Visions of Amen, by Stephen Schloesser

Apart from the exceptional figure of Johann Sebastian Bach, probably no Western composer of stature has been so thoroughly correlated with a nuanced Christian theology as has the French modernist Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992). But whereas many would read Bach’s extraordinary musical accomplishment as expressive of his Lutheran culture, Messiaen’s work appears to be not in solidarity with but in opposition to his own culture: the cynical secularism of the 20th-century avant-garde.

As we have learned from much probing scholarship since Messiaen’s death, this image of a Christian composer singled out from the pack is the one he carefully fashioned for himself. Ac­cording to his own narrative, Mes­siaen was not raised in the doctrines of the Catholic faith but rather was “born a believer,” destined on his path as a “musician of joy.” This unlikely Delphic persona—the pious church organist with a groundbreaking musical language motivated by the complexities of Cath­olic doctrine, from whose Parisian classroom nevertheless issued some of the most iconoclastic composers of secular modernism—is the Messiaen deconstructed by an impressive corpus of recent work.

That corpus has once again expanded with Stephen Schloesser’s Visions of Amen, at 594 pages the heftiest single-author study of the composer in English. Significantly, Schloesser’s field is not music but modern European history, which he teaches at Loyola University Chicago. His previous monograph on Parisian Catholic culture between the world wars (Jazz Age Catholicism, published in 2005) informs the newer work. A consideration of Messiaen’s person and music through the lens of a broad-based cultural history is both fitting and welcome.