Hymne (au Saint-Sacrement)

Program notes

About the Work

The Hymne au Saint-Sacrement (‘Hymn to the Blessed Sacrament’) is one of Messiaen’s earliest orchestral works, written in 1932 when he was just twenty-three, already the organist of La Trinité and already, unmistakably, himself. It belongs to a small group of early orchestral ‘meditations’ (with Les Offrandes oubliées and Le Tombeau resplendissant) in which the young composer first displayed his command of the orchestra and his lifelong subject: religious contemplation, here a hymn of adoration before the Eucharist.

The work has an extraordinary backstory: the original score was lost during the Second World War, and Messiaen reconstructed the entire piece from memory in 1946, a feat that shows both his prodigious musical recall and how much the work meant to him. Though early, it already shows the hallmarks of his style: glowing, sensuous harmonies, a free and flexible sense of rhythm and time, and an atmosphere of ecstatic, mystical contemplation that builds to a bubbling, sunny climax. It makes a luminous, devotional opening to the concert.

What to Listen For

Listen for the slow, contemplative, almost timeless quality of the music: Messiaen is not interested in conventional momentum or development, but in creating states of spiritual contemplation. Listen for his rich, sensuous harmonies (the young composer already finding the glowing, ‘coloured’ chords that would define his style) and for the way the music moves in waves of adoration, alternating hushed mystery with radiant, surging climaxes.

Even in this early work, you can hear the essential Messiaen: the sense of music as an act of worship, the love of bright orchestral colour, and a rhythmic freedom that makes the music seem to float outside ordinary time. At around twelve minutes it is a concentrated, glowing meditation, a window onto the spiritual world that would occupy this singular composer for the rest of his life.