“I  don’t belong to my era,” cried Olivier Messiaen in 1979, but he did, as we all do, whether he liked it or not. During his lifetime, biographers tended to take him at his own estimation. The entry in the Grove Dictionary opens with a declar­ation that “He was a musician apart” and he did everything he could to maintain the illusion during his lifetime, inventing history and hiding his plans from everyone. Stephen Schloesser is one of the first writers in English to use an authoritative French biography of Messiaen’s mother, the poet Cécile Sauvage, to unravel the complex theological and literary influences on a young man whose love of words prefigured a literary rather than a musical career: the orthodox Catholicism of his father, the