The Joy of Turangalîla

In February 1941, one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers staggered out of a prisoner of war camp in Görlitz, present-day Poland. Olivier Messiaen had been interned in the camp for more than twenty months.  

Messiaen soon returned to his everyday existence in Paris. He played the organ at the Church of the Trinity on Sundays, taught on weekdays, and the rest of the time, wrote some of the most profoundly original works in music history. Many of them combined joyous ecstasy with lavish opulence.  

When the war finished, life felt much like it had before. But for Messiaen, everything was about to change. In 1949, his wife, the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, suffered a cerebral infection during an operation, resulting in a complete amnesia. Delbos would remain institutionalized for the rest of her life.  

Whether he knew it or not, Messiaen was likely already falling for someone else – a brilliant pianist named Yvonne Loriod. This was surely the feeling coursing through the composer when, in 1946, a commission landed from Serge Koussevitsky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  

Koussevitsky wanted a big new work from Messiaen, who was yet to achieve the guru-like status he would assume in later life, and gave the composer free-reign: ‘write for as many instruments as you desire, write a work as long as you wish and in the style you want’, Koussevitsky instructed.  

Messiaen obliged. He delivered what many consider his standout masterpiece – a colossal ten-movement symphony he christened with a name of his own coining: Turangalîla.  

The Power of Love  

‘Turangalîla’ is a combination of two Sanskrit words: ‘turanga’, suggesting movement, rhythm, the onward march of time; and ‘lîla’, referring to the all-embracing sacred, cosmic and sexual love that powers creation – the life force itself.  

The British music journalist Philip Clark has observed that ‘Turangalîla deals with everything you shouldn’t talk about in polite company: love, death, sex, religion and time.’ 

In truth, Turangalîla doesn’t talk at all. It sings, dances, frolics and meditates with apparently unbounded joy. Koussevitsky deemed it ‘the greatest composition composed in our century’ second only to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.  

Like Stravinsky, Messiaen helped changed the course of his art form. He set out to rewire not just concert music’s structures but its whole communicative purpose. It was his expressed desire to create ‘an iridescent music, one that will delight the auditory senses with delicate, voluptuous pleasures…that lead the listener gently towards that theological rainbow which is the ultimate goal of music.’  

Central to this was Messiaen’s mystical, broad yet devout attachment to the Catholic faith – one that opened the joy of salvation up to the many rather than roping it off for the initiated. ‘God spoke to Messiaen in the mighty roar of the orchestra or church organ, the clattering of exotic percussion, or the songs of birds,’ writes the critic Alex Ross in his seminal book on twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise.  

Roaring, clattering and singing (of the non-vocal variety) are all present in Turangalîla, the work in which Messiaen fused the modern and the traditional, the natural and the supernatural, the Catholic and the pagan, the western and the Asian in a single, ecstatic musical stew in which emotional abandon is sharpened by rigorous musical controls.  

Yvonne Loriod peers out from deep within the music – most obviously in its considerably part for solo piano. Whether or not Messiaen knew his love for the pianist was on the way to becoming all-encompassing, he took as a conscious influence the ancient myth of Tristan and Isolde – the idea of a love so strong it can only be consummated in death, overcoming the limitations of the human body and thus taking on cosmic dimensions. 

A Huge Canvas 

Given these big themes, Turangalîla required serious sonic real-estate. Not only is it long, it employs an orchestra extended upwards, downwards and outwards. The brass section alone stretches from piercingly high piccolo trumpet to growling tuba.  

The orchestra’s 8-person percussion section utilizes vibraphone, glockenspiel, bass drum, chimes, maracas, snare drum, tabor, tambourine, tam-tam, temple blocks, triangle and wood block – all combined with an assembly of gongs and cymbals that approximates the sound of a Balinese gamelan ensemble.  

Added to the conventional strings and extended woodwinds and brass of a large symphony orchestra – not forgetting that piano and a celesta – this gonzo instrumentation makes for an impressive arsenal and a potential cacophony. Yet Messiaen’s distinctive handling of his enlarged orchestra renders all of it as vivid as a Hollywood movie. His ability to sound more enraptured than aggrieved, even in the loudest, busiest passages, is only now being surpassed by composers of the broadest sonic imagination. 

What we haven’t yet mentioned, is Turangalîla’s most distinctive instrument of all – also its most rarified. In 1928, the French cellist, inventor and radio telegrapher Maurice Martenot invented the ‘ondes Martenot’, a monophonic electronic instrument that uses an oscillator to create a tone that can float seamlessly between pitches.  

