Several times during the San Francisco Opera’s (SFO) remarkable production
of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (which I discussed in Part
I of this essay last month), Sister Helen is asked if she is afraid. With
striking similarity, “J’ai peur sur la route!” (I am afraid on the road!)
are the first words, sung by the young friar Leo, of Olivier Messiaen’s opera
Saint François d’Assise, which had its first American performance
at the SFO in the fall of 2002. Francis comforts Leo with a description of the
greatest happiness, of pure joy. Such happiness, he instructs him, lies neither
in the most sublime knowledge nor even in the accomplishment of great and pious
tasks. Instead it lies in the renunciation of one’s self and the cheerful endurance
of suffering for the sake of Christ. The road of life, even the painful and
frightful road of life, is not to be feared. It is also the radiant path of
the cross, blazed by Christ, which leads to joy, to ecstasy eternal.

The ecstasy
that twists like a DNA code through every bar of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise is a startling repudiation of the angst
that lies at the heart of modernism—a high irony since Messiaen was one of the
modern era’s most singular and innovative musicians. Increasingly, the opera is
being recognized as the most important work of the late twentieth century.
Certainly not since Bach completed the St.
Matthew Passion has an artist combined substantive theology with
magisterial composition into such a titanic example of artistry. As New York Times critic Paul Griffiths
wrote, “If music could make us good, this music would.”

The Paris
Opera commissioned the work in 1975. Messiaen worked on the music and the
libretto at the same time, completing the sketched opera in 1979. It took three
more years to orchestrate, and the opera premiered in Paris in November 1983.
Three years later Seiji Ozawa (who conducted the Paris performances) performed
three of the opera’s scenes with the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood Festival
Chorus in New York and Boston. In 1992 and again in 1998 the complete opera was
staged as part of the Salzburg Festival. Berlin presented the opera in the
summer of 2000. San Francisco’s production in the fall of 2002 was the first
staging of the complete work outside of Europe.

The opera is
huge (even the score is big; it’s in three volumes, each roughly three by two
feet). The work demands a greatly expanded orchestra (for instance, Messiaen
calls for seven flutes, while Mozart gets along with a mere two), and a huge
chorus. The baritone role of St. Francis is comparable in its Herculean demands
only to Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Meistersinger
(which is considered the most difficult role in the repertory), and the role of
the angel, the opera’s only female role, is almost cruelly punishing in its
extended high soft passages. The music is at times extraordinary complex, and
it demands three to four times the number of rehearsals required for almost any
other opera. (When Ozawa first saw the score, he told Messiaen that he thought
parts of it were impossible to conduct.)

So it was with
considerable daring that general director Pamela Rosenberg chose to begin her
first year of leadership of the SFO with this production, and she apparently
spared nothing on it. The chorus was tripled in size and extra musicians were
added to the orchestra. Platforms were built out into the audience to
accommodate the extended percussionists and the players of the three electronic
ondes martenots (two of which,
instruments and performers both, had to be imported from Canada and Europe).
Such care was taken with the production and lighting that a full scale mock–up
of the set was built to make sure that it would fulfill the SFO’s vision of the
opera. The production was supported by seminars on Messiaen’s music and
concerts of his organ and chamber works throughout the Bay Area. The production
even included lavish press packets (complete with a CD–ROM) and a program that
contained substantial essays on the composer and the opera. This was not a
cheap show to mount.

Messiaen’s
eight scenes (divided between three acts) show Francis’ progress toward a
“state of supreme grace” (Messiaen’s words). The first three scenes broadly
deal with earthly themes and encounters (the fear of death, man’s relationship
with the created order, and the need to love others more than ourselves), while
the three scenes of the second act involve man’s relationship with the
supernatural (the angel appears at the monastery, Francis is given a vision of
the “music of the invisible,” and he preaches to the birds). The two scenes of
the third act—the gift of the stigmata and the saint’s death and
resurrection—summarize the themes of the first two acts and complete their
arguments. Borrowing a device from Debussy’s Pelleas et Mélisande, most of Messiaen’s scenes contain little, if
any, real action. Messiaen’s purpose here is not to present a piece of
symbolist psychological theater, but instead to present what are almost
animated meditations upon points of theology.

