Couleurs de la cité céleste
At the point when Messiaen was writing Couleurs de la
cité céleste, colour began to assume parity with birdsong and rhythm, and indeed he
came increasingly to use it to articulate those two entities. It is interesting too to
note that, since L’ascension thirty years earlier, Messiaen had not written
any specifically religious work for orchestra alone. In 1963 he composed Couleurs de la
cité céleste, breaking this silence and returning to L’ascension’s
concern with the life beyond – it was to be a central theme in the music of his final
thirty years.
The composer’s preface states his stance clearly
enough: ‘the form of this work depends entirely on colours’. He goes on to say
that the melodic and rhythmic ideas and the colour/sound combinations evolve in the manner
of colours, and that these transformations can be compared with characters acting on
several superimposed stages, and unfolding several different stories simultaneously. The
musical ideas are mostly short and distinguished sharply from each other by rhythm, tempo
and orchestration, but to some extend we have to invent our own logic to explain their
interaction. Perhaps no two such explanations will be the same. After all, it seems fair
to assume that the colours of the celestial city have not been ‘achieved’
through any structured work programme – they just are.
© Roger Nichols
