Advent is a perplexing challenge in our resolutely mercantile culture, which insists that Christmas begin no later than the day after Hallowe’en and end with a thud on the morning of December 26th, when all the department store window displays will be dismantled to make way for goods related to New Year’s Eve. (Or are there any department store displays any more, given the progressive triumph of on-line retail?)

Amid the inescapable flourish of Christmas music, some of it sappy at best, I find myself hankering for something that can bridge the gap between the frenzy around me and the kind of Advent that might actually prepare me for Christmas. Not that I want to stop my ears every time I hear a carol on broadcast or a bit of Handel’s Messiah. There’s a lot of tremendous music associated with Christmastide and never enough time during the Twelve Days to enjoy it all—though you’ll have to do all your own programming to hear any of it during Christmas itself, given that it will have disappeared from all public media at midnight on the 25th, even before than the Christmas window displays.

(Yes, call me a grump if you like. On this subject I am.)

So here I am in Advent, wanting to look toward Christmas without finding myself awash in jollity just yet. As it happens, I’m also having to spend a while on my back every day, giving my battered knees a rest. My companion is my IPod, and I’ve been hearing some things that I’ve neglected the last few years. It’s been particularly wonderful to listen again to Olivier Messiaen’s wonderful piano cycle Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus (Twenty Gazes at the Infant Jesus)—and really to listen instead of trying to finish up Christmas cards or wrap presents at the same time. (I happily recommend Håkon Austbø’s excellent recording on Naxos.)

There’s nothing remotely sentimental about this music. Some might say that there’s not much music, either. But Messiaen is one of the few composers of his generation who seldom make me feel that way. And if there’s no sentimentality, there’s certainly no lack of emotion—emotion that springs directly out of Messiaen’s deep involvement with both the story and the theology of the Nativity. 

For instance, “The Gaze of the Virgin” is framed by moments of tenderness, but interrupted by music of deep distress, even violence, which I hear as embodying her sorrow and horror for what she knows lies ahead. “The Gazes of the Stars” combines high, shimmering notes that might almost seem too conventional a depiction of starlight for someone like Messiaen except that it never resolves into anything merely pretty. It remains, instead, both beautiful and remote. And, with it come powerful rumblings of bass—because stars are not just pretty, twinkly things, but mighty beings, in terms of myth and of physics alike.

I won’t try to put all twenty pieces into words. In fact, I feel the inadequacy of my efforts to do any of that here. But I do want to mention “The Virgin’s First Communion.” It’s an odd title, given that “first communion” awakens images of young children in a solemn rite of passage centuries after the earthly life of Jesus. To my own mind it also prompts an image of the eyes of mother and child locked on each other in that ineffable exchange that welcomes the newcomer into the human family. At the same time, the piece includes passages of immense power, not threatening as in the “The Glance of the Virgin,” but passing beyond human into divine communion. Mystical experience? I don’t know what Messiaen would have said, but I think so. And it speaks very strongly of the true, deep mystery we are expecting to meet yet again on the Feast of the Nativity—meeting with a God who draws near to us, even becomes one of us, without relinquishing any of the infinite depth and power of divine love.

Oh, and if Messiaen sounds a bit daunting, another wonderful, and much briefer work that I love for its success in maintaining both warmth and spiritual humility in the presence of the wonder of Christmas:  Francis Poulenc’s brief “Four Motets for the Season of Noel.”