After the fall of France in 1940, Messiaen was interned for nine months in the German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIII-A, where he composed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) for the four instruments available in the prison—piano, violin, cello and clarinet.

His many distinguished pupils included Iannis Xenakis, George Benjamin, Alexander Goehr, Pierre Boulez, Jacques Hétu, Tristan Murail, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Kurtág, and Yvonne Loriod, who became his second wife.

He travelled widely and wrote works inspired by diverse influences, including Japanese music, the landscape of Bryce Canyon in Utah, and the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.

[7] He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Anne Marie Antoinette Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Léon Joseph Messiaen [fr], a scholar and teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud[8] who also translated William Shakespeare's plays into French.

[9] Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, L'âme en bourgeon (The Budding Soul), the last chapter of Tandis que la terre tourne (As the Earth Turns), which address her unborn son.

His interests included the recent music of French composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, and he asked for opera vocal scores for Christmas presents.

[13] He also saved to buy scores, including Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, whose "beautiful Norwegian melodic lines with the taste of folk song ... gave me a love of melody".

Their marriage inspired him both to compose works for her to play (Thème et variations for violin and piano in the year they were married) and to write pieces to celebrate their domestic happiness, including the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi in 1936, which he orchestrated in 1937.

In response to a commission for a piece to accompany light-and-water shows on the Seine during the Paris Exposition, in 1937 Messiaen demonstrated his interest in using the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument, by composing Fêtes des belles eaux for an ensemble of six.

[33] He also wrote the extensive cycles La Nativité du Seigneur ("The Nativity of the Lord") and Les Corps glorieux ("The glorious bodies").

He wrote a trio for them, which he gradually incorporated into a more expansive new work, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps ("Quartet for the End of Time").

[39] Shortly after his release from Görlitz in May 1941 in large part due to the persuasions of his friend and teacher Marcel Dupré, Messiaen, who was now a household name, was appointed a professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught until retiring in 1978.

[46] Two years after Visions de l'Amen, Messiaen composed the song cycle Harawi, the first of three works inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde.

While he had long been fascinated by birdsong, and birds had made appearances in several of his earlier works (for example La Nativité, Quatuor and Vingt regards), the flute piece was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.

[56] From this period onward, Messiaen incorporated birdsong into his compositions and composed several works for which birds provide both the title and subject matter (for example the collection of 13 piano pieces Catalogue d'oiseaux completed in 1958, and La fauvette des jardins of 1971).

[62] Works performed included Réveil des oiseaux, Chronochromie (commissioned for the 1960 festival), and Couleurs de la cité céleste.

[63] Another work of this period, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, was commissioned as a commemoration of the dead of the two World Wars and was performed first semi-privately in the Sainte-Chapelle, then publicly in Chartres Cathedral with Charles de Gaulle in the audience.

Reluctant to take on such a major project, he was persuaded by French president Georges Pompidou to accept the commission and began work on Saint-François d'Assise in 1975 after two years of preparation.

[77] Although in considerable pain near the end of his life (requiring repeated surgery on his back),[78] he was able to fulfil a commission from the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Éclairs sur l'au-delà..., which premièred six months after his death.

[79] On going through his papers, Loriod discovered that, in the last months of his life, he had been composing a concerto for four musicians he felt particularly grateful to: herself, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the oboist Heinz Holliger and the flautist Catherine Cantin[80] (hence the title Concert à quatre).

This is partly due to the symmetries of his technique—for instance the modes of limited transposition do not admit the conventional cadences found in western classical music.

[86] Messiaen continually evolved new composition techniques, always integrating them into his existing musical style; his final works still retain the use of modes of limited transposition.

But very few of these works lack new technical ideas—simple examples being the introduction of communicable language in Meditations, the invention of a new percussion instrument (the geophone) for Des canyons aux etoiles..., and the freedom from any synchronisation with the main pulse of individual parts in certain birdsong episodes of St. François d'Assise.

Although a considerable pianist himself, he was undoubtedly assisted by Loriod's formidable technique and ability to convey complex rhythms and rhythmic combinations; in his piano writing from Visions de l'Amen onward he had her in mind.

[93] Messiaen was further influenced by Surrealism, as seen in the titles of some of the piano Préludes (Un reflet dans le vent..., "A reflection in the wind")[94] and in some of the imagery of his poetry (he published poems as prefaces to certain works, for example Les offrandes oubliées).

He sometimes combined rhythms with harmonic sequences in such a way that, if the process were repeated indefinitely, the music would eventually run through all possible permutations and return to its starting point.

The pieces are not simple transcriptions; even the works with purely bird-inspired titles, such as Catalogue d'oiseaux and Fauvette des jardins, are tone poems evoking the landscape, its colours and atmosphere.

He expressed annoyance at the historical importance given to one of these works, Mode de valeurs et d'intensités, by musicologists intent on crediting him with the invention of "total serialism".

He first used this technique in his Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité for organ; where the "alphabet" includes motifs for the concepts to have, to be and God, while the sentences encoded feature sections from the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.