Welcome, 2025: Stuart & Friends, Part II with Dvořák's Piano Quintet No. 2

On Sunday, January 5th at 4:00, join us at Market Square Church when Stuart Malina, celebrating his 25th Anniversary as Music Director of the Harrisburg Symphony, trades in his baton for a piano to make music with friends. What else would you call the program but "Stuart and Friends"? 

There are two works on the printed program (which means there's a surprise but since it's meant to be a surprise, I can't write about it but I'm pretty sure it's going to add another dimension to the idea of "And Friends"). It opens with the Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen, an amazing work that is both powerful in its impact and personal in its perception. I've written about it in the previous post and it includes two performances you can listen to: the first one was recorded a few years ago at the Met Museum's Temple of Dendur (speaking of Timeless) with the New York Philharmonic's former music director Alan Gilbert as the violinist. The other is a 1956 recording made with the composer at the piano and the cellist who joined him in that original premiere performance in 1941 at Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp.

Dvořák & Wife, 1886

By comparison, Dvořák and his Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, more extroverted and accessible, need little introduction. (Therefore, I will now proceed to offer reams of introduction...)

Premiered in Prague on January 6th, 1888 (it had been composed between August 18th and October 8th, 1887), it was at the height of what is called the Belle Epoque, that period of relative peace and cultural exuberance between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the start of World War I in 1914. Vienna was essentially the Musical Capital of Europe and dominated by two Germans, Wagner and Brahms. Dvořák, on the outskirts of the Imperial World, was just making a name for himself not just in Vienna with considerable help from Brahms (more on this, later), but had just had his newest symphony, his Seventh, premiered in London. That photo of the composer and his wife (see left) was taken in London, Dvořák's first taste of a real success. He had arrived. The next year, he composed this Piano Quintet.

Where the Messiaen is ultimately a work of hope despite the apocalyptic associations with the sources of its inspiration, both the Nazi prison as well as the Book of Revelation, Dvořák's quintet may be viewed as entertainment pure and simple. Pure yes, but "simple" is not to imply frivolous. Dvořák knew how to write a good tune and usually knew what to do with it. It's one thing to come with one good tune but so many to fill four separate movements that make a work of around 40 minutes' duration, not as easy as you might think. And, looking at its placement in the composer's output, it really is a masterpiece in its own way.

There are many recordings of it available, and I admit the reason I wanted to choose this one this time is because it features pianist Menahem Pressler and the Ebène Quartet in a recording of a special concert celebrating Pressler's 90th Birthday! Given Stuart Malina's recent allbeit considerably younger birthday, it seemed appropriate. Pressler has long been one of the mainstays of the chamber music world, most famously with the famous Beaux Arts Trio. 

Another reason I chose his performance (not to diminish the quality of the quartet he's collaborating with) was shadowed by the presence of the Messiaen on this program. He was born Max Jakob Pressler in Magdeburg, Germany, on December 16th (Beethoven's Birthday!), 1923. His parents owned a men's clothing store that was destroyed in the Kristallnacht of November 1938 and the family eventually fled Nazi Germany the following year. The teenaged boy subsequently suffered from eating disorders and was in danger of starvation; later he said playing the piano is what cured him. Incidentally, his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins all died in Nazi concentration camps. 

While that has nothing to do with Dvořák's music, it has a great deal to do with the formation of the man who's playing the piano. Normally, I would edit the video to where the music begins, but since the audience greets the performers' entrance by singing "Happy Birthday" to Pressler... hey...

Hmmm... as luck would have it, this video is blocked from being posted on blogs like this but apparently (hopefully) can still be viewed separately on YouTube so I supply this link instead, and HIGHLY recommend it! (And a happy belated birthday, Stuart: live long and prosper and wish I could be around to hear you play this when you're 90!)

The Quintet is in the standard four movements, opening with an Allegro that's not too fast but then is. The second movement is marked "Dumka" which I'll explain after the video but which contains sections alternating between slow and fast tempos. The third movement, the true scherzo, is another Czech dance, a "Furiant." And then it all concludes with a rip-roaring Allegro. In lieu of the Pressler/Ebene video, I substitute this one complete with score, which features pianist Andreas Haefliger and the Takacs Quartet.

