It is a rare YouTube find, uploaded a few years ago: in 1965 the directors Luc Ferrari and Gérard Patris, together with the composer and engineer Pierre Schaeffer, met Olivier Messiaen to document the genesis of his orchestral work Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, composed one year earlier.

Their documentary, made by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales de la Radio-Télévision Française (RTF) directed by Schaeffer, is part of the series Les Grandes Répétitions, today considered an iconic programme by contemporary music lovers, a documentary that has become accessible again thanks to restoration work done by the INA, the French National Audiovisual Institute. The opening credits state: “These images were filmed during the general rehearsal and retrace the fine-tuning of the musical performance”.

Messiaen and Schaeffer had known each other since 1936, during the time of the Jeune France group of musicians; indeed, from the 1950s onwards Messiaen regularly took part in the radio programme Studio du club d’essai, a platform for the musique concrète, the contemporary experimental music movement created by Schaeffer.

In 1963, André Malraux, then Minister of State for Cultural Affairs (1959-1969), was looking for a musical work to officially commemorate the dead of the two World Wars. In 1964, he approached Messiaen: Ex exspecto was to be his second commission from the French government after the Seven Haikai composed a few years earlier, a composition that would make him famous among the French public at large.

Malraux asked him for a “simple, solemn and very strong” work to be performed either at Notre Dame de Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle or Chartres Cathedral, for the 50th anniversary of the Great War in 1964. The composer at first thought of a relatively conventional form such as a requiem, but then decided to write a piece for orchestra with woodwind, brass and percussion.

Messiaen took advantage of his usual summer vacation stay at his holiday home in Saint-Théoffrey near Lake Petichet in the Dauphiné region (Isère) to devote himself to the composition of Ex exspecto. Fundamentally and deeply inspired by nature he had resumed his habit of long walks in the surrounding alpine mountains, accompanied by Yvonne Loriod: their Sunday excursions in August 1964 took them to the village of La Grave, to its spectacular glacier, La Meije, and to Mont Thabor (Hautes Alpes).

Instead of the national commemoration of the centenary of the Great War, an idea that Malraux had abandoned in the meantime, there were two official performances of Ex exspecto. The premiere took place on the eve of the commemorations of the Allied Victory in Europe Day of 8 May 1965 at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. This event, a non-public performance, was broadcast on the radio; the second, a public concert, took place “on 20 June 1965 in Chartres Cathedral in the presence of General de Gaulle”, as state the final credits of the documentary.

In a letter to Malraux in 1964, the composer wrote that the “nobility of the subject requires a powerful and majestic orchestration, appropriate for a cathedral but also for the open air”, a reference to the two fundamental themes of Messiaen’s artistic creation: nature and his Catholic faith.

In the documentary Messiaen comments, “Since I am fortunate enough to be a Catholic and to be a believer, to be a Christian and not to believe so much in death and war, well, I looked at it from a higher perspective and wrote a work on the resurrection of the dead which is divided into five pieces, each of these pieces commenting on a text from Holy Scripture having to do with the resurrection of the dead and the life of the glorious bodies which will follow this resurrection.”

The film begins with the impressive framing of the façade of Chartres Cathedral in low angle, accompanied by the monumental opening notes of the Ex exspecto. The camera slowly approaches the tympanum of the central portal, below which only the deep black behind the open doors is visible. The particular perspective of the low angle emphasises the austerity and severity of this overwhelming religious architecture and forces the viewer’s attention towards the dominance of the sacred.

At first sight it is surprising that Gérard Patris, the director of the documentary, chose to film exclusively in black and white, given the importance of colour for Olivier Messiaen. According to the latter, musical sounds give rise to concrete colours. Deeply impressed by the first performance in the Sainte-Chapelle, he said that the effect of the coloured light produced by the medieval stained glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle was a perfect match for the sounds of Ex exspecto.

Messiaen explains that the theme is repeated by “complexes of sounds which are played by six horns and each note of the theme is provided with a new complex of sounds as a new colour”. He goes on to say that “this will be constant throughout the work and goes quite well with the principle of the stained glass window since we are in a cathedral.” He adds that the music “consists of colouring the characters in a symbolic way and also in such a way as to produce a certain dazzle on the eye and to arouse with a thousand colours a single colour”.

In this very complex passage of the documentary he develops the phenomenon of synaesthesia, i.e. the ability to perceive more than one bodily sense following a single stimulus. For him, each musical sound has a specific colour. Messiaen evoked this conviction throughout his career, well aware that the vast majority of his listeners were unable to sense it.

He elaborates this theme in detail in the seventh volume of his “Traité de Rythme, de Couleur et d’Ornithologie”, published posthumously in 2005. On YouTube there is a fragment of one of his lectures at the Conservatoire where he associates chords from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with specific colours.

It is likely that Schaeffer chose monochromatic austerity because of the technical impossibility of adequately rendering colours with the film equipment available at the time. Filming in colour was a very expensive artistic option and required much more sophisticated and extensive lighting, impractical in a cathedral.

Black and white film brings out the idea of power, death, fear, but has nothing to do with the celestial illumination to which Messiaen refers in his work. The austere images created by the shot of the pillars, vaults and buttresses rather evoke the theme of the consequences of war, the abyss of darkness. The human suffering is mainly translated by exploring in close-up some faces of medieval statues of the exterior of the cathedral, damaged by the passage of time.

A few technical remarks: for the architectural shots the documentary uses fixed cameras; yet for a good part of the rehearsal shots portable cameras are used, a considerable technical and artistic challenge given the equipment available at the time, long before the rise of gimbals as camera stabilisers. The editing, done by Juliette Bort, falls somehow short of expectations: some of the musical sequences are out of sync with the parade of lithic faces. It is only towards the end of the documentary that the editing finds its rhythm.

The finale, written as “a choir of a thousand voices”, played only by the orchestra, is associated, thanks to a close-up of the mandorla, with the Virgin represented in the centre of the north rose window. Instead of uniting the powerful music with the whole of the stained glass window, the last images return to the orchestra and the Strasbourg percussion group, finally settling on the conductor, Serge Baudo, the earthly executor of a deeply spiritual work.

A must-see.