After France fell to the Nazis in 1940, French composer Olivier Messiaen was imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner-of-war camp on the border of modern-day Germany and Poland. In transit to the camp, Messiaen met a Jewish clarinetist named Henri Akoka, and showed him sketches for a solo clarinet movement. Akoka dismissed the movement as impossible, but Messiaen persisted. Inside the prison, he met a cellist, Étienne Pasquier, and a violinist, Jean Le Boulaire. After a sympathetic guard smuggled in some paper and pencil, Messiaen began work on a quartet for the three inmates plus himself on piano: Quartet for the End of Time. It was possibly that same guard who later procured dilapidated instruments for the musicians, and the piece received its premiere inside the prison walls in January 1941, outdoors and in the freezing rain for an audience of 400 fellow prisoners and guards, while World War II raged outside. Messiaen later recalled, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”
Perhaps primary among the wide variety of forces that shaped Messiaen and his music was his intense spirituality, so it stands to reason that the extravagant imagery of the Book of Revelation would have found resonances in his ardent brand of Catholicism. Indeed, the Quartet was inspired by an almost psychedelic passage from that final book of the Bible describing the arrival of the angel of the Apocalypse:
“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…”
As advertised, the idea of time is a constant presence throughout the piece. But the meeting of Messiaen’s theme of time cessation with the decidedly time-bound medium of music strikes a fascinating paradox that manifests itself in myriad ways throughout the work. At his most predictable, Messiaen does away with time signatures altogether, leaving the performers with no instructions as to the organization of musical time, as in the third, fifth and sixth movements. But on a subtler level, Messiaen erases the would-be natural accents of each bar by crafting clever rhythmic palindromes, or by stringing together idiosyncratic combinations of rhythms that form one long, repeating pattern — both of which defy the tendency of musical time to organize by smaller measured units. Messiaen uses the latter technique to disorienting effect in the first movement, whose pages are mosaicked by a thirteen-beat (seventeen-note) rhythmic pattern in the piano that repeats itself over and over irrespective of the alleged 3/4 time signature.
To make matters worse — or at least, more dizzying — Messiaen’s harmonic color only adds to this static, directionless quality that his rhythms also produce. Whereas functional tonality derives its sense of forward motion from the asymmetries of tension and resolution, Messiaen’s language is built on scales that divide evenly into coolly tessellating micro-patterns that don’t point one way or another, thus foregrounding stasis instead of direction. Ironically, the second piano chord of the piece actually contains all seven pitches of a B-flat major scale sounding at once; by folding the scale onto itself, Messiaen strips away the temporal meaning from something that would otherwise suggest motion — as if to acknowledge functional tonality and then flip it the bird. In contrast to more goal-oriented harmonies that suggest a progression over time, Messiaen’s music creates what Paul Griffiths called “a sense of time not as flow but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in sequences of brilliant, unalike instants.”
This “pre-existing” sense of musical time infects all of the Quartet’s movements, but especially the “inhumanly slow” tempos of the fifth and eighth movements, where harmonies change so infrequently that they seem prolonged for eternity. But the first movement has more to say about the logic of the rest of the piece. It introduces a juxtaposition between the birdsong presence of the physical world, and the passive transcendence of metaphysical time, both of which will dominate the musical material of the whole piece. Messiaen’s birds are the clarinet and violin, a blackbird and nightingale, respectively, and he sets their physical presence against the cosmic backdrop of the cello and piano, playing what he imagined as the “harmonious silence of Heaven.” In this way, Messiaen articulates two distinct worlds: physical and metaphysical, human and spiritual. And the friction between the two sides of this duality gives momentum to the musical arc of the rest of the piece, which to an awestruck Le Boulaire sounded like an apocalyptic duel between “monsters and cataclysms” and “adoring silences and wonderful visions of peace.”
In the preface to his score, Messiaen wrote about the Abyss of the birds movement for solo clarinet, “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness.” It is curious that Messiaen’s movement for a lone clarinet, the only instrument of the group bound to a single line without the ability to provide harmony or accompany itself, would become the piece’s longest (if one is to take Messiaen’s written tempos to heart). But the instrument’s limited ability to keep time for itself makes it ideally-suited to destroy the listener’s sense of time, its unfeeling crooning instead mapping a desolate, boundaryless void, and its inexorable crescendos on single notes leaving listeners with volume as the only metric to measure the passage of time. The stark nakedness of the clarinet does indeed evoke the vacant melancholy that Messiaen’s preamble suggests, and the implicit connection to Gregorian chant of the monophonic texture amplifies the spiritual orientation of the Quartet.
Messiaen’s magnum opus is highly unusual for its varied orchestration across its movements, and the sonic distance between a solo clarinet and, say, the brutal unisons of the sixth movement — where the four players join forces to form one towering, trumpet-like instrument — or the seventh movement’s dizzying swirls where we lose harmony and melody altogether, creates a sense of earth-shattering scope fit for the awe-inspiring subject matter. In fact, the scope is so broad — between terror and tenderness, between the divine love of the two Praises to Jesus and the jolting unisons of all four instruments together — that it’s almost hard to believe that all of this music was written by the same person. But Messiaen was the sum of so many powerful influences. He was synesthetic, and saw colors when he heard chords; he was obsessed with birds, had them stuffed all over his apartment walls and spent hours at a time studying their songs; he was pioneering and meticulously mathematical in his approach to rhythm; and he was a devout Catholic, and played organ in a Paris church for over sixty years, right up until his death.
