Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

This all-star chamber ensemble was specifically formed to play Messiaen's masterpiece. Two decades after this recording was made, it still shows the effects of their intense identification with the music. Some listeners find Messiaen's music longwinded and difficult, and my own opinion varies depending on the work and my mood. But this piece, written in a German concentration camp during the early years of World War II, is truly one of the greatest works of music of the 20th century. Although it lasts nearly an hour, its variety of color and its powerful expressiveness will engross any responsive listener, especially in this performance. --Leslie Gerber Amazon.com

Beyond Time

Not long ago, I listened to Olivier Messiaen's *Quartet for the End of Time* for the first time. I did not know what to make of it when it started, but by the time it ended it had made a deep impression. Since then I have listened to it several times more. Without the description provided by Messiaen, I wonder how many listeners would have guessed what the quartet was all about, or called it one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. I can't prove it, but possibly critics would have called it an interesting experiment. Yet the music taken together with its explanation (including the circumstances under which it was composed) communicates a compelling vision. I have attempted to convey some of Messiaen's vision with the aid of quotes from his description (as translated in the liner notes from the original French).

The music itself is unusual. Not only the choice of instruments (violin, cello, clarinet and piano), but the way Messiaen used them, is striking. The full quartet performs in only four of the eight movements that comprise the work. The piano has no part in the brief fourth movement; the fifth movement, both reverent and moving, is for cello and piano only; the eighth movement mirrors the fifth, but this time is for violin and piano; and the third movement - lasting for about eight minutes - is for solo clarinet only. We know that music often expresses emotions, but here Messiaen apparently tried to express visions he had of celestial colors, of rainbows, of the vast cosmos. He related sound to vision. I give fragments of what he wrote: "... amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills..." (on the first movement); "From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords..." (2nd mvmt); "Music of stone ... as huge blocks of livid fury or icelike frenzy" (6th mvmt); "I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpretation of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!" (7th mvmt).

The third movement, 'Abyss of the birds', with its eloquent clarinet solo, provides an important key for interpreting the whole. Messiaen writes, "The abyss is Time, with its sadness and tedium." A new and strange idea, at first. Abyss is a spatial term, even when used figuratively. But here the abyss is time with a capital T, not depth. The birds or what they stand for - "they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song!" (in contrast to sadness and tedium) - are trapped in time, awaiting release. In that sense, then, time is the abyss from which there is no escape, not by our own powers. Messiaen based his work on an excerpt from the New Testament Book of Revelation, Chapter 10. Part of the excerpt reads, "There shall be time no longer, but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be consummated." In that only is the release.

Messiaen, a deeply religious Roman Catholic, was a prisoner of war in a German camp during World War II when he wrote the quartet, and had experienced the "sadness and tedium" of time, in addition to suffering the harsh conditions. We can only imagine how that must have affected his thoughts, emotions and creative effort. He dreamt of release - from prison, surely, but perhaps more so from the confines of time - and expressed it in the music. The last movement, 'Praise to the immortality of Jesus', ends with the solo violin, accompanied by soft piano atonal notes, rising upward, upward, ever more faintly, upward. "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."

Is Quartet for the End of Time an interesting experiment? Let the listener/ interpreter decide. I think it is much more than that, although I am always wary of using superlatives such as "greatest" or "best". I will add that this was not the only time Messiaen expressed himself in this manner. About eight years earlier, he had composed *L'Ascension* (The Ascension), a set of four pieces that he termed Meditations. The last of these depicts the prayer of Christ rising toward his Father, a reference to verses taken from the Gospel of John, Chapter 17. There, as in the last movement of the quartet, the music keeps rising upward, toward heaven as Messiaen intended to signify. His religion was integral to his life and, inevitably, to his modes of expression.

September 28, 2008

Fin

I gave my copy of this (favorite) album to my favorite music professor -- now I have to replace it! Other reviewers have stressed the history behind the composition and its premiere in a Nazi POW camp, so I won't go into that, interesting and pertinent as it may be. Other reviewers have focussed on the fact that Messiaen was a devout Catholic mystic, implying that the listener must share the composer's religious convictions in order to fully appreciate his artistic expression. However, because this is a work of art, listeners will hear in it beauties unique to their own sensibilities. The listener can be a complete atheist and respond emotionally to Messiaen's passionate, idiosyncratic, and heart-wrenching composition. This is a piece that brings tears to my eyes and makes me intellectually curious too; I want to get the score so I can see how Messiaen works his magic. It's emotional, odd, intense, riveting, and harmonically sophisticated, right up there with the best of the 20th Century composers' works.

