Religion und Glaube als künstlerische Kernkräfte im Werk von Olivier Messiaen

The creative impulse and impetus remain a mystery - despite the revelation of MichelAngelo, painted on the ceiling of the Sistina in Rome. They are fed by a source that - until it reaches the individual creative spirit - branches out into many streams, as it is given a wide variety of names by artists.

In his commentaries and writings, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) mentions two of these in particular, namely religion and faith, which MEETINGPOINT MUSIC MESSIAEN invited the authors of this volume to Görlitz-Zgorzelec for a three-day exchange of ideas. Olivier Messiaen completed his QUARTET ON THE END OF TIME in the former StaLag VIIIa prisoner-of-war camp there and performed it for the first time in the camp's theater barracks with three other French prisoners in front of around 400 inmates and the German guards on January 15, 1941, under the most adverse conditions.

From the opening question of whether the composer is a saint (St. Francis) in the history of 20th century music to thinking through the aesthetics of his organ works, this symposium at the Centenaire MESSIAEN2008 was a hyperbola of questions and research that sought to approach two of the main axes - religion and faith - in the multidimensional coordinate system of Olivier Messiaen's oeuvre as closely as possible. The intellectual coordinates of this curve are marked by the investigations of Wolfgang Rathert, Jörn Peter Hiekel, Rudolf Frisius, Dieter Schnebel, Jascha Nemtsov, Albrecht von Massow, Stefan Drees, Michael Heinemann, Hartmut Möller, Lydia Weissgerber, Marcin Blazewicz, Burkhard Meischein and Rebecca Rischin. Their intellectual precision and researching meticulousness make it clear that these two vectors of Olivier Messiaen's work reach into transcendence. Messiaen chose the words Éclairs sur l'Au-Delà in his last composition, completed in 1991 and premiered by the New York Philharmonic only after his death.

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