The ondes Martenot sounds like no other instrument in regular use, combining the lyrical freedom of the human voice with all manner of distinctive electronic annunciation tools and a broader sound inextricable form the world of Sci-Fi. It also sounds markedly different, depending who is playing it (again, like a human voice). 

In Turangalîla, Messiaen uses the ondes Martenot mostly to colour other instrumental groups – seasoning the sound of the strings in the big melodies and punctuating the winds and percussion in the more rhythmic passages.  

But the ondes Martenot also has some remarkable moments of its own. In the eighth movement, it takes on Messiaen’s ‘flower theme’ with distinctive trill-like gestures, delivering one of Turangalîla’s most spine-tingling moments.  

Ten Chapters 

Turangalîla is structured in ten chapters or ‘movements’. The symphony has no through-line or narrative. Rather, it builds effects through juxtaposition and association, as montages of fragmented musical material recur and revolve.  

The first and last of those movements is an Introduction, which sets out at least one of the work’s main musical ideas, and a Finale, which appears to tie up all its threads in conclusion.  

In between, we hear three interlocking series of movements: two titled ‘Chant d’amour’, three titled ‘Turangalîla’and three titled freely: ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’, ‘Jardin du sommeil d'amour’ and ‘Développement de l'amour’.  

Each movement has a character of its own, from rapture to terror, from agitation to meditation. And yet, despite those contrasting moods, the symphony’s entire emotional and temperamental state seems to somehow make its presence felt in each and every movement.  

Percussion comes to the fore in the three ‘Turangalîla’ movements, where musical energy is most propulsive. There is rapture, tenderness and elegance in the love movements.  

Some early critics deemed much of that ‘love’ music too syrupy. Virgil Thomson, who was initially a fan of Messiaen and described his music as ‘convulsive, ecstatic, cataclysmic, terrifying and unreal’, dismissed some of the melodic material in Turangalîla as ‘straight from the Hollywood cornfields’.  

Thomson’s rationale, was that he thought the music too cheap and filmic. Messiaen would have countered that his music was direct and naturalistic – brandishing the most obvious emotional power. 

Plenty have heard elements of jazz and pop music in Turangalîla’s melodies. Ross points to the chord that emerges towards the end of the second ‘Chant d’amour’ and is one of the harmonic staples of the work, despite its exotic sound. But here, elaborates Ross, the chord is ‘played as a slow, slinky arpeggio in the manner of a cocktail lounge pianist.’  

Three Motifs 

Three principle musical motifs pervade the score to Turangalîla. Messiaen later labelled them ‘the statue’, ‘the flower’ and ‘love.’ 

‘The statue’ consists of seven huge chords blown with extreme grandeur through trombones and a tuba, introduced and almost obsessively repeated less than a minute into the work’s first movement.  Messiaen said of this motif that it possessed something of the brutality of ancient Mexican monuments.  

That theme is almost immediately contrasted with ‘the flower’, more delicately rendered on two clarinets.  

The ‘Love’ theme germinates throughout the work but only manifests itself with full clarity at the start of ‘Jardin du sommeil d'amour’. Here, we hear it on hushed strings coloured by ondes Martenot and piano but it will be proclaimed with joyous power in the final movement.  

‘Jardin du sommeil d'amour’, incidentally, is a languid interlude in which Messiaen’s love of birdsong is prominent, heard most obviously on the piano. Birdsong would gain far more prominence in Messiaen’s output later in his career.  

The presence of these three themes – and a fourth, a sequence of four complex chords to which Messiaen didn’t add a label – lends Turangalîla a rooted feel, for all its exoticism. We can think of this as a reflection of Messiaen’s Catholic faith.  

Another reflection of that faith is Messiaen’s constant return to big, reassuring tonal chords – chords that sound consonant and harmonious, not discordant. As Ross writes, ‘The Lord could manifest Himself [to Messiaen] in consonance and dissonance alike, though consonance was His true realm’. 

Time and Harmony Reimagined 

In Turangalîla, the whole concept of musical and biological time is altered. The piece creates its own time – what Clark has described as ‘Turangalîla-time’, in which ‘the Eastern ideal of being overrides Western symphonic aspirations to become’. This is one of many ways in which Eastern philosophy exerts an influence on the piece. 

