Les Offrandes oubliées

Program notes

About the Work

Les Offrandes oubliées (The Forgotten Offerings) is where Olivier Messiaen’s career as an orchestral composer begins. He wrote it in 1930, aged 22, just after leaving the Paris Conservatoire, which he had entered at eleven and where his teachers included Paul Dukas. Walther Straram conducted the first performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 19 February 1931. Messiaen later recalled it as “my first work played by an orchestra and my first contact with the public at large”.

The subject is the one that would occupy him for the next sixty years. Messiaen was a devout Catholic, and he said many times that the first purpose of his music was to set out the truths of his faith. Here the idea is simple and severe. The “offerings” of the title are Christ’s death on the Cross and the Eucharist, and humanity, absorbed in sin, has forgotten them. Messiaen printed a short poem of his own at the head of the score to spell this out. It has three stanzas, one for each part of the music, and the first and last end with the same line: “We have forgotten, sweet Jesus, how you love us.”

The three parts are played without a break, and Messiaen gave them plain names: the Cross, the Sin and the Eucharist. As he put it: “The sin is the forgetting of God. The Cross and the Eucharist are the divine offerings.” Much of what is characteristic of the later composer is present already in this early piece: very slow music that seems to suspend time, rhythms that avoid a regular beat, and harmony he described in terms of colour.

What to Listen For

The Cross. The piece opens with a slow lament for the strings, marked to be played with deep sadness. The melody moves in short groups of uneven length, which Messiaen compared to the “neumes” of plainchant, the small note-groups of medieval notation. There is no steady pulse to hold on to, and the line keeps sinking back into long, drawn-out notes that the composer called “mauve and grey wailings”.

The Sin. Without warning the tempo snaps to fast and the full orchestra enters. Messiaen described this section as a “race to the abyss” at an almost mechanical speed. Listen for the heavy accents that fall at the ends of phrases, the whistling slides of string harmonics and the sharp calls of the trumpets. The music drives forward until it simply breaks off.

The Eucharist. What follows is the heart of the work and the longest of its three parts. The violins play one long, extremely slow phrase that climbs gradually higher over a bed of very quiet chords. Messiaen heard those chords as “reds, gold, blues, like a faraway stained-glass window”. The music grows no louder and reaches no climax, and it ends by fading out at the top of the violins’ range.