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On 15 April 1959, a small, dark-haired, bespectacled woman performed a superhuman feat of piano virtuosity.

The venue was Paris's Salle Gaveau and the pianist was the dazzlingly talented Yvonne Loriod. The music was the first complete performance of the Catalogue d'oiseaux ("Catalogue of birds") by Olivier Messiaen. The completed piece had 13 movements, each one painting a sound picture of a different bird, and its preface in the score gave the names of the birds and their habitat. Even Loriod’s black and gold dress was no accident: the second movement was dedicated to the Golden Oriole, a golden bird with black wings whose name, in French, is the Loriot.

Yvonne Loriod had been a student of Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, in a class that was also attended by Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and many other figures of the post-war avant-garde. She was talented enough to tear through the fiendishly difficult piano music that they wrote, including Boulez’s notorious Second Piano Sonata. But it was with the music of Messiaen that Loriod became synonymous. Since they had met in the early 1940s, Messiaen had barely written a piece that wasn't centred on her pianism. Catalogue d'oiseaux was his most ambitious to date.

Birdsong had been an obsession of Messiaen’s since childhood. Birdsong appears early on in his music, but it was only in the 1950s that it became a major structural element. Messiaen was often photographed in fields or mountains, notebook in hand, writing down the songs of the birds. "But let there be no mistake!" he said of the Catalogue, "The birds alone are great artists. It is they who are the real composers of these pieces." Birdsong freed Messiaen and gave him a new music - one not tied to the past nor to the human-led systems that his students had been grappling with. He was a deeply religious man; this music must have seemed to come directly from God.

One of the concert's reviewers seemed to sense this on that night in 1959. "Yvonne, with her amazingly accurate fingers, chatters, chirps, strokes and teases the piano from its twittering heights down to its booming depths of terror," she wrote, "and gives us a film of unknown landscapes from which all human presence is firmly excluded.’

But there was a very human tragedy playing out at the time of this concert. At around the time Loriod and Messiaen first met, Messiaen’s wife was showing the first signs of what was to become a long, cruel illness. Messiaen was the principal carer for his wife, Claire, and their son. Gradually, he became close to the much younger Loriod, depending on her for practical and emotional support.

Their shared Catholic faith meant that neither Loriod and Messiaen could acknowledge their growing love - but it is more than evident in the colourful, ecstatic, dazzling outpouring of music that Messiaen wrote for her, nowhere more so than in her namesake, the Loriot movement of the Catalogue. Just one week after the premiere of the Catalogue d'oiseaux, Claire died in a nursing home. Messiaen and Yvonne were married two years later.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by Â鶹Éç Radio 3’s Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a Â鶹Éç season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an excerpt from a recording made by Yvonne Loriod in 1970-1973.

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