Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité
Open-knowledge reference entry
Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité (French: "Meditations on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity") is a suite for organ by Olivier Messiaen. The Méditations were composed from 1967 to 1969 at Messiaen's house in Pétichet.
The first private performance of the piece took place in Paris on November 8, 1971, at the Sainte-Trinité. Messiaen gave the first public performance on March 20, 1972, at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
Structure
The work comprises nine untitled meditations ranging from 3 to 10 minutes long each. A complete performance of the whole composition is around 75 minutes long. Prior to each movement, Messiaen describes the musical content and its symbolism.
Meditation No. 1
The first piece presented in this composition is sometimes called "Le Père des étoiles" (The Father of Stars). It is long and varied, marked Lent at the beginning of the piece. Its structure can be broken down as follows:
Theme: The main melodic line presented is called "le Père des étoiles", played fff and legato, with both hands in unison.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité” is open-knowledge reference entry. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Méditations, Mystère and Sainte, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3332678. VIAF identifies the subject as 178221170. The Library of Congress control number is n83040077. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1969, 1971 and 1972.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.