Apparition De L’Eglise Eternelle: Dissonance and the Eternal Church

In 1932 a twenty-four-year-old Olivier Messiaen wrote a piece that received two of the strongest sentiments of which mankind is capable—love and hate. Easily one of the only pieces that causes some people to sigh and collapse with joy and others to wail in anguish, Messiaen’s Apparition De L’Eglise Eternelle is indisputably one of the finest works for organ that has come out of France within the past hundred years.

Apparition stands aside from Messiaen’s other works, being unlike his later works in style and overall tone. But the most important thing about Apparition is that it crosses boundaries that other music…can’t.

Many musicians have acknowledged the organ as being the most magnificent—more or less. Mozart called it ‘The King of Instruments’. Berlioz called it ‘The Pope of Instruments’. Most, if not all, classical composers played the organ. So what is it that this fantastic instrument has that draws people to it so?

The organ has the incredible ability to either snare someone in its grasp, or repel someone so viciously that they dislike the very thought of it. The latter tends to happen when an individual hears the organ being played incorrectly, thereby resulting in a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare.

Apparition exemplifies the organ in its highest form, its most glorious form—one of the heights of organ music. Yet some people continue to hate it. Why is that?

The first possibility is that Apparition begins with heavy, heavy dissonance. Upon hearing it the first time, I found it actually painful to listen to—and then to my surprise—it resolved to a partial first inversion of a C major chord. It returned to the opening chord, and resolves to fifth. It continues on in this way, and changes in the 12th measure, continuing the dissonance—but by this point, it ceases to be a shock. It progresses onward, and resolves. By the end of the 17th measure, it has resolved altogether to a fifth, giving a restful, peaceful sound. And then—
There comes the dissonance again!

It is not surprising, nor even slightly offensive, that many people find the initial dissonance painful. But the resolutions make the pain worthwhile—such curious, innate beauty that it compensates, and somehow feels very much like an elaborate story—something standing through the darkest hours to grace the earth, triumphing in glory, surviving when nothing else can, a single candle remaining lit when other lights are smothered and put out—like the Eternal Church.

There are major chord sprinkled throughout—rising climaxes, so gloriously triumphant, filled with such power and strength that it almost makes one cry. They are preceded by dissonances that seem to weep and burn and nearly die and are sometimes to filled with tragedy that it brings tears to your eyes—and when the climax comes, it makes it all the more glorious.

Like I said, the dissonance begins as being painful, even bordering on ugly. But one forgets that…which is what Apparition does, it cries, weeps, burns, forgets, laughs, rests, triumphs…and even the dissonance is beautiful now. Any wincing that occurs at the half-step clashes will vanish; there is no horror in it anymore. There is only resplendent, everlasting, true glory, true beauty, unlike anything that the world could possibly know. While it is true that people can learn to love the most horrific of things if they try hard enough, it never happens like—this.

So why is it that Apparition, which some people find so intoxicating, torments other people like the very fires of Hell?

We read often, in the Bible, of the Angels singing, and almost everywhere you turn music has been used as a higher form of expression, especially in worship, spanning not only the Catholic faith but other cultures as well. What is this connection—music with worship?

It is hardly any secret that music can move people to tears. Such a thing, I am told, happens every time that newly wed couples hear All I Ask Of You, though I’ve cried at more horrific sounds as well (imagine, if you can, someone trying to sing descant who oughtn’t have ever been allowed outside of the parlor-lounge music division). A famous director once said that, in musicals, people sing when the emotion is too great to be explained with speech—following it with, of course, ordinary people don’t burst out into song (a statement that I find most unreasonable)—but there’s something more than that. Music is so terribly interconnected with man’s emotions, with the very soul, that, when administered just so, it causes an overwhelming surge of—something—and touches one’s heart and mind in a way otherwise unreachable.
Perhaps it would be a good time to mention some of the people who had such a hard time with Apparition. Several were well-known atheists, others Christians in direct opposition to the Church's teachings.

Oh, of course there were people who disliked Apparition that were perfectly pleasant. There’s always going to be people who will disagree. But the fact that such an overwhelming majority of people that were not exactly friends with the Church hated it…

I am so interconnected with my faith that it is a part of me. In Apparition I see the very story of the Church—how it survived impossible situations, how it stands so strongly in spite of the fallibility of its members, how it triumphs over all, and how after two thousand years we haven’t broken it down. Apparition is an extension of that—it reaches not only to my heart and mind, but into my soul, in the most literal sense. It puts to sound what words could never describe, what could never be expressed in any other way. In many ways, Music is the Angels’ art. In Apparition is something otherworldly, something that is not solely on the plane of this mortal earth. In Apparition, I can hear the sum of everything I believe and love. In Apparition, a piece that extends beyond the physical, I hear God.