Quartet for the End of Time represents the miraculous collision of all of these influences under the most unlikely circumstances. To introduce such timeless music that eludes time itself, a piece that invites endless commentary but exists on a plane beyond words, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Rebecca Rischin’s, from the inscription of her book about the piece:
“This is the story of a quartet for all time,
based on the Apocalypse and written in apocalyptic times,
music for the future, defiant of the past,
music for the moment, and for eternity.”
© Graeme Steele Johnson
Perhaps primary among the wide variety of forces that shaped Messiaen and his music was his intense spirituality, so it stands to reason that the extravagant imagery of the Book of Revelation would have found resonances in his ardent brand of Catholicism. Indeed, the Quartet was inspired by an almost psychedelic passage from that final book of the Bible describing the arrival of the angel of the Apocalypse:
“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…”
As advertised, the idea of time is a constant presence throughout the piece. But the meeting of Messiaen’s theme of time cessation with the decidedly time-bound medium of music strikes a fascinating paradox that manifests itself in myriad ways throughout the work. At his most predictable, Messiaen does away with time signatures altogether, leaving the performers with no instructions as to the organization of musical time, as in the third, fifth and sixth movements. But on a subtler level, Messiaen erases the would-be natural accents of each bar by crafting clever rhythmic palindromes, or by stringing together idiosyncratic combinations of rhythms that form one long, repeating pattern — both of which defy the tendency of musical time to organize by smaller measured units. Messiaen uses the latter technique to disorienting effect in the first movement, whose pages are mosaicked by a thirteen-beat (seventeen-note) rhythmic pattern in the piano that repeats itself over and over irrespective of the alleged 3/4 time signature.
To make matters worse — or at least, more dizzying — Messiaen’s harmonic color only adds to this static, directionless quality that his rhythms also produce. Whereas functional tonality derives its sense of forward motion from the asymmetries of tension and resolution, Messiaen’s language is built on scales that divide evenly into coolly tessellating micro-patterns that don’t point one way or another, thus foregrounding stasis instead of direction. Ironically, the second piano chord of the piece actually contains all seven pitches of a B-flat major scale sounding at once; by folding the scale onto itself, Messiaen strips away the temporal meaning from something that would otherwise suggest motion — as if to acknowledge functional tonality and then flip it the bird. In contrast to more goal-oriented harmonies that suggest a progression over time, Messiaen’s music creates what Paul Griffiths called “a sense of time not as flow but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in sequences of brilliant, unalike instants.”
This “pre-existing” sense of musical time infects all of the Quartet’s movements, but especially the “inhumanly slow” tempos of the fifth and eighth movements, where harmonies change so infrequently that they seem prolonged for eternity. But the first movement has more to say about the logic of the rest of the piece. It introduces a juxtaposition between the birdsong presence of the physical world, and the passive transcendence of metaphysical time, both of which will dominate the musical material of the whole piece. Messiaen’s birds are the clarinet and violin, a blackbird and nightingale, respectively, and he sets their physical presence against the cosmic backdrop of the cello and piano, playing what he imagined as the “harmonious silence of Heaven.” In this way, Messiaen articulates two distinct worlds: physical and metaphysical, human and spiritual. And the friction between the two sides of this duality gives momentum to the musical arc of the rest of the piece, which to an awestruck Le Boulaire sounded like an apocalyptic duel between “monsters and cataclysms” and “adoring silences and wonderful visions of peace.”
In the preface to his score, Messiaen wrote about the Abyss of the birds movement for solo clarinet, “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness.” It is curious that Messiaen’s movement for a lone clarinet, the only instrument of the group bound to a single line without the ability to provide harmony or accompany itself, would become the piece’s longest (if one is to take Messiaen’s written tempos to heart). But the instrument’s limited ability to keep time for itself makes it ideally-suited to destroy the listener’s sense of time, its unfeeling crooning instead mapping a desolate, boundaryless void, and its inexorable crescendos on single notes leaving listeners with volume as the only metric to measure the passage of time. The stark nakedness of the clarinet does indeed evoke the vacant melancholy that Messiaen’s preamble suggests, and the implicit connection to Gregorian chant of the monophonic texture amplifies the spiritual orientation of the Quartet.
Messiaen’s magnum opus is highly unusual for its varied orchestration across its movements, and the sonic distance between a solo clarinet and, say, the brutal unisons of the sixth movement — where the four players join forces to form one towering, trumpet-like instrument — or the seventh movement’s dizzying swirls where we lose harmony and melody altogether, creates a sense of earth-shattering scope fit for the awe-inspiring subject matter. In fact, the scope is so broad — between terror and tenderness, between the divine love of the two Praises to Jesus and the jolting unisons of all four instruments together — that it’s almost hard to believe that all of this music was written by the same person. But Messiaen was the sum of so many powerful influences. He was synesthetic, and saw colors when he heard chords; he was obsessed with birds, had them stuffed all over his apartment walls and spent hours at a time studying their songs; he was pioneering and meticulously mathematical in his approach to rhythm; and he was a devout Catholic, and played organ in a Paris church for over sixty years, right up until his death.
Quartet for the End of Time represents the miraculous collision of all of these influences under the most unlikely circumstances. To introduce such timeless music that eludes time itself, a piece that invites endless commentary but exists on a plane beyond words, it is difficult to imagine words more eloquent than Rebecca Rischin’s, from the inscription of her book about the piece:
“This is the story of a quartet for all time,
based on the Apocalypse and written in apocalyptic times,
music for the future, defiant of the past,
music for the moment, and for eternity.”
© Graeme Steele Johnson