July 18, 2007

A great work, a Catholic work

This recording of the "Quartet for the End of Time," one of the greatest musical works of the 20th century, is precious to me. Performers Peter Serkin (piano), Ida Kavafian (violin), Fred Sherry (cello), and Richard Stoltzman (clarinet) offer a stunning, heartfelt performance. Olivier Messiaen, a Frenchman born in 1908 who demonstrated an early gift for music as a pianist, composed the piece in a Nazi prison camp for the few instruments he had available, including an out-of-tune piano on which he performed, a violin, a cello, and a clarinet. Imagine. World War II was obviously a dark time, and Messiaen went into the army with some rations and a few musical scores that he kept in his backpack. Not to diminish his suffering, but he was not treated as poorly as Jewish prisoners were in the death camps. He was not made to work in total starvation, nor was he deprived of all contact with the outside world (he was able to write home and have supplies sent to him). However, being a Catholic mystic, Messiaen sensed that the rise of the Third Reich signified the Apocalypse as prophesied in Revelations. Germans being Germans (they do love their music, after all), the camp guards allowed him to perform this piece in the camp with the group of musicians he assembled. His astonishing music captures not only that desperation and discord of the earth's final days, but also the redemption that can only be found through Our Lord Jesus Christ. However, you do not have to be a Christian to feel or understand the power in this music. Christianity has inspired the best music in Western culture (those "scientists" and "mathematicians" and "philosophers" who misguidely try to secularize J.S. Bach are wrong), and while Messiaen's music speaks for itself, his explanation for the final passage of this quartet is eternal: "Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus -- to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love. 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." Amen to that, son, which is an important message for today's youth. February 17, 2007

Imagining the end...

I wonder how many other masterpieces were in fact lost in prisoner or war camps. We shouldn't be listening to this work today. It should not have survived. Perhaps Messiaen should not have either. But he did, and it did, and we are lucky because of it.

The quartet, composed for violin, clarinet, cello and piano because those were the instruments Messiaen's fellow inmates played, is in, oddly, eight movements instead of the Biblical seven. It is prefaced by a quotation from the Apocalypse of St. John Chapter 10: "I saw a 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." That moment is depicted on the cover of this CD. The eight movements describe the harmonious "silence" of the heavens (including the awakening of birds--birds fascinated Messiaen all his life), Vocalise for the angel who announces the end of Time,* the Abyss of the birds, with a very technically-demanding clarinet solo (as an amateur clarinetist myself I find it hard to just play it all in tune, never mind the extreme dynamics), a bouncy scherzo interlude, which is the brightest part of the work, Praise to the Eternity of Jesus, which is deeply moving and spiritual if pulled off right, Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets, which is a real rhythmic tour-de-force (try to figure out the time signatures), Cluster of Rainbows, for the angel who announces the end of time (supremely haunting) and finally Praise to the Immortality of Jesus, which is supposed to represent the man Jesus more than the divine Son of God.

In terms of time, the work is extraordinarily complex, even in this post-Stravinsky universe. In fact, I couldn't begin to tell you I understand all that's going on, and would love to get my hands on a score. But the sonorities of this unusual combination of instruments makes you really pay closer attention--the unusual message is heard in an unusual voice. Use of dissonance is extremely intelligent--compared to so many "modern" compositions I hear today that claim to be profound (the Fourth Concerto for Orchestra by Robert Holloway, which I just heard premiered the other night in San Francisco, comes to mind), this score uses dissonance and consonance for a very high purpose, very judiciously, and not just because it can. Oh, and the ending pages of this work are a stunner, one of the most chilling finishes I've ever heard in a work. It's like the end of Mahler's 9th without the sentimental comfort--and yes, next to this, Mahler's 9th sounds sentimental and comforting.

This is all-around the best performance I've ever heard of the Quartet, though a Philips recording with Vera Beths, George Pieterson, Anner Bijlsma and Reinbert de Leeuw is better-recorded. They don't quite reach the heights and depths that these four musicians do, however, particularly in the Abyss of the Birds and the Praise to the Immortality. Despite some intonation issues by Stoltzman, he's more soulful in his lengthy solo than the more-in-control Pieterson.

The rest of the forces here are magnificent too. Ida Kavafian has always struck me as an underrated violinist. For a while she played with the Beaux Arts Quartet, but recently I have not seen her with them--what happened?

The Quartet was premiered to an audience of fellow prisoners and prison guards in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany on January 15, 1941. "Never have I been heard with as much attention and understanding," Messiaen later said. Considering the effect this music has on us, as we arrive warm and fed at the concert hall after the attendant parks our Mercedes or Lexus, how this work must have felt to the starving cold war prisoners of 1941 surely cannot be imagined.


*The "end of time" is not purely an allusion to the Apocalypse, the work's ostensible subject, but also refers to the way in which, through rhythm and harmony, Messiaen used time in a way that was completely different from the music of his predecessors or contemporaries. February 6, 2007

Unique Spiritual Expression

The Quartet for the End of Time and The Turangalila Symphony are great pieces by Messaien. If you're looking at this version by Tashi, you are looking at a legendary performance. Similarly, Antoni Wit on the Naxos label does wonders in the Turangalila Symphony, a very lively work. Let's not skirt the issue: both are strange pieces, lovable for their insanity. Here, however, you have a piece with an amazing history and an intimate depth of soul.

I think the titles of some of the movements say a lot about the work, like "Cluster of Rainbows, for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time." As a person who is awe-inspired by symbols, alchemical art work, and out of the ordinary things, titles like these bring tears to my eyes. The cover art for this album is a striking representation of this rare kind of beauty.

The music expresses itself on its own terms. You are receiving the language of another dimension. It is that bizarre, and you must be prepared. Put down all conceptions of what Western music is. Do not compare this to any other work. Extraterrestrial visitors will guide you to the mothership. Take the ride. And remember that for Messaien God is at the center of all things. You will feel this presence as the music wends its way through the final moments. December 21, 2006

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