Typed letter signed from the important twentieth-century composer to "Monsieur l'Abbé." 1 page, on the composer's Paris letterhead. 1 May, 1987. Translated from the French: "As I wrote an opera on Saint Francis of Assisi, I have at home nearly 50 books on him, and also all the texts he left and several editions of the Little Flowers and Considerations on the Stigmata. I did not have Joergensen's biography of Saint Francis. Thank you very much for sending it to me. / Attached you will find the requested autograph, taken from the "Prière exaucée" des "Poèmes pour Mi". Send it yourself to the dedicatee whose address I do not know. Believe, please, dear l'Abbé, to all my deepest feelings respectful. / Olivier Messiaen." A few areas whited out along the top (presumably by Messiaen), but otherwise in very fine condition. 8.25 x 11.5 inches (21 x 29 cm).
The cleric recipient is not identified but may in fact be the formerly beloved Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), Capuchin priest who was from Messiaen's home city of Grenoble and who was a member of the Resistance during World War II and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP). In 1949, he founded the Emmaus movement, with the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees. For years, he was one of the most popular figures in France and is known to have corresponded with Messiaen. Allegations of sexual abuse of at least two dozen of women and children emerged in 2024.
Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise : Scènes Franciscaines is an opera in three acts and eight scenes, composed to his own libretto from 1975 to 1979, and concerns Saint Francis of Assisi, the titular character, and displays Messiaen's devout Catholicism.The premiere was given by the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier on 28 November 1983. Messiaen's only opera, it is considered his magnum opus.
Alex Ross has called it "the grandest grand opera since Wagner's 'Parsifal,'" and written that it "is not easy listening. It is five hours long, devoutly Catholic in content, and by turns dissonant, jubilant, voluptuous, and austere. There are eight tableaux, each recording a stage in the life of the saint. Francis kisses a leper, speaks to the birds, receives the stigmata, dies in a state of suffering joy. The libretto, which Messiaen wrote himself, would have posed no problems for an audience of fourteenth-century Loire villagers. The music is something else again: a twentieth-century echo chamber in which prosaic turns of phrase acquire shattering overtones. The composer once remarked that he saw the Resurrection as an atomic explosion; likewise, his Francis has to undergo a death that sounds like the apocalypse."
Typed letter signed from the important twentieth-century composer to "Monsieur l'Abbé." 1 page, on the composer's Paris letterhead. 1 May, 1987. Translated from the French: "As I wrote an opera on Saint Francis of Assisi, I have at home nearly 50 books on him, and also all the texts he left and several editions of the Little Flowers and Considerations on the Stigmata. I did not have Joergensen's biography of Saint Francis. Thank you very much for sending it to me. / Attached you will find the requested autograph, taken from the "Prière exaucée" des "Poèmes pour Mi". Send it yourself to the dedicatee whose address I do not know. Believe, please, dear l'Abbé, to all my deepest feelings respectful. / Olivier Messiaen." A few areas whited out along the top (presumably by Messiaen), but otherwise in very fine condition. 8.25 x 11.5 inches (21 x 29 cm).
The cleric recipient is not identified but may in fact be the formerly beloved Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), Capuchin priest who was from Messiaen's home city of Grenoble and who was a member of the Resistance during World War II and deputy of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP). In 1949, he founded the Emmaus movement, with the goal of helping poor and homeless people and refugees. For years, he was one of the most popular figures in France and is known to have corresponded with Messiaen. Allegations of sexual abuse of at least two dozen of women and children emerged in 2024.
Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise : Scènes Franciscaines is an opera in three acts and eight scenes, composed to his own libretto from 1975 to 1979, and concerns Saint Francis of Assisi, the titular character, and displays Messiaen's devout Catholicism.The premiere was given by the Paris Opera at the Palais Garnier on 28 November 1983. Messiaen's only opera, it is considered his magnum opus.
Alex Ross has called it "the grandest grand opera since Wagner's 'Parsifal,'" and written that it "is not easy listening. It is five hours long, devoutly Catholic in content, and by turns dissonant, jubilant, voluptuous, and austere. There are eight tableaux, each recording a stage in the life of the saint. Francis kisses a leper, speaks to the birds, receives the stigmata, dies in a state of suffering joy. The libretto, which Messiaen wrote himself, would have posed no problems for an audience of fourteenth-century Loire villagers. The music is something else again: a twentieth-century echo chamber in which prosaic turns of phrase acquire shattering overtones. The composer once remarked that he saw the Resurrection as an atomic explosion; likewise, his Francis has to undergo a death that sounds like the apocalypse."