The scene that
begins Act II is typical. A disguised angel visits the brothers’ monastery. He
knocks repeatedly on the gate (represented by huge dark and irregular chords in
the orchestra). His raps are answered by a young brother who lectures the
divine messenger on the etiquette of knocking (“three times, not too loud,
wait—as long as it takes to say an ‘Our Father’—then you can knock once more”).
The angel says that he has come to see Francis. Told that Francis is at his
prayers, and not wishing to disturb him, the angel asks to present a question
to one of the brothers. Brother Elie, something of the order’s chief
bookkeeper, appears. “What do you think of predestination?” the angel asks.
“Have you put off the old man, to put on the new? Have you found your true face
as foreseen by God in His justice, holiness, and truth?” Elie is a busy man,
and has no time for such grandiloquent nonsense. He refuses to answer and
orders the gate slammed in the strange visitor’s face.

Undeterred,
the angel knocks again (again loudly—but how else is the messenger of God to
announce his advent?) and again is lectured on his bad manners. He asks for
Brother Benard to hear his question. The aged friar is brought out, and the
angel presents the same question to him. Benard answers, “I have often thought
that after my death, our Lord Jesus Christ will look at me as he looked at the
tribute–money, saying ‘Whose is this image and this inscription?’ And, by God
and His Grace, I would like to be able to answer him: ‘Yours, Yours.’” The
angel tells the friar that he has answered well (indeed, it’s a response that
would probably satisfy both John Calvin and Ignatius Loyola), and encourages
him to “persevere in that road.”

It is one of
the most stunning moments in opera. There is a little comedy, and a bit of
action, but the real drama is not on stage. Instead Messiaen places it beyond
the orchestra pit, in the heart of each person in the auditorium, the dramatic
struggle of that second, unasked question that we almost involuntarily find
ourselves asking, “Ah, whose image is on my coin?” No matter what our religious
beliefs, in a flash we find before us that inevitable moment of our death, and
of our fear, and of our desperate hope that there is a meaning to it all, that
there is a God, and that somehow we might be seen as His own. Might we all be
able to say “de Vous, de Vous.”
Yours, Yours.

Messiaen
often said that the purpose of his art was to demonstrate the truth of the
Catholic faith (although no bigot, neither was Messiaen an ecumenist). For him,
an important part of that faith is the recognition of the extravagance of God’s
love proclaimed by creation. Although John Cage is the composer most closely
identified with “natural sounds,” Messiaen was actually more deeply influenced
by nature—his music more inextricably bound up with nature’s actual sounds.
This is seen above all in his attitude toward melody and counterpoint.

The greatest
problem facing composers in the twentieth century was melody. The innovations
of modernism—atonality, serialism, composed forms, aleotoric practices,
electronic music, and heightened rhythmic complexity—all generally distracted
composers from melodic considerations. But recently, as some composers have
shown new interest in the harmonies and forms of nineteenth–century music,
interest in melody has also been renewed. Yet almost always these new melodies
simply appear as stale imitations of Puccini, Tchaikovsky, and even
Rachmaninoff. Certainly melodies must be a significant part of music, but how
to write them? How to make them sound fresh?

Messiaen’s
answer was to invent a new kind of melody based upon bird song. He spent long
hours out of doors, voraciously notating and then cataloguing the songs of
individual birds (in mock complaint he once said, “You have to get up at four
in the morning, walk long distances, and travel in search of new artists!”).
The flourishes, leaps, coloratura, and irregular rhythms of these songs became
in Messiaen’s art ecstatic melodies, emblematic of the pure joy characteristic
of redeemed nature.

These melodies
permeate Messiaen’s score, making Saint
François perhaps the most purely lyric opera since Bellini. Many times, and
particularly when combined with texts, the melodies are presented as extended
monodies, carefully controlled so that Messiaen’s words can be clearly heard.
Some bird songs are paired with specific characters, and appear with their
characters as identifying motifs. At other times, dozens of them are laid on
top of each other, creating not a rational counterpoint but instead the heady
glossolalia of nature. Messiaen’s almost pentecostal polyphony not only makes
us hear traditional melodies with new ears, it also makes us return to nature
and listen to those sounds with a deeper spiritual understanding.

