Music for Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through by Fiona Maddocks

Author:Fiona Maddocks [Maddocks, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571329397
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2016-10-03T22:00:00+00:00

OLIVIER MESSIAEN

Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) (1941)

January 1941. Temperatures below freezing. A German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Silesia. Four musicians, one of whom is a composer and organist, the Frenchman Olivier Messiaen. The others are a clarinettist, a violinist and a cellist. This was the unpromising circumstance that gave birth to the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, or Quartet for the End of Time. The audience for the premiere was a group of prisoners with their guards in the front row. One guard in particular had been supportive to Messiaen, providing him with materials and enabling him to work. ‘Never have I been heard with as much attention and understanding,’ Messiaen recalled later. The work is a meditation on words from the Book of Revelation, in which the Angel of the Apocalypse descends from heaven, ‘clothed in a cloud, having a rainbow on his head’ and declares: ‘There will be no more Time: but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God will be completed.’ Four movements involve all the players, the lines variously flowing, throbbing, nervously jabbing and ethereally floating. At the heart of the work are two Louanges – hymns of praise – for solo cello and piano in the middle, and for violin and piano at the end. In life, music can exist only in earthly time. Messiaen was looking beyond.

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