MESSIAEN TAGE COESFELD 1980
DOCUMENTATION
It was very unusual news in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1980: The famous French composer Olivier Messiaen traveled to Münsterland with his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, to take part in a festival dedicated to him, the 'Messiaen - Tage - Coesfeld'. Music lovers from various parts of the Federal Republic came to Yvonne Loriod's piano evening with the great piano cycle 'Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus' and the panel discussion with Olivier Messiaen and several German musicologists.
National newspapers such as 'Die Zeit', and also the WDR in its third programs on radio and television reported on it, often with an expression of astonishment that the most important living composer of his time had travelled to a district town in Münsterland to take part in a music festival dedicated to his work...
LA NATIVITÉ DU SEIGNEUR - On the music of Olivier Messiaen ESSAY BY Dr. RUDOLF INNIG (p. 25 ff.)
Among the organ works that are at the heart of Olivier Messiaen's work, "La Nativite du Seigneur" occupies a special position: with nine meditations, this is his first major organ cycle, after only individual pieces - Le banquet celeste (1928), Diptyque (1929), Apparition de l' église éternelle (1931) - had previously been published in print, and Messiaen had still wavered between an orchestral version (1932) and an organ version (1935) in his four-movement cycle L' Ascension.
Looking back, Messiaen himself also felt this way: in his theoretical work Technique of my musical language (1944, German translation, which is used as the basis for the following, Paris 1966) he describes La Nativite du Seigneur as the first composition that is particularly characteristic of his musical language...