In many ways, Harawi occupies a special place in the oeuvre of Olivier Messiaen. On the one hand, it places extreme demands on the two performers, often not in a purely technical sense, but even more in a spiritual, psychological sense. At the same time, to highlight the work’s humanly testing difficulty is to miss the point. The other aspect of the piece’s uniqueness is the composer’s style, which is a mixture of surrealism and sacredness, and which makes his musical language always unique and instantly recognisable. And although Messiaen always represents a kind of transcendence, his compositional thinking is, in contrast, finitely organised. The aforementioned surreal flavour also stems from the seemingly irreconcilable nature of this totally organised ‘chaos’ and the sound of sacral rapture. (NB! The composer intends the sixth – Répétition planétaire – movement to give a vision of the chaos of the universe.)

The Harawi (‘yarawi’, a characteristic genre of Peruvian folk poetry, originally related to tragedy) was, not surprisingly, written by Messiaen himself. In addition to the above, Messiaen, who boasted literary ancestry, was obviously keen to create a kind of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (synthesis of the arts) – in which he was ‘responsible’ for every detail of his work, including not only the music but also the text, which is written in French, but also
makes extensive use of Kechuan idioms, which are included for their particular sound. These lyrics can therefore hardly be called song lyrics in the traditional sense, but rather metaphorical dream descriptions, or ‘celestial suggestions’ if you like, whose meaning lies precisely in their artistic ambiguity. These magical texts project the often ‘too noisy loneliness’ of the human psyche. They express in a symbolic-surrealistic voice all that cannot be expressed in words. In this respect, one of the most direct sources of inspiration for the work was the oil painting ‘Seeing is Believing (L’Ile Invisible)’ by the English surrealist painter Sir Roland Penrose.

Anna Molnár – Mezzo-soprano
László Borbély – Steinway Model D Concert Grand Piano, Hamburg