Force et Agilité des Corps glorieux [3:45

June 1941 he wrote to Claire that he had 'not yet tried out Les Corps glorieux at the Trinité', but a few weeks later, on 22 July, he took his Conservatoire pupils to the Trinité for a complete private performance while he was in the process of adding fingering, pedalling and registrations for the work's publication.

It was to be more than two years before the complete work was heard in public, but on 28 December 1941, Messiaen gave a recital at the Palais de Chaillot which included two movements from the new cycle: 'Joie et clarté des corps glorieux' and 'Combat de la mort et de la vie'; a review by Norbert Dufourcq appeared in L'Information musicale:

It is the sign of a great artist, coupled with a great spirit, that he is no slave to procedures. […] In the second part of the concert, the composer presented and championed his own works […] two pieces receiving their first performances, taken from a collection entitled Les Corps glorieux. […] It is through his continual experiments into the opposition of ideas and of the clash of different moods that Olivier Messiaen attains the power to move us. In this respect, no musical instrument can serve him better than his own, which he plays with true virtuosity.

In June 1942, despite chronic wartime paper-shortages, two major new Messiaen works appeared in print: the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps from Durand, and Les Corps glorieux from Leduc. Just as he had asked friends to give the first performance of La Nativité, he evidently intended to do something similar for his new organ work, noting in November 1942: 'Litaize and Langlais will be giving the concert at the [Palais de] Chaillot after Duruflé. Offer them the first performance of Les Corps glorieux, and write to [Noëlie] Pierront about the same work for the Trinité.' These plans came to nothing, and the first complete public performance took place in a series of recitals which Messiaen himself gave at the Trinité in November 1943. During three early evening concerts in a freezing cold church, Messiaen played virtually all of his organ works along with L'Offrande à Marie, a new piece by his wife Claire, who was starting to show early signs of the mental illness that was to cast a blight over her last years (she died in 1959). The first recital took place on 15 November and included Les Corps glorieux and Apparition de l'Eglise éternelle. On 17 November Messiaen played Claire's new work, framing it with 'Transports de joie' (the only movement from L'Ascension which was originally conceived for organ) and Le Banquet céleste. The final programme, on 19 November, was a complete performance of La Nativité. Described by its composer as 'a pendant to La Nativité du Seigneur', Les Corps glorieux, subtitled 'Sept Visions brèves de la Vie des Ressuscités' ('Seven short Visions of the Life of the Resurrected') was the most daring and original of Messiaen's organ works up to that time, ranging from the bold austerity of a single-line 'monodie' of the opening, to the considerable complexity –structural and musical – of the vast central movement, 'Combat de la mort et de la vie'. In an interview published in 1954, Francis Poulenc had this to say about Messiaen's organ music:

I admire it deeply, since Messiaen has put the best of himself into it. La Nativité and Les Corps glorieux contain passages of genius. If I bristle (above all from a literary point of view) when Messiaen invents a pseudo-hindu language mixed with outdated symbolism […] it gives me pleasure to salute, in his organ music, the very great musician that he undoubtedly is. © 2005 Nigel Simone Nigel Simeone is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Sheffield. His latest book is Messiaen (written with Peter Hill), the first full-length biography of the composer, which draws extensively on Messiaen's own diaries and papers. It was published by Yale University Press in September 2005.

Thanks to Geraint Watkins and Ben Giddens.