Olivier Messiaen

French composer Oliver Messiaen broadened the reach of classical music by weaving in the sounds of nature together with elements of world music. His Turangalila Symphonie received its premiere from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1949 and combined the rhythmic structures of classical Indian music with western pop influences. From 1930 until his death in 1992 he held the post of organist and composer at Eglise De La Trinite in Paris.

Artistic ability ran in the family; his mother, poet Cecile Sauvage, and his father, who assisted with rendering Shakespeare into French, passed these gifts to him. Messiaen began composing at the age of eight and moved forward at an accelerated pace. After he learned to read music he mastered the operatic scores of Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and Wagner. He entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of eleven.

He accepted the organist position at La Trinite in 1930 and six years later joined the faculty of Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. Military service as a medical orderly in the French army halted his work in 1939. German forces captured him the next year and sent him to a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia. There he kept composing despite the absence of a piano, completing The Quartet for the End of Time and presenting its first performance to an audience of more than five thousand fellow prisoners.

Freed and discharged in 1941, he began teaching harmony at the Paris Conservatory. Between 1943 and 1947 he led private seminars on musical analysis and composition for a select circle that included Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Messiaen maintained his duties at Eglise de la Trinite while fulfilling outside commissions. The French government asked him to write Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum in memory of those lost in the World Wars. The following year he started teaching composition at the Paris Conservatory.