Music of the invisible: Messiaen's `Saint Francis'. (Music).

Saint Francois d'Assise, Olivier Messiaen's only operatic work, received its world premiere in Paris in 1983. It has rarely been performed since, partly because of the sheer scope and audacity of the project, but also because of its subject matter--faith itself. This fall, the San Francisco Opera, newly directed by Pamela Rosenberg, gave the opera its U.S. premiere in its namesake city. It was a brilliant gamble, possibly opening a new operatic door in America. This is an opera unlike any other--an unabashed paean to music, to nature, and to the mystical path to joy seen in the figure of Francis (sung movingly by baritone Willard White).

Messiaen, who was born in 1908 and died in 1992, was a devout Catholic. For many years he served as principal organist and director of music at L'Eglise de la Trinite in Paris. Much of his oeuvre is infused with his own mystical faith, nourished in the soils of a French Catholicism at once pious and completely modern. In the person of Saint Francis, Messiaen found the meeting place of many of the drives of his own soul: the poverty, humility, and suffering of Jesus; the revelation of God in nature, especially in the beauty and song of birds; and the pathway to God through the prayer of music itself.

Those looking for a comforting spiritual romanticism in Messiaen had better look elsewhere. As subtly conducted by Donald Runnicles, this music stands closer to Wagner in its lush magnitude and to the early Stravinsky in its shocking effect. The recognizable influences here are Debussy and Bartok. There isn't a trace of the more didactic religious evocations of recent "transcendental" composers such as Tavener, Part, or Gorecki, much less the abstraction of Adams. This is to religious music what Rilke is to religious poetry: It converts through both its sheer boldness and its inner allure. Dissonance emerges through highly structured chord strata and haunting tonalities and atonalities working with and then against one another. Hindu raga rhythms flow underneath. Rarely heard instruments, notably the ondes martenot, produce colorful, sonorous, and wild tones. Singing voices are introduced by a signature leitmotif, somewhat in the manner of Wagner.

The opera divides into eight scenes or tableaux. They translate not into plot, but into luminous occasions along Francis's road to God. An anxious tone is set right away with the words of Brother Leo (Johannes Kranzle): "I am afraid on the road." Francis himself moves fearfully along that road (here a spiraling platform), only to meet his worst fear, a leper. His angst is offset in the stunning third scene where he embraces and kisses the leper. The music pauses just long enough to mark Francis's conversion, signaled suddenly by an exuberant dance theme that later recurs in fragments, always in connection with the joy promised at the end of the road of fear and suffering.

Francis then meets a one-winged blue Angel (soprano Laura Aiken), a visitor from "far beyond" who makes tremendous noise and rattles the cages of more than one of the friars. She also has an affinity for Francis. As the Angel seeks him out, "Francois, Francois" becomes a plaintive refrain, a divine wooing. The rendering of a pure intimacy between Francis and the Angel--as Francis is transfixed by the music of heaven--is uncannily expressive of mystical union. (The day I attended happened to coincide with the Blue Angels' air show over San Francisco. At precisely this point in the opera, I could hear the muffled roar of the fighter jets overhead, a disturbing intrusion into the drama on stage, but the very irony of it giving the message of Messiaen's blue Angel all the more poignancy.) The Angel-Musician invites Francis: "Listen to this music that suspends life from the ladders of heaven; listen to the music of the Invisible."

And so we do. Messiaen's unique musical signature comes into full play in "The Sermon to the Birds," the sixth tableau. It is the synthesis of his personal vision: the spiritual apex of Francis's earthly life, the heavenly "music" to which he was attuned, and Messiaen's own love for bird song (he was a well-traveled ornithologist who recorded bird sounds). The longest scene in the opera, it may be the most transcendent. Human voices give way to a glittering cacophony of bird voices that become interlocking and shifting polytonal structures, punctuated by seemingly chance atonal effects, something like an aural rendering of a Jackson Pollock painting, in seventy-five staves! The effect is ethereal, the action on stage stops, and for a moment we are lifted out of the opera itself. At this point I simply closed my eyes.

The final two tableaux, representing the stigmata and the death of Francis, describe the arduous path of the Christian through suffering to the light of resurrection. The Cross is inscribed in the scenery itself, as a visible, three-dimensional scar on the floor of the stage. The stigmata arrives with eerie force: the Saint stands atop a platform that rises slowly above the stage. The entire musical burden is shifted to the massive chorus, while fierce sharp chords pronounce the onset of the bloody wounds. In the death scene, Francis is thrust toward the audience and over the orchestra, like a supine crucified Christ. Yet supernatural joy prevails. A pure white light shines on the Saint's body as the chorus sends him upward.

I was struck in San Francisco by the power of artistry to convey a conviction that cannot be expressed in the ordinary forms of the liturgy, much less by "official" theology. Few academic theologians could get away peddling in public the theology found in this opera (What? The path to God is becoming another Host in and through suffering?!) Yet somehow it stands, as a deeply modern yet stubbornly antimodern expression of what living Catholic faith boils down to. We are indebted to Messiaen for helping us see, and hear, that message. n

Paul Crowley, S.J., is visiting associate professor of theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.