Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time: Visions of Eternity

One of the 20th century’s most mystical and transcendent works was created in a frigid, overcrowded German prisoner-of-war camp during the gloomy second winter of World War II.

It was not his captivity, nor premonitions of a coming fiery apocalypse that inspired Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) to compose the provocatively titled Quartet for the End of Time (“Quatuor pour la fin du temps”), but serene spiritual visions of the “eternity of space and time,” set out in the Book of Revelation.

In a preface to the score, Messiaen inscribed this excerpt from the “Revelation of St. John” (Rev 10:1–2, 5–7, King James Version):

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire…and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth…And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever…that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…

When France entered the Second World War, the 31-year-old Olivier Messiaen was called to active duty as a medical auxiliary. He was captured by the German army in June of 1940, and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland), a camp which housed 50,000 malnourished French and Belgian prisoners.

Messiaen later recalled,

When I arrived at the camp, I was stripped of all my clothes, like all the prisoners, but naked as I was, I clung fiercely to a little bag of miniature scores that served as consolation when I suffered. The Germans considered me to be completely harmless, and since they still loved music, not only did they allow me to keep my scores, but an officer also gave me pencils, erasers, and some music paper.

The officer was Carl-Albert Brüll, a covert anti-Nazi who protected numerous Jewish prisoners, and ultimately conspired in the forging of documents to facilitate Messiaen’s release. The composer’s fellow prisoners included three other professional musicians: violinist Jean le Boulaire, cellist Étienne Pasquier, and clarinetist Henri Akoka.

Gradually, the eight-movement Quartet, scored for the unconventional collection of available instruments (clarinet, violin, cello, piano), took shape. Some movements developed from pre-existing pieces, while others were written at the request of players such as Akoka, who, throughout the ordeal, refused to be separated from his clarinet. The celestial, boundary-pushing music was rehearsed in a washroom.

Later, the composer claimed that thousands attended the first performance, and that Pasquier played on a cello with only three strings.  Actually, the premiere on January 15, 1941 was attended by around 400 prisoners and German officers, who huddled in an unheated barracks. The cello was fully strung, although numerous keys were nonfunctioning on the out-of-tune upright piano on which Messiaen played.

Pasquier later vividly described the occasion:

Everyone listened reverently, with an almost religious respect, including those who perhaps were hearing chamber music for the first time. It was ‘miraculous.’ These people, who had never before heard such music, remained silent. These people, who were completely musically ignorant, sensed that this was something exceptional. They sat perfectly still, in awe. Not one person stirred. No doubt, these people reassumed their original personalities afterward, but there they were subject to a miracle: the miracle of the performance of this music.

“Never had I been listened to with so much attention and understanding,” recalled the composer.

The four collaborating musicians survived imprisonment, and soon went their separate ways.

Throughout the Quartet’s eight movements, we get a sense of “rhythm outside of time.” Messiaen strove for “the banishment of temporalities,” liberating rhythm from the confines of the bar line. Subtle thematic links between the movements establish order on a vast scale. In his program note, the composer wrote,

This Quartet contains eight movements. Why? Seven is the perfect number, the creation of six days made holy by the divine Sabbath; the seventh in its repose prolongs itself into eternity and becomes the eighth, of unfailing light, of immutable peace.

In the first movement (Liturgy of crystal), the cello and piano voices drift along with hazy, unrelated ostinato lines. The music awakens with evocations of the dawn chorus. A duet between the nightingale and the blackbird is translated to the violin and clarinet. Quotes of birdsongs recur throughout Messiaen’s music. The composer once said, “I doubt that one can find in any human music, however inspired, melodies and rhythms that have the sovereign freedom of bird song.”

Messiaen experienced synesthesia, a neurological blurring of the senses in which sounds are associated with colors. The second movement (Vocalise, for the angel who announces the end of Time) is filled with a vibrant sense of tonal color. For Messiaen, the brief first and third sections suggested the power of the rainbow-haired angel. In between, we hear “the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords, encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant-like recitativo of the violin and cello.”

In the third movement (Abyss of the birds) we are left with the solitary voice of the clarinet. The composer wrote, “The abyss is Time, with its sadnesses and tediums. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song!”

The fourth movement (Interlude) is a brief, jubilant scherzo which concludes with two playful cello pizzicati. It offers a respite from celestial contemplations.

The interpretive marking for the fifth movement (Praise to the Eternity of Jesus) is “infinitely slow, ecstatic.” The cello’s unending melody, an expression of “love and reverence,” rises over hypnotically repeating chords in the piano. Messiaen wrote, “Majestically, the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome.”

The sixth movement (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets) erupts with jazzy exuberance. The four instruments play in unison to evoke “gongs and trumpets.” Messiaen plays with our perception of time with the “use of extended note values, augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns, non-retrogradable rhythms – a systematic use of values which, read from left to right or from right to left, remain the same.” It is “music of stone, formidable sonority; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or ice-like frenzy.”

In the seventh movement (Cluster of rainbows, for the angel who announces the end of Time) passages from the second movement return. The composer writes,

The mighty angel appears, and in particular the rainbow that envelops him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, of wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreamings I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following this transitory stage I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: Behold the cluster, behold the rainbow!

The final movement (Praise to the immortality of Jesus) is poised between striving and serenity. We return to the world of the fifth movement, except now the cello is replaced with the solitary voice of the violin. In an unending melodic stream, it floats above the piano’s hypnotic, eternal pulse. Messiaen writes, “Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the Son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise.”

The composer concluded his program note with the following words: “All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject!”

In the end, this music needs no words. We must simply listen.

This performance features Gil Shaham (violin) Paul Meyer (clarinet) Jian Wang (cello), and Myung-Whun Chung (piano):

I. Liturgy of crystal:

II. Vocalise, for the angel who announces the end of Time:

III. Abyss of the birds:

IV. Interlude:

V. Praise to the Eternity of Jesus:

VI. Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets:

VII. Cluster of rainbows, for the angel who announces the end of Time:

VIII. Praise to the immortality of Jesus:

Five Great Recordings

• Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time, Gil Shaham, Paul Meyer , Jian Wang, Myung-Whun Chung Amazon
• Peter Serkin, Ida Kavafian, Fred Sherry, Richard Stoltzman
• the Amici Ensemble
• Vera Beths, George Pieterson, Anner Bylsma, Reinbert de Leeuw
• Carter Brey, Anthony McGill, Inon Barnatan, Alan Gilbert

Featured Image: Olivier Messiaen with musicians at the Stalag VIIIA prison camp