The Turangalîla-symphonie is the only symphony by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908âÂÂ1992). It was written for an orchestra of large forces from 1946 to 1948 on a commission by Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with two soloists playing piano and ondes Martenot. Along with the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, the symphony is one of the composer's most notable works.
Leonard Bernstein conducted the premiere in Symphony Hall in Boston on 2 December 1949, followed by the New York City première at Carnegie Hall on 10 December (Messiaen's 41st birthday). The latter two performances included an intermission after the fifth movement and were the only work on the programme. The commission did not specify the duration, orchestral requirements or style of the piece, leaving the decisions to the composer. Koussevitzky was scheduled to conduct the première, but fell ill, and the task fell to Bernstein, who never again conducted the work. Yvonne Loriod, who later became Messiaen's second wife, was the piano soloist, and Ginette Martenot played the ondes Martenot for these first performances.
From 1953 on, Yvonne's sister Jeanne Loriod was the ondes Martenot player in many performances and recordings.
While most of Messiaen's compositions are religious in inspiration, at the time of writing the symphony the composer was fascinated by the myth of Tristan and Iseult. Turangalîla forms the central work in his trilogy of compositions concerned with the themes of romantic love and death; the other pieces are Harawi for piano with soprano and Cinq rechants for unaccompanied trios of soprani, alti, tenors, and basses. It is considered one of the greatest musical compositions of the twentieth century, being described by its commissioner as 'the most important piece of classical music ever written since Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring<nowiki/>'. A typical performance runs around 80 minutes in length. Messiaen once summarised the entire symphony as being "a love song; a hymn to joy."
Although the concept of a rhythmic scale corresponding to the chromatic scale of pitches occurs in Messiaen's work as early as 1944 in his Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (a suite Messiaen quotes in the fourth movement), the arrangement of such durations into a fixed series occurs for the first time in the opening episode of the work's seventh movement, Turangalîla 2, and is an important historical step toward the concept of integral serialism.
The title of the work, and those of its movements, were a late addition to the project, chosen after Messiaen made a list of the work's movements. He described the name in his letters from 1947 to 1948. He derived the title from two Sanskrit words, () and (), which he explained thus:
Messiaen described the joy of Turangalîla as "superhuman, overflowing, blinding, unlimited". He revised the work's orchestration in 1990.
The piece is scored for a large orchestra, consisting of the following instruments:
Percussion (12 percussionists)
Interestingly, the piece does not require timpani, notwithstanding the use of a very large percussion section. The demanding piano part includes several solo cadenzas.
In writing about the work, Messiaen identified four cyclic themes that reappear throughout; there are other themes specific to each movement. In the score the themes are numbered, but in later writings he gave them names to make them easier to identify, without intending the names to have any other, literary meaning.
The work is in ten movements, linked by the common themes identified above, and other musical ideas:
The composer's initial plan was for a symphony in the conventional four movements, which eventually became numbers 1, 4, 6, and 10. Next, he added the three Turangalîla movements, which he originally called tâlas, a reference to the use of rhythm in Indian classical music. Finally, the 2nd, 5th, and 8th movements were inserted. Early on, Messiaen authorized separate performance of movements 3, 4, and 5, as Three tâlas (not to be confused with the original use of the term for the three Turangalîla movements), but later came to disapprove of the performance of extracts.
No recording was made of the world premiere, and Bernstein himself did not return to the work in either concert performance or in the recording studio, but a recording exists of part of the rehearsals for the premiere in Boston, featuring the fifth and sixth movements.
It was released in 2013 as part of a set of previously unissued Bernstein recordings (Music and Arts WHRA-6048).