David Schiff [The Nation, 25 January 2006]
As composer, organist, teacher and theorist, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was the most influential European musician of the second half of the twentieth century–and yet he was in many ways far removed from his time and place. His religious beliefs were those of a pious medieval Catholic; his musical style ignored just about everything that had happened in European music between the troubadours and Wagner.