Composed in the summer of 1945, Olivier Messiaen's Harawi (Chant d'amour et de mort) is both the final member of one trilogy of pieces and the founding member of another. It arrives as the last of Messiaen's three large song cycles, and while its predecessors—Poèmes pour Mi from 1936, and Chants de terre et ciel from two years later—both dealt with deeply religious themes, Harawi is almost deliriously sensual in nature. As its subtitle suggests ("Song of Love and Death"), Harawi takes as its subject "a love that is fatal, irresistible, and which, as a rule, leads to death." This puts the work at the head of a trio of works that Messiaen referred to as his "three Tristans": Harawi (for "dramatic soprano" and piano), the Turangalîla-Symphonie (for orchestra) from 1948, and the Cinq Rechants (for 12-voice a cappella ensemble) from the same year. Inspired by Béclard d'Harcourt's writings on Andean folklore, and fascinated by the seemingly archetypal universality of the "love-death" theme, Messiaen took his title from a Peruvian dialectical word meaning "a love song in which the lover dies." This idea resonates with numerous works throughout the history of western music-and in fact, Cinq Rechants would later throw several of these ideas together: allusions to Tristan and Isolde, Merlin and Vivien, and Orpheus and Euridice, are set to primitive-sounding chants and faintly Peruvian melodies.

The twelve texts that comprise Harawi, all written by the composer himself, are in a highly surrealistic French that defies accurate translation; this again presages Cinq Rechants, in which similarly surreal images in intelligible French are juxtaposed with purely phonetic nonsense syllables. The symbols utilized in the text are highly evocative, and the musical setting matches nuance for nuance.

The first poem, "La ville qui dormait, toi" ("You, the city that slept"), presents the woman—perhaps Isolde lying on the bank next to her lover in the second act of Wagner's Tristan?—as a city sleeping on a hill. She transforms in the second poem into a green dove, a Mayan symbol for love. As one would expect, here Messiaen's ornithological tendencies are reflected in the recurring birdcall figures in the piano accompaniment. This imagery will return later in the eighth song, "Syllables," in which a variety of musical hues and textures accompany the vivid descriptions of the lover as a colorful bird and heavenly flower. The insistent repetitions of the word "pia" recall an ancient Incan legend in which a prince is saved by a band of chattering apes.

The death of the Peruvian Isolde, Piroutcha, is suggested in the fourth poem, "L'amour de Pirouchta," and apparently sealed ritualistically in the incantational "répétition planétaire" and the subsequent "adieu"; as the cycle progresses and transcends the moment of death, the imagery becomes more and more fantastical. In "l'escalier redit, gestes du soleil," the lovers ascend a stairway to heaven. According to the composer, the subsequent poem, "amour oiseau d'etoile," was inspired by a painting by Sir Roland Penrose entitled "Seeing is Believing." The painting is a kind of hallucinatory nocturne depicting a woman's head floating upside-down above a town, while the viewer's hand reaches from below towards the apparition; Messiaen's musical response to this image is perhaps the most poignant and focused song in the cycle. The final song, "dans le noir," ends with the first line of the cycle, suggesting that the city on the hill sleeps still, and dreams.

© Jeremy Grimshaw, All Music Guide