Maritain, Stravinsky and Messiaen

I'm currently reading Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen by Stephen Schloesser. As Vincent P. Benitez writes, 'Schloesser investigates Messiaen's intriguing 'ultra-Catholic avant-gardism' to uncover what might have influenced the composer as he created his early pieces, leading readers to a greater appreciation of Messiaen's later works.'

One of those early influences, according to Schloesser, was Jacques Maritain through the reading of Art et Scholastique in 1927. Robert Fallon has also written about this same connection in an essay entitled Composing Subjectivity which explores Maritain 's poetic knowledge in Igor Stravinsky and

Messiaen:

'Maritain and Stravinsky first met after a concert on 10 June 1926, at the time that Stravinsky was writing his first work with a religious text, a Pater Noster for four-part chorus. That year, Cocteau published his Lettre a Jacques Maritain and Maritain his Reponse a Jean Cocteau; both volumes are dedicated to Stravinsky. By the end of April 1927, Stravinsky had returned to the Orthodox faith that he had abandoned in his youth. He later wrote that "Jacques Maritain may have exercised an influence on me at this time [ 1926]. " Though Stravinsky denied that Maritain played a role in his conversion, his assistant Robert Craft says that Maritain did exert some influence on his return to the Church. In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera oratorio Oedipus Rex, a collaboration with Cocteau, premiered in Paris. Following Oedipus Rex, however, Stravinsky's attitude toward Maritain became ambivalent. In 1928, he wrote to one of his patrons, Victoria Ocampo, that Maritain's entourage nauseated him. In another letter he describes Maritain as:

"one of those people of superior intelligence who are lacking in humanity, and if Maritain himself does not deserve this judgment, certainly it applies to a great deal of his work.

Maritain is still attached to the nihilism of his youth, and this can be sensed in all of his books, despite the great value of his work in Christian and Thomist thought."

Stravinsky's famous Norton Lectures of 1941, delivered at Harvard University and later published as Poetique musicale, refer several times to Maritain and borrow his neo-Thomistic definition of a composer as a medieval artisan who orders and disciplines his craft. The book's considerable debt to Maritain includes quotations from the very same passages from Baudelaire, Poussin, Bellay, and Montaigne that Maritain had used in Art et Scholastique two decades earlier ...

Unlike Stravinsky, Messiaen never met Maritain, though by his own account he did read one book (probably Art et Scholastique) by him in 1927. He said it was "a book of high philosophy that seemed very difficult to me," but admitted having benefited from it. Maritain's influence is suggested in Messiaen's views on artistic imitation, his skeptical attitude toward science, his apparent interest in Emmanuel Mounier's personalist movement, and his rhetorical use of terms such as "poetic intuition."

Among Messiaen's early works, La Nativite du Seigneur (1935) most strongly suggests Maritain's influence in its Thomistic theme of truth. Like Oedipus Rex, La Nativite opens a window onto Messiaen's epistemology. Comprised of nine movements for solo organ lasting twice as long as any composition he had yet written, La Nativite quickly entered the organist's repertoire and remained one of his favorite works. Though it bears no dedication, Messiaen later said it was written in homage to his teacher Paul Dukas.'

Fallon also notes that 'Olivier Messiaen's father, Pierre Messiaen, did know Maritain, whose books quote English Romantic poetry in the father's translations.'

Schloesser notes that, 'Maritain's extended argument in Art and Schlasticism made two principal points: first, religion and the avant-garde are eminently compatible as they meet in the artistic and aesthetic arenas; second, there is no particularly "religious" form of art.' As a result, 'Maritain gave a Catholic artist licence to jettison received external forms and set out on an avant-garde path. One thing alone mattered: the eternal formal principle that radiated clarity ... from within and gave unity and meaning to the organic whole.'

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Olivier Messiaen - La Nativite du Seigneur.

Humility, humanity and shame culture

I've been reading Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus, as well as watching Masahiro Shinoda's film of Endo's Silence, over the Christmas period.
De Waal is critical of Ruth Benedict's famous thesis, made in The Chrysanthmum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, "that the Japanese had a culture of shame rather than a culture of guilt." De Waal's criticisms - the simplicity of this polarity and Benedict's own lack of direct experience of Japan - are fairly standard current critiques of Benedict's thesis. What is interesting though is the continuing popularity of the book and it's influence on a Japanese writer like Endo.

Endo writes in his Preface to the American Edition of A Life of Christ that the "religious mentality of the Japanese ... has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them ... the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father." He then suggests that if his American readers "keep this point of view in mind as they move through A Life of Jesus, they will ... gain deeper insight into just where the religious psychology of the Japanese and other Orientals coincides with their own, and they will better appreciate those points at which the two psychologies perhaps diverge."

As Adrian Pinnington notes in his interesting paper on the issue Endo clearly accepts the shame culture versus guilt culture thesis and it may be that this reflects the influence of Western Catholicism on his thinking and writing. Doug Cummings, in his essay accompanying the film Silence, writes that "Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform" during the period that Endo studied at the University of Lyon - "Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity" while Endo "focused on writers he called the "grande écrivaines of French literature" ... François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green ... Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul."

Cummings notes a "deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion." As a result, the reigning motifs in his work become "philosophical rifts, religious fervour and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures."

Pinnington, however, argues that Endo's "initially negative picture of Japanese culture grows more positive" with "the lack of a strong self" coming to be seen as a "precious asset." This change in Endo mirrors the Japanese response to Benedict's thesis which was "initially accepted in a spirit of contrition after the war, but was later reversed into evidence for the greater humanity of Japanese society." Once this is understood, Pinnington suggests, Endo's early work can also be seen as less negative towards Japanese culture than has often been assumed. In Silence, for example, "Rodrigues, the priest who finally betrays the Church and apostasizes, actually first learns true humility through this action." It is only, Pinnington notes, "after he has abandoned the false absolutes of European culture that he can recognize the action of Christ in his own life, and begin to hear the voice of Christ."

On this basis, it would seem that, while Benedict's thesis cannot simply be accepted per se, its reception in Japan and the use made of it by Endo suggest that her thesis has much that can critique Western culture when understood through Japanese eyes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------     

 Toru Takemitsu - Rain Spell.