150th anniversary of his birth, Messager was the subject of a large exhibition at the Musée des musiques populaires de Montluçon, recounting his biography and illustrating his works in the various genres. Among the comité d'honneur of the exhibition were the composer's three grandchildren, and the singers Susan Graham, Dame Felicity Lott and Mady Mesplé, the conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, John Nelson and Michel Plasson, and the director Jérôme Savary. Music In his 1991 study of Messager, John Wagstaff writes that the composer's music is notable for its fine orchestration, easy-flowing melody, and skilfully written music, dance-like in character. Unlike his teacher Fauré, Messager enjoyed orchestrating. He said that musical ideas came to him "already clothed in the appropriate instrumental shades", and after the concentrated effort of composing his scores he found it relaxing to work on "the handling of instruments, the balancing of different sonorities, the grouping of colours and the structuring of effects". He remarked that composers who had their music orchestrated by assistants presumably did not care if their helpers lacked "that indefinable sixth sense which would indicate the right combination of sonorities to carry out the original intentions of the composer". To Messager, passages often depended for their significance or flavour on the orchestral writing alone. Gervase Hughes, in a study of French opérette, comments that Messager's only technical defect was "one all too common to many composers of operetta – too close an adherence to repetitive rhythmic figures and four-bar rigidity", although such was Messager's "innate artistry that criticism on that score would be academic pedantry". One of the composer's distinguishing characteristics was a liking for chromaticism; this appealed to a younger generation of composers. His "Eh que ne parliez-vous?", from La Basoche, was quoted note-for-note by Poulenc in Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Although Messager greatly admired Wagner, and was a celebrated conductor of his music, he distanced himself from Wagnerian influences in his own compositions. In Madame Chrysanthème he made use of leitmotifs, and included other references to Wagner, but such examples are rare in his works. Unlike some older contemporaries such as Saint-Saëns and Massenet, Messager remained open to new ideas and idioms throughout his life, and his style evolved to match the spirit of the times. His biographer and former pupil Henry Février commented that from classic opéras comiques, such as La Basoche, Messager's later works, such as Les P'tites Michu