Musical Messiah?

Was French Composer Olivier Messiaen a musical messiah or a voice from the jungle? Critics differed. Few claimed to understand his message. Others doubted that he had one.

Parisians were bewildered because the monkish composer, a devout, 38-year-old Catholic, punctuates his pious music with bird calls and Hindu rhythms. Instead of repose, listeners felt spastic jerkiness; instead of exalting sonorities, they heard grinding dissonance. After a performance of his Three Short Liturgies of the Divine Presence, which is scored (among other things) for a xylophone and two dried gourds with rattling seeds, one Paris critic snorted: "African witchcraft rather than Christian music."

Last week, after the U.S. premiere of Messiaen's harsh, ascetic Hymne pour grand Orchestre, Manhattan music critics also failed to agree. Growled the New York Times: "... A slightly varied and highly diluted version [of Le Sacre du

Printemps'), . . . The divagations from Stravinsky . . . are not of creative significance." Said the entranced World-Telegram: "He [Messiaen] seems to stand before a shrine, chanting the vision he beholds ... a sort of fluttering commotion spread over the music." Even the Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson, who has labored to introduce Messiaen's music to the U.S., was slightly flummoxed. Wrote he: ". . . powerful and original music . . . it is our obligation as listeners ... to get inside [it], since [it does] not easily penetrate our customary concert psychology."

Meanwhile, in Paris, Messiaen was composing a "very important work" commissioned by the Boston Symphony's Conductor Serge Koussevitzky. It is a symphony, he said, which will have eight movements instead of the usual four.

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