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I mentioned the term "dumka" which is a not so much a dance as it is a form (often used in a dance) which is actually a Ukrainian musical term that means literally "thought." Which seems rather vague, but it's usually applied to the idea of two contrasting musical episodes alternating between melancholy and exuberance. It originated in a series of lectures in Russia by a Ukrainian composer, Mykola Lysenko, in 1873, examining its use in the ethnic folk music of Ukraine. Dvořák first used the "thought" in a piano piece in 1876 and in subsequent works like the 10th String Quartet (Op.51), the Violin Concerto of 1879, the Piano Quintet of 1887, and again in each of the six movements of his last piano trio, it's always been called the "Dumky" Trio. 

But it's not just a "thought" heard in the second movement of this Quintet. Listen again to the opening, to this wistful cello theme and then how it's answered by the full ensemble, in a fast and dramatically contrasting mood. These ideas almost as act as two themes but they're really only sub-sections of the Main Theme. And yet Dvořák does this without changing the tempo: bear with me (nerd-speak ahead). The beat-pulse of the measure remains the same between the two sections, but in the opening there's a leisurely subdivision into 3+3 with a swaying feel to it. However, the faster section isn't really faster because technically the tempo stays the same but instead he subdivides it into 4+4 which, with a change in mood and dynamic, not to mention accents, you now feel like you'd want to nod your head sharply up and down in a march, not swaying back and forth in 3 like a waltz. Even if you didn't understand how it's done, can you feel it? That's a dumka. 

Listen for these kinds of contrasts throughout the piece, not that the audience should sit there swaying back and forth or bouncing up and down with each change of "thought." Whatever drew Dvořák not only to use the idea of a Dumka in the first place, but to integrate it into the micro-structure of his themes, I have no idea, but there's something we're not aware of, just from listening to one piece like the Quintet, a work of his maturity (he was 46 when he composed it), and that's how a composer who grew up in a small town (more of a village) in provincial Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic) with little benefit of hearing or studying the likes of Mozart and Beethoven when he was growing up, just playing fiddle in the village dance bands.

When he decided he wanted to become a professional musician, something of a late-bloomer, he wasn't given much incentive. And that fact that provincial Bohemians were regarded as "rubes" in Imperial Vienna, given the standard ethnic stereotyping of the day, it was amazing he was able to succeed at all. He came under the spell of Wagner and then Brahms. 

So where, then, did Dvořák come from???

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Unlike Beethoven who grew up in a musical family at a royal court in provincial Germany – even if that province is along the Rhine – and Brahms who grew up in a major city, the seaport of Hamburg, Antonín Dvořák was born in a small village not far from a small town several miles from the provincial capital of Prague. And like Beethoven whose big break was going to Vienna at 21 to study with Haydn and Brahms who met the Schumanns when he was 20, Dvořák’s big break came when Brahms saw some of his music and recommended him to his publisher – when Dvořák was 36.

If you consider that was really the start of Dvořák’s career, by that age Mozart was already dead one year...

As Grove’s Dictionary puts it, “his music is characterized by a remarkable fertility of invention coupled with an apparent, yet deceptive, ease and spontaneity of expression.” It’s interesting to trace how this musical voice evolved over the years.

His father – like Beethoven’s and Brahms’ (both, curiously, bass-players) – has been described as a musician even if his abilities were limited to playing the zither and writing a few simple dance tunes for the village dance-band where his son, taught by the local schoolmaster, would eventually play the violin. As the local butcher, his father’s intention was, of course, his son should go into the family business as he had done with his father, and though there may be much in the way of embroidered story-telling in Dvořák’s mature memories, the fact was he dropped out of school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice butcher. It’s not clear whether he finished that apprenticeship but a year later, he went off to the nearby town of Zlonice where he could better learn German and where he found more opportunities for his musical interests.

This need to learn German is significant. Ethnically, Dvořák is Slavic, specifically Czech – whether we call his country Bohemia, Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic – but it was a province of the Austrian Empire and a fairly backwards one, once you were beyond the city of Prague, despite its great historical past as a significant Central European kingdom (Good King Wenceslaus was, incidentally, just one of many good (and bad) Bohemian kings). This cultural memory was very strong even in the peasants who hated the Austrian rule. The only way anyone was going to get beyond the rural life was to learn the language of the “occupying nation,” in this case Austria.

