(classical music, 1941)
It was an unlikely time and place for the debut of a major composition by one of the twentieth century’s great composers. But in the middle of the Second World War, on a brutally cold January night in 1941, Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was performed for the first time in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in Gorlitz, Germany. On that evening, frost covered the windows and the snow piled twenty inches high outside as an audience of several hundred prisoners and guards crowded into an unheated, makeshift performance hall—Barracks 27. They were there to hear a piece that Messiaen had written during his imprisonment in the camp, following his capture as a French soldier during the German invasion the previous year. As the unlikely audience sat transfixed, their cold breath rising in little puffs of steam and their bodies shivering against the cold, few would have guessed that they were being treated to the initial performance of one of the masterpieces of modern concert music.
That such a piece could even be written under these circumstances was partially due to the efforts of Karl-Albert Brull, a music-loving guard who was familiar with some of Messiaen’s prewar compositions and went to extraordinary efforts to provide the composer with pencils, erasers, and music paper. He also found a quiet place in an empty barracks where Messiaen could work undisturbed, even posting a guard outside to keep him from being bothered. After the performance, Brull helped forge the documents that made it possible for Messiaen to return to France.
To arrange this quartet—born in conditions of war, death, famine, and frost—Messiaen used the only instruments that were available in the camp: a cello with only three strings, a clarinet, a violin, and a dilapidated piano. It was an unusual combination, but around these instruments he fashioned something startling, strangely beautiful, and spiritually evocative.
The title refers to the proclamation of the “seventh angel” from Revelation 10, about the time when all will be made right in eternity—a time beyond time. Messiaen inscribed in his notes to the score, “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’ ” Surely it must have felt to many Europeans as though the apocalypse was at hand as Nazi aggressors stormed triumphantly across Europe, set on establishing their Third Reich. But Messiaen’s music is not a gloomy meditation on defeat and hardship; it is a musical expression of a hopeful expectation of the future God has promised.
Sometimes, however, hope does not sound like a sweeping romantic wash of strings. Instead, Messiaen’s rhythms dance along in intricate patterns without any regular beat to ground them. There are moments of clashing chords jostling against each other as well as long sections of great contemplative serenity called Louanges, or “songs of praise.” The quartet opens with a movement called “Liturgy of Crystal,” highlighting the joyful sounds of birdsong, as transcribed for violin and clarinet. Two later movements celebrate the immortality and eternal life of Christ, and one movement highlights the voice of the archangel with a swirling and cascading piano; it is playfully titled, “A Tangle of Rainbows.” There is also a “Dance of Fury” in which all the instruments join together in discordant musical loops of sound. In all, the quartet contains eight movements; seven representing the seven days of creation, and an eighth for the eternal life that follows.
The Quartet for the End of Time, like much of Messiaen’s work, sets aside many of the musical conventions of Western classical music. He was, like many modern composers, not much concerned with linear progression and development or with harmonic resolution, so his music may initially sound somewhat strange and jarring to the ear of the casual listener. It is a music of contrasts: sometimes funereally slow and contemplative, sometimes nervous and jarring, sometimes voluptuous and grand, sometimes peaceful and spare, and always interesting.
Contemplating the precarious position of humanity deep in the middle of the horrors of the Second World War, Messiaen was not asking the nagging, obvious question of “Why me, Lord?” but instead lifting a voice of praise in the midst of chaos, a musical celebration of a hope beyond this world in a time beyond time.
Born in France in 1908, Messiaen was a musical prodigy who taught himself how to play the piano before he took official lessons, and had a special interest in the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Their colorful, impressionistic compositions so fascinated him that he began to compose music himself, and even asked his parents to give him opera scores as Christmas presents. Though neither of his parents were Christians, he embraced Catholicism for himself at an early age.
At age eleven Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatory, where he became a star pupil. He took a course in the organ from Marcel Dupre, and as his young student had never even seen an organ console, the master organist took an hour to patiently explain the ins and outs of the instrument. When Messiaen returned a week later for his next lesson, he dumbfounded his teacher with a remarkably good performance of a Bach organ fantasia. The year 1931 marked two milestones in Messiaen’s life: he saw the first public performance of one of his own compositions and he was appointed as organist for the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where he served faithfully until his death.
After Messiaen’s release from the Nazi prison camp, he taught music at the Paris Conservatory, where he was known as a lively and patient teacher. His students included such future luminaries as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez.
From his childhood Messiaen had been fascinated by the songs of birds, and he exerted a great deal of effort to study the sounds of different species worldwide, seeking them out and transcribing their songs into music, which he then incorporated into many of his compositions. Often these compositions include a note identifying which birdsong inspired that particular section of the piece. When asked to create a test piece for flutists wishing to enter the conservatory, he offered Le Merle Noir, which was based entirely on the song of the blackbird.
Messiaen was forever experimenting with new sounds and techniques that placed him solidly within the world of avant-garde composers. But within that world he was often suspect, as he was a committed Christian who espoused traditional theology against an intellectual and cultural backdrop that was predominantly hostile toward it. Fellow artists recognized his compositional genius but were suspicious of his beliefs, almost as if it were, in their minds, impossible to be so very modern and also be a committed Christian. Despite such criticisms from his musical counterparts, as well as religious critics who found his music odd and incomprehensible, he boldly synthesized ancient and modern elements into his own unique theological and musical vision, combining the musical textures and rhythms of contemporaries such as Stravinsky with resonances borrowed from medieval choral works.
Messiaen’s influences were many and varied, including the music of India, Indonesia, Japan, and ancient Greece; medieval chant and polyphonic songs; the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel; and avant-garde modernism. He maintained that music should be interesting, beautiful to listen to, and must touch the heart of the listener. Those who take the time to accustom themselves to his unique palette of sounds, textures, and rhythms will find that his work accomplishes all three goals.
Messiaen was also an amateur theologian and read widely in ancient and modern theological texts, and he often tried to translate those ideas into his musical compositions. “I wished to express the marvelous aspects of the Faith,” he said. “I’m not saying that I’ve succeeded, for in the final analysis they’re inexpressible . . . most of the arts are unsuited to the expression of religious truths. Only music, the most immaterial of all, comes close to it.”1 He knew that music could never fully achieve what he wanted it to, but he was trying, through his compositions, to somehow make the invisible just a little bit more visible, and in some manner express what was ultimately inexpressible.
Rather than writing liturgical music for use in churches, Messiaen brought his own brand of sacred music to the concert hall. He “wished to accomplish a liturgical act—that is to say, to transfer a kind of divine office, a kind of communal praise to the concert hall.”2 Therefore, many of his compositions bear religious titles reflective of their inspiration: Visions of the Amen, The Ascension, Twenty Gazes Upon the Child Jesus, Three Small Liturgies of the Divine Presence, The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and Meditations on the Mystery of the Holy Trinity.
When asked what he wanted to communicate with his music, Messiaen replied that
the first idea I wanted to express, the most important, is the existence of the truths of the Catholic faith. . . . The illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and no doubt the most useful and most valuable—perhaps the only one I won’t regret at the hour of my death.3
When esteemed concert pianist Jacqueline Chow first set out to master a set of difficult piano works composed by Messiaen, she was a confirmed atheist. But as she pored over the music and tried to comprehend what Messiaen was trying to say, it had a profound effect. “Little by little,” she said, “I started believing.” In his attempt to express Christian truths in a fresh, modern idiom, Olivier Messiaen demonstrated—with his transcendent soundscapes—that the old can become new, and that the new is always a product of the past.