Like all of Olivier Messiaen's solo vocal works with piano, the Chants de Terre et de Ciel (Songs of Earth and Sky) are intensely personal. With texts by the composer, they are suffused with his deep love for his wife, nicknamed "Mi" (for whom he had earlier written the Poèmes pour Mi), and for their infant son, Pascal. As usual, they are shaped as well by his profound Catholic convictions. They are also highly dramatic and intensely lyrical, combining his mastery of harmonic and timbral coloration with irregular rhythmic figurations to produce a cycle of songs for high voice and piano that virtually overpower the conventions of the genre. Notwithstanding the personal texts of the songs, the cycle is grand, almost monumental in scope, without the introspective, intimate atmosphere usually associated with the song cycle. A joyous mood is maintained throughout most of the cycle, which at times becomes ecstatic. And the cycle's large-scale conception places it squarely within the realm of repertoire for the concert hall, rather than for the salon.

The first work is a paean to the composer's wife, with melodic sequences built on descending semitones that later find an echo in "Danse du bébé-Pilule" at the words "était un lac tranquille." The rhythms are extremely irregular and in no way correspond to any syntactical considerations. "Antienne du silence," like "Résurrection," is highly melismatic; the former exists on a plane where time is elongated, almost arrested, while the robust exultation of the latter is a straightforward outburst of joy. The two songs dedicated to "my little Pascal" are testaments to a young father's delight in his offspring, somehow reminiscent of Coleridge's haunting coda to "Frost at Midnight": "A child, a little limber elf/ Singing, dancing to itself." The "sport" in this collection of otherwise happy expressions of domestic warmth and solid faith is number five, "Minuit pile et face." A kind of Witches' Sabbath, it evokes in its grotesque dance figures an anguished cry to all members of the Trinity; the dance rhythms die down finally into a strange lullaby in which the speaker wishes he were sleeping outside like a child, head cradled on his hands, wearing a little nightshirt. The ecstatic song of resurrection that follows this troubled nightmare dispels the atmosphere of insecurity with a great shout of conviction.

© Virginia Sublett, Rovi