Saturday, December 8, 2018

Messiaen: Vingt Regards - IV. Regard de la Vierge


Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano

As RMJ pointed out the other day, the nativity story in Matthew with the star and the astrologers from the East and the evil King Herod and his plot which eventually included the murder of babies and Jesus and his parents becoming undocumented aliens in a foreign land, when looked at seriously is pretty chilling.

In writing a Christmas post about eleven years ago, I did a similar exercise of really thinking of what it said in the text to the people who those stories were originally told to would have made of the manger scene and the shepherds, having grown up on and lived on farms my entire life, my mind went to animal shit in a time and place when bedding for animals in a cave or hovel would have been minimal and labor to clean them out probably only slightly more plentiful.  To talk about the Son of God being born in a stable wouldn't have looked like the creches erected at almost any time since that custom started, it would have been filthy, smelly, fly ridden, noisy and probably a danger to the life of both mother and child.  And the people who first told that story and heard it would likely have known that.  "Silent Night" might have some truth in it but it isn't the truth.  No doubt mothers, especially young mothers who went through labor and gave birth in such circumstances might be touched with the feelings of that song but it wouldn't have been the only thing they thought and felt.  I can imagine it is something that lots of women who give birth to children under similar danger and hardship, today, might be those in the best position to tell us about what that must have been like. (Again, see RMJ who does the best Advent posts). 

I think this vision, this understanding of The Virgin carries some of that feeling of everything from maternal tenderness to the ominous danger all of them were in.  Not to mention the portents of the Angelic messenger that came before it in Luke.

Leaving out his technical description which you'd have to be a Messiaen scholar familiar with his harmonic theory to understand, here is what he said about this movement.

Toute simple et naïve . . . A la rentrée, un contrepoint mélodique nouveau exprime la tendresse du regard maternel. 

It's all simple and naive . . . At the return (of the opening theme)  a new melody in counterpoint expresses the tenderness of the mother's gaze. 

I should point out that Pierre-Laurent Aimard was a winner of the Olivier Messiaen prize, I believe during the lifetime of Yvonne Loriod and given by people who would have been very familiar with Messiaen's preferences in the performance of his music.  I think his playing of these is very good.

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