Quartet for the End of Time
“Everyone listened reverently, with an almost religious respect, including those who were perhaps hearing chamber music
for the first time. It was ‘miraculous.’”
~The cellist’s recollection concerning the Quartet’s premier
Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) was premiered under unconventional circumstances, at a WWII POW camp in Görlitz, Germany known as Stalag VIII-A. Messiaen had been drafted into French military service in August of 1939, where he served as a medical auxiliary rather than as a combatant (due to poor eyesight). The Germans captured him at Verdun in May of 1940 and brought him to Görlitz. During the war, an estimated 120,000 military personnel from France, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Russia, Britain, and America were imprisoned at Stalag VIII. The camp was highly civilized in comparison to the Nazi concentration camps, with barracks functioning as a theater, chapel, and library. Here, musical prisoners typically received preferential treatment—a German tactic used to project an idealized public image of humane treatment of all prisoners. Additionally, the Germans’ pride in their own extended musical legacy roused their curiosity concerning all new music. For these reasons, Messiaen was given ample time to complete the quartet, and was provided with mediocre instruments for the theater barracks premiere on January 15, 1941. In addition to Messiaen on piano, the other musicians were fellow prisoners Henri Akoka (clarinet), Jean le Boulaire (violin), and Étienne Pasquier (cello). The audience remained silent and still throughout the performance, allowing the spiritual effect of the music to transcend differences in nationality and social class. Whether he had intended to or not, Messiaen’s music had temporarily freed the prisoners’ minds and hearts from their physical reality of cold, hunger, and hard labor.
The Quartet for the End of Time is a musical translation of Messiaen’s vision of eternity and Paradise. Messiaen was a devout yet open-minded Catholic, and the confidence of his faith can be detected within his music. In this piece and others, Messiaen draws upon “Revelations,” the last chapter of the Bible, for musical inspiration (particularly movements 2, 6, and 7). The quartet’s title references the words of the angel from Revelations: “Il n’y aura plus de délai,” translated by Messiaen as: “There will be no more Time.” Messiaen understood the eternal to be unrestricted by time or space. He strove to communicate this through music by frequently employing palindrome rhythmic patterns designed to operate independently of meter (the rhythmic values read the same from left to right and right to left). Messiaen refers to these formulas as “nonretrogradable rhythms.” The rhythms purposely make it difficult for the listener to keep time by tapping beats (particularly within movements 3, 5, and 6). By disrupting standard relationships between rhythm and meter, Messiaen created a sense of timelessness.
Two additional factors play a prominent role in comprehending the composer and his musical language: synesthesia and birdsong. As a synesthete, Messiaen’s sound-color associations were unavoidable. He wrote:
1 Messiaen, “Address Delivered at the Conferring of the Praemium Erasmianum,” 42–43.
To provide some guidance for the performers and audience, Messiaen shares some of the colors and emotions he experienced while composing each movement (see below). Particularly striking is his vision of the angel bedecked with a rainbow, appearing in movements 2 and 7.
In addition to celestial beings, the quartet features the instrumental imitation of birdsong (most notably within movements 1–3). Messiaen was a passionate ornithologist who correlated birds and their songs with the freedom and joy of the eternal. He often arose before dawn so as to witness the “symphony of birds” heralding the emergence of daybreak. Armed with music paper and pencil, he would traverse the forest while transcribing the contours and rhythms of individual birdsongs into actual notes. He could recognize bird species by sound. In the quartet, Messiaen assigned the blackbird’s song to the clarinet and the nightingale’s song to the violin.
Messiaen’s descriptions from his ‘Préface’ to the score follow. - Note by Bethany Cencer
I. Liturgie de cristal (Liturgy of crystal; full quartet):
Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of
sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven.
II. Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps (Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time; full quartet):
The first and third sections (very short) evoke the power of the mighty Angel, crowned with a rainbow and clothed by a cloud, who
sets one foot upon the sea and one foot upon the earth. In the middle section—these are the impalpable harmonies of heaven. On the
piano, gentle cascades of blue-orange chords, garlanding with their distant carillon the quasi-plainsong chanting of the violin and cello.
III. Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of birds; clarinet):
The abyss is Time, with its sorrows and its weariness. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars,
for rainbows and joyful songs!
IV. Intermède (Interlude; violin, cello, clarinet):
V. Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus (Praise to the eternity of Jesus; cello, piano):
Jesus is here considered as the Word. A long phrase for the cello, infinitely slow, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity
of this powerful and gentle Word, ‘which the years can never efface.’ Majestically, the melody unfolds in a kind of tender and
supreme distance. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in God, and the Word was God.’ (John 1:1)
VI. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets; full quartet):
Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece of the set. The four instruments in unison are made to sound like gongs and trumpets
(the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse followed by various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announcing the
consummation of the mystery of God). The use of added values, augmented or diminished rhythms, and non-retrogradable rhythms. Music
of stone, fearful granite sonorities; the irresistible movement of steel, enormous blocks of purple fury, of icy intoxication.
Listen above all to the terrible fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and the changes in register of its different notes, towards the end of the piece.
VII. Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps (Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time; full quartet):
Certain passages from the second movement return. The mighty Angel appears, and above all the rainbow which crowns him (the rainbow:
a symbol of peace, wisdom, and of all sounding and luminous vibrations). In my dreams, I hear recognized chords and melodies, I see
known colors and forms; then, after this transitory stage, I pass beyond reality and submit in ecstasy to a dizziness, a gyratory
interlocking of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, these flows of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars; this is the tumult of rainbows!
VIII. Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus (Praise to the immortality of Jesus; violin, piano):
A long violin solo, acting as a pendant to the cello solo of the 5th movement. Why this second eulogy? It is addressed more specifically
to the second aspect of Jesus—the man Jesus—to the Word made flesh, resurrected immortally to grant us life. It is all love. Its slow
ascent towards the extreme high register is the ascent of man towards his God, of the child of God towards his Father, of the deified Being towards Paradise.
Program notes courtesy of Bethany Cencer.