Apparently acquiescing to his son’s wishes to pursue music as a living, his father sent him to another town in the north of Bohemia when he was 15 specifically to learn German, where he also began more serious studies of music, including harmony and playing the organ. A year later, he was accepted at the Prague Organ School – the city’s second-best conservatory – where he was preparing for a degree as a church musician. One of his teachers there was interested in “contemporary music” – in this case, Mendelssohn (who had died ten years earlier) and even that avant-garde composer, Franz Liszt who, by then, had already composed 12 tone poems, two piano concertos and his Faust and Dante Symphonies.

Dvořák had become a decent enough violist to play in the pit for performances of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin – at this time, Wagner, in the midst of writing The Ring had begun a new opera, Tristan und Isolde which would change the approach to traditional tonality if not the course of music history in general. He attended concerts and heard performers like Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann, though he couldn’t afford to buy scores – a senior student allowed him to borrow from his own library and also gave him access to use his piano. But he only won the 2nd Prize in the highly competitive graduation process, told he was excellent but better in practical work rather than, say, theory. It was not much of a recommendation for the real world.

So he made a living playing in the theater orchestra, in pick-up bands for restaurants and dances and the occasional student. When he was 21, he became the principal violist of the new “people’s equivalent” to the court orchestra. The next year, Wagner came to town and conducted the Tannhäuser Overture, excerpts from Meistersinger and Walküre plus the new TristanPrelude.

Dvořák at age 27

This was apparently the ignition he needed to start composing seriously and, not surprisingly, this early music imitated everything Wagner – his first two symphonies, a cello concerto, a song cycle (inspired by his love for one of his pupils: after she married someone else, Dvořák would marry her sister) and eventually his first attempts at opera which were almost produced.

It was a time of increasing nationalist cultural awareness – most recently ignited by revolutions and political uprisings around Europe in 1848-49 (the one in Dresden got Wagner, having just finished Lohengrin, in considerable hot water) and when Bedrich Smetana became the conductor, Dvořák found a strong inspiration in his music, especially his reliance on the folk music of their native Bohemia.

Dvořák was always having trouble making ends meet. At the age of 32, he was hired by a wealthy merchant to be the house musician – essentially the home-entertainment center, giving the children music lessons as well as accompanying the wife and daughters in their evening musicales. From this point on, Dvořák could rely more on teaching to earn a living which offered him more time to concentrate on composing.

A patriotic cantata was well-received but the theater again rejected his second opera, King and Charcoal Burner which he then completely rewrote from scratch. By now, he was abandoning his Wagnerian influences in light of Smetana’s, and heard Smetana conduct his 3rd Symphony not long after he’d completed his 4th. Finally, the new version of King and Charcoal Burner was produced. His music was being published by a small but limited Czech firm in Prague.

This gave Dvořák, now almost 33, the confidence to enter fifteen of his works, including these last two symphonies, for the Austrian State Prize, a major music competition in Vienna which was intended to help young but poor, struggling artists. The judges were the director of the Imperial Opera, the music critic Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms. Dvořák won a prize of 400 gulden (I do not know what that might be worth today or how it compared to, say, an annual income in the 1870s). More confident, he began another symphony and a new opera. He competed for the prize several more times, winning two of them – in 1876 and 1877.

Those were the years Brahms had completed his 1st Symphony and then wrote his 2nd, still working on his Violin Concerto.

In November of 1877, Hanslick wrote to Dvořák informing him he’d just won a prize of 600 gulden and that Brahms had taken an interest in his music, suggesting to his own publisher, Simrock, they take on Dvořák’s vocal duets.

Two weeks later, Simrock took Brahms’ advice and commissioned their new client to write some piano duets inspired by Bohemian dances, considering Brahms’ Hungarian Dances had proven such a lucratively popular success. Published next year, his first volume of Slavonic Dances was well-reviewed and performed to great success in Berlin and London. His new String Sextet in A (op.48) was premiered in Berlin by Joachim’s quartet and the two Serenades (one for strings, the other for winds) also received successful premieres. In fact, his music was now being performed from Latvia to New York City.

This was also a time that makes Opus Numbers unreliable guides to the chronology of his works: not only was an early work given a higher number to make it seem more mature, because Dvořák was now having successes with several new works, he went through the pile of rejections and sent some of them out to new publishers. This time, they snapped them up.

