Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

One of French composer Olivier Messiaen's very few chamber pieces, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) is exceptional, too, in the circumstances of its composition and first performance—at a prisoner-of-war camp in the harsh winter of 1940‒41—and in the vividness and variety of its images—of the end times, and of celestial radiance.

Introduction

Messiaen scored the piece for the forces he had available in the camp: three colleagues—a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinetist—and himself on piano. He gave each of his companions a solo movement; elsewhere, the instruments are used, mostly together, in music of startling dynamism and color, or of infinite peace. The total duration is around 50 minutes.

The subject of the work is given in a passage from the Book of Revelation that Messiaen, in his preface to the score, abridged as follows: “I saw a mighty angel, descending from heaven, clothed in a cloud, having a rainbow on his head. His face was as bright as the sun, his feet as columns of fire. He placed his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the earth, he raised his hand towards heaven and swore by Him who lives for ever and ever, saying: There will be no more Time; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God will be completed.”

History

Called up for military service in the French army, Messiaen was captured by the German army in May 1940, along with two colleagues: the clarinetist Henri Akoka and the cellist Étienne Pasquier. They were transferred to a camp in northeastern German territory (now Poland), where they teamed up with a violinist, Jean le Boulaire, to create the ensemble for which Messiaen set about composing. The eventual work received its premiere at the camp on January 15, 1941, under freezing conditions, before an audience of prisoners and guards. “Never,” Messiaen later recalled, “have I been heard with as much attention and understanding.”

The first recording, made in 1956, included two of the original performers: Messiaen and Pasquier.

Form

There are eight movements—eight panels with cross-references, but each with its own individual character.

Analysis

The ending of time, which is also the ending of progression, is expressed in the music by various means: by strongly repetitive forms circling through the same instants; by the composer’s particular scales, which dissociate chords from their normal functions of creating forward harmonic motion; by processes of potentially enormous duration (“Liturgie de cristal”); and by extremely slow tempos (the two “Louange” movements). At the same time, the text is addressed almost pictorially by trenchant timbres and harmonies, and by the force the four instruments can exert together.

The eight movements are:

I. “Liturgie de cristal” (“Crystal Liturgy”).  The piano keeps repeating a pattern of 17 rhythmic values, draped with a sequence of 29 chords. Simultaneously, the cello has a five-note motive repeating through another rhythmic pattern. The whole mechanism of musical cogwheels would take nearly two hours to get back to its starting point. The small portion Messiaen offers is decorated by birdsong-like passages in violin and clarinet.

II. “Vocalise, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du temps” (“Vocalise, for the Angel who Announces the End of Time”).  The angelic song is sustained by violin and cello, two octaves apart, with what Messiaen called “rainbow water drops” in the piano—all this encased in music evoking the heavenly being’s might.

III. “Abîme des oiseaux” (“Abyss of the Birds”).  In Messiaen’s music, the abyss is frequently a symbol of negation—of the human experience of time as oppressive, pointing towards death—while birdsong, still more commonly, is his image of spiritual joy—of participation in eternity. Here, the unaccompanied clarinet brings the two images together: the abyss, with great crescendos, arpeggios straddling the instrument’s range, and slow melody; and the birdsong, with lively flights.

IV. “Intermède” (“Interlude”).  A scherzo omitting Messiaen’s own instrument, the composer resting to listen.

V. “Louange à l’Eternité de Jésus” (“Praise to the Eternity of Jesus”).  Jesus as Word is praised by the cello, with piano accompaniment, in a calm E major. The marking is “Infiniment lent, extatique” (“Infinitely slow, ecstatic”).

VI. “Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes” (“Dance of Fury, for the Seven Trumpets”).  Messiaen describes this panel as “music of stone,” of the “irresistible movement of steel, of huge blocks of purple fury, of abandonment frozen”; his preface also draws attention to how the four instruments together suggest trumpets and, later, gongs. The piece is based on a powerfully rhythmic theme, worked to a climax in which it is distended in time and instrumental register.

VII. “Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du temps” (“Bunches of Rainbows, for the Angel who Announces the End of Time”).  There are references to the second movement, whose melodic and dynamic ideas are first alternated, then combined. Again, Messiaen’s preface demands quotation: “In my dreams I hear and see classified chords and melodies, known colors and forms; then, after this transitional stage, I pass into the unreal and submit in ecstasy to a wheeling, a gyrating interpenetration of superhuman colors. These swords of fire, these blue and orange lava flows, these sudden stars: here is the tangle, here the rainbows!”

VIII. “Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus” (“Praise to the Immortality of Jesus”).  A renovation of the fifth movement, in the same stilled E major, marked “Extrêmement lent et tendre, extatique” (“Extremely slow and tender, ecstatic”). The violin, accompanied by the piano, sings the praises of Jesus as Resurrected Man, as victor over time.

Connections

Though unusual among chamber works in its number of movements, the work belongs with other Messiaen compositions in surveying a religious theme from many different perspectives. Examples include his nine-movement organ cycle La Nativité du Seigneur (The Savior’s Nativity, 1935) and the concert-length piano work Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant‒Jésus (Twenty Gazes on the Child Jesus, 1944).

Legacy

Messiaen never composed anything on this scale again, or with this degree of variety. Nor has anyone else. The work has created its own place in concert life, and is sometimes performed as a standalone piece. It has been recorded numerous times.

Since the publication of Rebecca Rischin’s study For the End of Time (2003), in which she thoroughly researched the quartet’s first performance, the work has come to be regarded not only as music of infinity, but also as a document of imprisonment and war.

________

Article by Paul Griffiths