“An exclamation mark! An island like an exclamation mark!… An island of the seas beyond the seas! There where the leaves are red, the pigeons green, the trees white, there where the sea changes from green to blue, and from violet to green, like the reflections of an opal… I saw it in a dream.”
This enthusiastic description of a far-off land in the opera Saint François d’Assise (1975-83) conveys its protagonist’s visionary abilities while reflecting an often overlooked factor in the music of Messiaen: a vivid sense of place. In the opera, the composer’s magnum opus, Saint François is describing New Caledonia, the dot of the exclamation mark being the Isle of Pines, a location Messiaen had calculated as the...
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