Quartet for the End of Time

There are some compositions whose origins threaten to overshadow the merits of the actual music. And though the Quartet for the End of Time is a remarkable work considered in itself, there is no denying that the situation in which Olivier Messiaen found himself when writing the work could hardly have been more dramatic. Messiaen had recently enlisted to fight in the French army when he was captured by German soldiers near Nancy in spring 1940. The ensuing journey to Stalag VIIIA east of Dresden was arduous, though he did forge friendships with several other musicians heading for the same camp. Among these were a violinist, a clarinetist, and a cellist. He began to write short pieces for them to practice together and quickly settled on a larger plan for a multi-movement composition.
Directly inspired by the instruments available to him (the Germans eventually provided a piano for Messiaen himself), the deeper motivation for the Quartet comes from the composer’s Catholic mysticism. As he put it, the Quartet’s “musical language is essentially immaterial, spiritual and Catholic. Modes which achieve a kind of tonal ubiquity, melodically and harmonically, here draw the listener towards the eternity in space or the infinite. Special rhythms, beyond meter, contribute powerfully in dismissing the temporal.” For Messiaen, music was specially poised to investigate the nature of time. And the title of the Quartet refers less to individual death or the end of captivity, which might have been foremost in many prisoners’ minds, but rather to a more universal cessation of time and the experience of temporal actions. That exploration explains many of the Messiaen’s complicated rhythmic theories that are developed throughout the work.
The eight movements are evocative and highly diverse. Only in half are all four instruments used together (movements 1, 2, 6, and 7); the third is a solo for clarinet. Some of the material even pre-dated Messiaen’s imprisonment, but the finished form was highly dependent on the performers he had around him. He carefully walked his players through some of the work’s most difficult rhythmic portions, especially the sixth movement which unfolds with all instruments in exact unison—the most exacting task to pull off in chamber music. The first performance, given in the prison itself, left a deep and abiding impression on all who heard it and must have seemed a brief oasis of cultural enlightenment in the wasteland of the German stalag. Messiaen recounts the moment:

They brought in an upright piano, very out of tune, and whose key action only worked intermittently. It as on this piano, with my three fellow musicians, dressed very strangely, myself clothed in the bottle-green uniform of a Czech soldier, badly torn, and wearing wooden clogs … that I was to play my Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, in front of an audience of five thousand, among which were gathered all the different classes of society: peasants, laborers, intellectuals, career soldiers, medics, priests…

One could say many things about the individual movements, for the music is both poetic and vivid. But it is a credit to Messiaen that what he intended to express—and we know from his own words what he intended—remains audible throughout. In a preface to the score Messiaen commented on each of the movements, citing periodically from Book 10 of Revelations:

Liturgy of crystal. Between three and four o’clock in the morning, the awakening of the birds: a blackbird or a solo nightingale improvises, surrounded by efflorescent sound, by a halo of trills lost high in the trees…
Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of Time. The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of this mighty angel, a rainbow upon his head and clothed with a cloud, who sets one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. In the middle section are the impalpable harmonies of heaven. In the piano, sweet cascades of blue-orange chords, enclosing in their distant chimes the almost plainchant song of the violin and violoncello.
Abyss of the birds. Clarinet alone. The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.
Interlude. Scherzo, of a more individual character than the other movements, but linked to them nevertheless by certain melodic recollections.
Praise to the Eternity of Jesus. Jesus is considered here as the Word. A broad phrase, infinitely slow, on the cello, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of the Word, powerful and gentle… “In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets. Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece in the series. The four instruments in unison take on the aspect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse were followed by various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announced the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of added [rhythmic] values, rhythms augmented or diminished… Music of stone, of formidable, sonorous granite…
A mingling of rainbows for the Angel who announces the end of Time. Certain passages from the second movement recur here. The powerful angel appears, above all the rainbow that covers him… In my dreams I hear and see a catalogue of chords and melodies, familiar colors and forms… The swords of fire, these outpourings of blue-orange lava, these turbulent stars…
Praise to the Immortality of Jesus. Expansive solo violin, counterpart to the violoncello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second encomium? It addresses more specifically the second aspect of Jesus, Jesus the Man, the Word made flesh... Its slow ascent toward the most extreme point of tension is the ascension of man toward his God, of the child of God toward his Father, of the being made divine toward Paradise.

The eight movements are evocative and highly diverse. Only in half are all four instruments used together (movements 1, 2, 6, and 7); the third is a solo for clarinet. Some of the material even pre-dated Messiaen’s imprisonment, but the finished form was highly dependent on the performers he had around him. He carefully walked his players through some of the work’s most difficult rhythmic portions. In particular, the sixth movement unfolds with all instruments in exact unison—possibly the most difficult task to pull off in chamber music. The first performance, given in the prison itself, left a deep and abiding impression on the 5,000 peasants, laborers, intellectuals, career soldiers, medics, and priests who heard it. This must have seemed a brief oasis of cultural enlightenment in the wasteland of the German stalag.

(c) Jason Stell