Messiaen was born in Avignon; his father taught English, his
mother was a poet. During the First World War the family moved
to Grenoble in the French Alps – a landscape to which Messiaen
would constantly return throughout his life in order to compose.
The other constant in his life was a deep Catholic faith, which
he found early and which never left him. In 1919 Messiaen
entered the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included
Marcel Dupré (organ and improvisation) and Paul Dukas
(composition). There he discovered the key elements of his
composing technique: Indian rhythmic cycles, and ‘modes of
limited transposition’ (exotic scales constructed differently
from the traditional Western major and minor ones). Le banquet
céleste (1928) for organ, a set of piano Préludes (1928–9) and
the orchestral Les offrandes oubliées (1930) already show the
trademark features of Messiaen’s mature style: slow meditation
in richly refracted chord-sequences (as an image of eternity);
bounding dances of despair or joy; and ir