain copies of some of the correspondence between Messiaen and Ray Ferguson (the 1986 convention program chair) for his 2010 essay,⁷ but the picture was still incomplete. Sadly, Ferguson died in 2002 and Joan Haggard, general chair of the convention, has retained no documentation. Thanks especially to Kramer, however, who has kept all his records, and to Executive Director James Thomashower and Executive Assistant Eric Birk at AGO Headquarters in New York City, who have dug through old boxes in storage, I have been able to piece together an almost full set of correspondence between Messiaen and the AGO. This is the subject of a feature article in The American Organist,⁸ but I will summarize the highlights here, supplementing the chronology presented in Chapter 4 of this book.

Ferguson’s initial invitation to Messiaen was dated “2.3.1982,” so it could be either Feb. 3 or March 2, depending on whether American or European dating was used (March 2 seems more likely, since the letter was in French). On July 5, Ferguson sent the letter quoted in Chapter 4 and by Berryman,⁹ offering a range of choices for length and instrumentation. He also offered a selection of four organs – Ford Auditorium, Metropolitan Methodist Church, Saint Aloysius Church, and Saint Jude’s Church – and attached the specifications. Given that Ford Auditorium was to be used only for a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and that the organs at Saint Aloysius and Saint Jude’s were both rather small, with mechanical action, Messiaen’s choice seemed obvious. Indeed, he responded on August 1 that he would accept a commission for a solo organ work of about a half-hour to be performed at Metropolitan Methodist, “parce qui’l est le plus riche en timbres” (“because it is the richest in color”). Not only does this 1971 M.P. Möller instrument, called the Merton S. Rice Memorial Organ, have five manuals, but it offers a wealth of mutation stops (needed especially for the birdsong passages) and the crucial combinations of 16- and 2²/₃-foot flutes (for Messiaen’s dialogue registration) in multiple divisions. Ferguson’s observation that the acoustics of the room were “rather dry” was ignored, but became noteworthy in hindsight.

After Messiaen’s trip to Israel in the spring of 1984 came the May 11 journal entry to “[w]rite Ray Ferguson and Almut Rössler,”¹⁰ which was followed by a letter dated May 14. Here, he stipulated that Rössler would play the premiere and noted that he had finished five of what he expected would be ten or twelve movements of a “grand cycle pour orgue seul,” which would take about an hour and a half – an entire concert. He expected to finish the piece by January or February 1985. Messiaen proposed a fee of 80,000 French francs and said he would attend the premiere with his wife. There was some discussion within the program committee regarding the fee – which was initially the equivalent of about $9,500 and eventually, after a decline in the dollar, equaled $11,446 – but the terms were approved in a committee meeting on June 3. It turned out to be one of the great bargains in recent music history. Ferguson wrote back on June 23 to accept Messiaen’s terms with great fanfare (in his first letter on the official stationery of the 1986 Detroit convention).

In a letter dated March 17, 1985, Messiaen noted that he had delivered a copy of the work to Rössler and that it was now eighteen movements. He expected it to last an hour and a half, plus a half-hour intermission after the tenth movement (later changed to the eleventh at Rössler’s wise suggestion¹¹ ). In the summer of 1985 (as confirmed by the minutes of a program committee meeting on August 10), Messiaen sent the movement titles and quotations, which were translated by Kramer for the official program book. On May 18, 1986, Messiaen sent his travel plans, along with material for the printed program, including the cover page, the introductory comments, the subtitles and quotations, and a listing of the birds in four languages (later printed in the score¹² ). Rössler followed up on June 3 with details of her own plans and the English translation of the introduction from Poland (whom Messiaen called “an American friend” of Rössler).

Ferguson then sent a final letter to Messiaen in which he noted that the premiere performance would be limited to the 2,000 members of the AGO, but that there would be a second performance for the general public two nights later. The program committee had decided to add a performance because of the wide interest in the premiere and the lack of extra seating. Metropolitan Methodist considered its capacity to be 2,000,¹³ which must be where Ferguson got his attendance estimate. That figure was later repeated by Messiaen¹⁴ and has since been accepted by scholars. The total registration for the Detroit convention, however, was only 1,474, including artists and presenters but not including 51 exhibitors.¹⁵ A better estimate of the attendance at the premiere, therefore, would be around 1,500.

Performing the Livre

As I worked through the Livre during the pandemic, I obtained permission to practice once a week at Augustana Lutheran Church. I had been acting as interim organist there before the shutdown, and I considered the four-manual Reuter organ to be the best choice in the Denver area for performing the Livre. Finally, I could at least play through every movement. At that point, I thought I needed some coaching before I could perform the piece in public. My first choice as a teacher, naturally, was Gillock, but he lives outside Paris and neither of us could travel. I was thrilled when he agreed to try remote coaching by Zoom, and we were able to make the technology work. As it turned out, we met almost weekly (morning for me, evening for him) for more than six months.

My insight into the piece and ability to perform it improved immeasurably with Gillock’s help. A public concert, cosponsored by Augustana Arts and the Denver Rocky Mountain Chapter of the AGO, has been scheduled for March 2023, around the same time as this book’s publication. I am adding one innovation: projected images of the movement titles, quotations, plainchants, and birds as they are encountered in the score, with appropriate colors and pictures of stained-glass windows. I hope this will enhance the listeners’ experience, similar to supertitles at the opera, and avoid the need to read a detailed program during the performance.