But just as the music’s time is different, so are its harmonies. Instead of changing key through ‘preparation’ – or even avoiding keys altogether after the modernist fashion of Arnold Schoenberg – Messiaen uses his own system of scales that he called ‘modes of limited transposition’.  

Essentially, this means his music is rooted in fixed triads and tritones. We don’t hear standard chord progressions in Turangalîla; rather, in Ross’s words, the music ‘skids from one triad to another’ in what Messiaen called ‘rainbows of chords’. 

Those rainbows hold the indescribable qualities of Messiaen’s music – what John Milsom has referred to as ‘the unexplained, the mysterious, the erotic and the sublime.’  

Messiaen lived at a time when the entire aesthetic of music hung in the balance; the language of music was, effectively, up for grabs. His music, not atonal but highly innovative and immensely communicative nonetheless (even if it took some time to be appreciated), was his suggested solution.   

One reason Messiaen’s solution is still so interesting and engaging is that, for all the intensely radical originality and fresh-minted orchestration of a piece like Turangalîla, the music can feel like it isn’t that ‘new’ or ‘radical’ at all. Often, in fact, it sounds like it has existed forever.  

This is connected to Messiaen’s use of natural elements like birdsong and the ‘overtone’ series (the mostly inaudible notes that resonate when a single note is played), but also his tendency to rest his music on modal scales. 

Messiaen uses a mixture of these modal scales – some are of his own invention, and some trace the DNA on which various indigenous musical traditions are built (both western and Asian). Either way, what they effectively do is form organic and unsullied musical building blocks which lend the music built from them a timeless, universal feel.  

This is reflected in Messiaen’s instrumentation. Writing about a performance of Turangalîla in Oslo in 2015, Rob Young described Turangalîla’s mixture of ‘primitive and sophisticated musical technology’. He was referring to the hitting and thwacking of objects (the orchestra’s percussion section) combining with the ondes Martenot – which was, in 1949, one of the newest instruments around. 

Playing Turangalîla 

The first performance of Turangalîla took place on 2 December 1949 at the Symphony Hall in Boston. Leonard Bernstein conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Yvonne Loriod on the piano stool and Ginette Martenot, sister of Maurice, at the ondes Martenot.  

There is no record of Bernstein’s performance, but a snippet of the rehearsal was recorded. In it, Berstein can be heard to say that ‘there is a great deal of quiet commotion going on’.  

You can read what you like into that comment, but it seems to capture something of Turangalîla’s combination of frenetic calm and soothing frenzy.  

We can justifiably imagine that Bernstein indulged the joyous rhythmic side of Turangalîla – and its wordless ode to the ecstasy of love – like few other conductors.  

Esa-Pekka Salonen, another conductor-composer, has a long relationship with the piece. He has conducted it on both sides of the Atlantic in performances that have reveled in the work’s tremendous range of colours and effects, and with no fear of its more outlandish, neon-lit corners. His 1986 recording of the work, made with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, still stands up as one of the best ever made.  

Joining Salonen for his two performances at the Grieg Hall as part of the 2026 Bergen Festival are soloists from France: the ‘remarkable musician’ (The Guardian) that is pianist Bertrand Chamayou, and Cécile Lartigau, the nation’s most clear successor to Jeanne Loriod, Yvonne’s sister, who for many years took the ondes Martenot part.  

Conducting Turanglîla may be physically and technically demanding; in the first place, there’s the challenge of keeping around 110 musicians focused on a single expressive objective (and that’s to grossly over-simplify the job of the conductor).  

But Turangalîla also demands the sort of openness that is a central element of Salonen’s artistic personality. The tremendous possibilities of the score’s colours, timbres and skidding harmonies are the starting point for any interpretation of a piece which reaches beyond dogma into a universal expressivity.  

Turangalîla also demands virtuosity, confidence, listening and intuition from its orchestra – qualities the Bergen Philharmonic has been steadily honing over the last decade under former music director Edward Gardner.  

‘Real music, beautiful music – you can listen to without understanding it,’ said Messiaen in a 1988 interview with the BBC; ‘you don’t need to have studied harmony or orchestration.’  

We can talk about Turangalîla’s extraordinary complexity and analyze its musical provenance and structure. But Messiaen was really just trying to communicate the joy he experienced in life, love, nature and faith. He succeeded, which is why his piece has such an overwhelming, indiscriminate impact on those who gather in a room to play and hear it together.   

Andrew Mellor © 2025