L'Ange aux parfums [7:53

Le Banquet céleste

Apparition de l'Eglise éternelle

Les Corps glorieux

Messiaen spent the summer of 1928 at the home of his aunts at Fuligny, a village in the Aube. While there, he composed an orchestral work as a student exercise for his teacher Paul Dukas which he later called Le Banquet eucharistique, though its one and only performance was given by a student orchestra at the Paris Conservatoire on 22 January 1930 with the title Le Banquet céleste (a concert where Messiaen's work was on the same programme as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony). Messiaen was unhappy with the piece, describing it as 'very long' and 'neither very well scored nor very well constructed', and he also 'found it bombastic, in other words, not good'. According to his own recollections, it was during the same summer holiday that he produced a much shorter version, rewritten for organ, derived from the best section of the orchestral work. The result was Le Banquet céleste, a slow meditation on the 'Heavenly Banquet', the Eucharist. In 1936 Messiaen included a succinct commentary on his earliest surviving organ work in a letter to Felix Aprahamian: '“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood will dwell in me and I in him” (Gospel according to St John). The prayer of a communicant to Jesus present in him through the Eucharist.'

Messiaen had been a member of Marcel Dupré's preparatory organ class for only a year when he wrote Le Banquet céleste, and even though he made astonishingly rapid progress on the instrument, he was still something of a novice. Dupré later recalled their first meeting:

He joined my class in October 1927. When he came out to Meudon for the first time (he was nineteen), he sat stupefied in front of the manuals of my organ. He had never seen an organ console before. After an hour of explanations and demonstrations, I gave him the Bach C minor Fantasia to learn. He came back a week later and played it to me by heart, perfectly; an astonishing feat! In class he didn't fidget, but seemed to me to be rather distracted. I confided this to his father, an English teacher at the Lycée Charlemagne, who replied: 'I've had hundreds of children pass through my hands, but Olivier is the only one I've completely failed to understand. All I can say is that, at table, he interrupts every conversation to talk about you.'

There was an immediate meeting of minds between Dupré and the young Messiaen, and they became lifelong friends. The May exams for the organ class in 1928 included a composition for organ based on a given theme. Messiaen later included a set of Variations écossaises for organ (1928) in his list of works, and one of the themes set that year was the Scottish folk-song 'Comin' through the rye'. Mind-boggling as it may seem, this is almost certainly the melody on which Messiaen's variations were based: his first attempt to write for the organ, now lost.

Messiaen's appointment as titulaire of the Trinité in September 1931 was not without complications. Two factors could have counted against him: his age (he was only twentytwo) and his earlier track-record as a deputy for the ailing incumbent, Charles Quef, when he had occasionally upset parishioners with the boldness of his improvisations (he had deputised regularly at the Trinité since autumn 1929). Both issues were resolved in a series of letters to the Parish Priest from Messiaen's supporters, who included some very distinguished names: CharlesMarie Widor (who had taught Messiaen composition at the Conservatoire in 1926-7), André Marchal (titulaire of Saint-Germaindes-Prés, who had asked his own students to stand aside so that Messiaen's appointment could proceed smoothly), Charles Tournemire (for whom Messiaen had occasionally deputised at SainteClotilde), and Marcel Dupré, whose touchingly whole-hearted support – not least in reassuring the church's authorities about the maturity of his protégé – was crucial to the appointment being made. Positions of this kind came up rarely in large Parisian churches – Dupré himself was not appointed titulaire at Saint-Sulpice until 1934, having served as Widor's assistant there for twentyeight years – so Messiaen's nomination was all the more remarkable.

Messiaen's first recital at the Trinité had been on 20 February 1930, when he gave a concert for Les Amis de l'Orgue which included the première of the Diptyque – an occasion which also marked his concert début in Paris. After becoming titulaire in September 1931, the first work he composed for the Trinité organ was Apparition de l'Eglise éternelle, described by him in 1936 (in the same letter to Aprahamian that included the note on Le Banquet céleste) as: 'An enormous and granite-like crescendo. It appears and then disappears. The pedals mark the hammerblows of Grace that built the cosmos.'

It is uncertain when the work was first played in public. It was composed during 1932, the year in which he was married to the composer and violinist Claire Delbos (22 June) – an occasion attended by at least one fellow-pupil from Dupré's class, Jean Langlais. It is likely that Messiaen played