The title of today’s choice is derived the title from two Sanskrit words, turaṅga (तुरङ्ग) and līlā (लीला), which the composer explained as:
“Lîla” literally means play – but play in the sense of the divine action upon the cosmos, the play of creation, destruction, reconstruction, the play of life and death. “Lila” is also love. “Turanga”: this is the time that runs, like a galloping horse; this is time that flows, like sand in an hourglass. “Turanga” is movement and rhythm.
“Turangalîla” therefore means all at once love song, hymn to joy, time, movement, rhythm, life and death. The joy of Turangalîla is superhuman, overflowing, blinding, unlimited”.
TheTurangalila Symphony is based on the love and death themes of Tristan and Isolde/Iseult, which had been set by Wagner – it’s a Celtic legend/love story.
The work was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky (conductor, composer, and double-bassist) who at the time was director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and called the Symphony “the most important piece of classical music ever written since Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring“. Koussevitzky fell ill before the premiere in 1948, so the task of conducting fell to the young Leonard Bernstein.
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and an ornithologist (for evidence, click here!). Like other French composers he was an organist, at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, a post he held for 61 years. He studied with Dukas, Widor and Dupré at the Paris Conservatoire from the age of 11.
In 1940 Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet – performed by Messiaen and fellow prisoners for an audience of inmates and prison guards.
His students included Xenakis, Goehr, Boulez, Stockhausen, Kurtág, and Yvonne Loriod, whom he married and who performed the piano part in the first performance of the Turangalila Symphony, which also includes a huge orchestra, and an instrument called the Ondes Martenot. You’ll most likely recognise it from the theme to Doctor Who, and it’s also used in popular music by Damon Albarn, Daft Punk, and Radiohead, as well as in many sci-fi and horror films.
The Listening Project Blog 