In the San
Francisco production, Messiaen’s primarily spiritual message is carried over
into the set design and staging. The cross, the road, and heaven are themes
throughout the opera. The road takes the form of an S–shaped ramp that cuts
across an inclined cross that is laid out on the stage. The back of the set is
open, the place of heaven. The ramp and the cross revolve, becoming a snowy
path, the cell of a hermitage, a cloud, and even a kind of cosmic harp. In the
final scene, the ramp becomes Francis’ road to heaven. Two multistoried blank
facades (which frequently hold the chorus) look out from the wings, giving the
set the ominous look of a De Chiricoesque cityscape. Francis and the friars are
costumed in simple gray habits (the chorus is dressed similarly). The prevailing
gloom of the design is relieved by the angel who appears one–winged and in a
body suit the color of heaven: electric blue. Color is also added by
atmospheric projections that appear on scrims and the far wall.

Even San
Francisco’s staging details reflect sensitivity to Messiaen’s purposes. The
third scene of the first act is a trio between a leper, Francis, and an angel.
Messiaen’s leper is deeply bitter. He mocks the brothers who bring him food,
and despises himself not only for the rottenness of his flesh but also for the
corruption of his character. He pulls along a large glass screen that he
continually places between himself and Francis. The angel appears (leaning at a
45–degree angle off the side of one of the blank facades) and sings to the
leper of God’s love for him. During the course of the scene the angel descends
to the leper and gracefully removes the screen.

It may sound
contrived, but in the context of the opera the simple staging device of the
screen is a powerful and immediately understandable pantomime of the barriers
we cultivate to shut out grace. Not only is forgiveness and transformation an
act of grace, but even the possibility of forgiveness and healing is itself a
divine work. Later in the scene the leper and Francis stand face to face and
Francis asks the leper to forgive him for not loving him enough. The saint and
the leper embrace and the leper is miraculously healed, but the real miracle is
the love that makes healing and transformation possible.

On every
level, San Francisco presented a Saint
François the artistry and thoughtfulness of which can hardly be surpassed.
Willard White sang the title role in a commanding and richly nuanced baritone
and soprano Laura Aikin’s angel was appropriately divine. The orchestra
shimmered and sparkled, roared and thundered, while the chorus sang Messiaen’s
difficult score with a confidence and unified choral tone seldom heard in any
work at any opera house. Donald Runnicles, who conducted the San Francisco
performances, told the press that he thought this opera was a potentially life–changing
experience. It is. And it was.

But San
Francisco is one of the world’s great opera companies. Great productions
there—such as Dead Man Walking and Saint François—are not particularly
newsworthy. What is remarkable about San Francisco’s production is the care the
house took in presenting not only these new works but also their specifically
Christian visions. A production of Heggie’s and McNally’s work could easily,
and legitimately, stress its broadly humanistic elements (although the
character of Sister Helen would probably continually pull the drama back into a
specifically Christian milieu); the recent Berlin production of Saint François purposely subdued
Messiaen’s overtly Christian content. That San Francisco chose not to take
those routes testifies first and foremost to the high integrity of the house
toward the works of art it selects to produce. Perhaps it testifies also to a
more general shift in cultural sensibility. Maybe there is reason to hope that
we are moving to an era where the elements of traditional Western culture will
not receive quite the immediate skepticism and ridicule they have elicited
since the mid–1960s.

One final word. San Francisco’s Dead Man Walking and Saint François
d’Assise were both substantially underwritten by the National Endowment
for the Arts. Without the agency’s help they probably would not have been mounted.
Since I have argued for the termination of the Endowment in these pages (“The
Blight of Cultural Rights,” June/July 2001), perhaps a measure of contrition
is in order—which I gladly offer.

Michael Linton is Head of the Division of Composition and Music Theory at Middle Tennessee State University.