(Incidentally, his earliest symphonies were never published in his lifetime and the latter ones not in their correct chronological order. When the other ones were brought to light, modern publishers back in the mid-20th Century decided to renumber them, leading to a generation’s confusion with “Symphony No. 7 [Old No. 2]” or “Symphony No. 9 [Old No. 5].” But I digress…)

However, when Hans Richter tried to program Dvořák’s new 6th Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, the anti-Bohemian sentiment among the Viennese musicians strongly opposed the idea and so the work was withdrawn.

Though people loved his dances inspired by folk music, the fact he was a Bohemian (essentially a provincial hick, in cosmopolitan Vienna’s eyes) writing symphonies was similar to the American literary elite’s reaction to, say, a red-neck attempting to produce the Great American Novel. Long gone were the days when many of Mozart’s respected colleagues were Bohemians.

Hanslick and others had urged Dvořák to leave Prague and center his career – as Brahms and Beethoven had done before him – by moving to Vienna but his national pride made him refuse their offer, “acutely aware of the way his people suffered under the Hapsburgs and of the continuing animosity of the and condescension of the German-speaking people toward the Czech nation.”

His 6th Symphony, despite the reluctance in Vienna, was well received in Leipzig and his choral music – large-scale works like Stabat Mater – was all the rage in England. London commissioned him to write a new symphony – his 7th, in D Minor, resolving to make it “a work,” he wrote, “which would shake the world.”

Suggestions he write a German opera rather than a Czech one were met with a large-scale opera based on the incident of the False Dmitri of Boris Godunov fame, if not Czech, at least still a Slavic story. But it was still rejected by Vienna’s opera companies: this time he was told, “the people were rather tired of five-act tragedies.”

“What have we two to do with politics,” he wrote to Simrock when he was told he needed to spell his first name “Anton,” in the German style. “Let us be glad that we can dedicate our services solely to the beautiful art. And let us hope that nations who represent and possess art will never perish, even though they may be small. …[A]n artist too has a fatherland in which he must also have a firm faith and which he must love.”

Three months after his 7th Symphony was such a success in London, Dvořák began work on his Piano Quintet in A Major (Op. 81). He was now touring as a conductor of his own music – Budapest, London, Dresden. He was invited to teach at the Prague Conservatory (he waited two years before he accepted their offer). In June, 1889, Dvořák (now pushing 50) was awarded Austria’s Order of the Iron Crown and received an audience with the Emperor as a result.

He had just finished a number of other works: his Piano Quartet in E-flat, Op. 87 and the Symphony No. 8 in G, Op. 88.

In 1891, invited by Mrs. Jeannette Thurber to become the Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, Dvořák made a kind of farewell tour with some of his latest works: the “Dumky” Piano Trio and the Carnival Overture.

At this point, I’ll leave the story – how he wrote his New World Symphony and the “American” Quartet, two of his most frequently performed works and then, before returning to Prague, starting his B Minor Cello Concerto (generally regarded as the cello concerto) which had been inspired by hearing a cello concerto by an Irish cellist-turned-composer/conductor named Victor Herbert, later conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony and winning more enduring fame as a composer of operettas.

While the 7th Symphony may be his first break-out international success, it's usually overshadowed by the more tuneful and leisurely 8th and practically everything else he wrote is overshadowed by the ever-popular 9th, the "Symphony from the New World." The Piano Quintet is one of his most frequently played chamber works but what makes it a success while the Piano Quartet written two years later is not played nearly as much as it should be?

When I was teaching at the University of Connecticut back in the mid-1970s and I'd mention something like this, a student would invariably ask "How do you write a masterpiece?"

"If I knew the answer to that," I said, "I wouldn't be teaching at the University of Connecticut..."

– Dick Strawser

Into the New Year with Stuart & Friends, Part I: Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

Now that all the various end-of-the-year holidays have come and, largely, gone (and hopefully we have all survived them), we face the New Year with a program billed as “Stuart and Friends” – and what better way to spend time than with friends – which includes two very different works. Join us on Sunday, January 5th, at 4:00 at Market Square Presbyterian Church as music director of the Harrisburg Symphony, Stuart Malina, celebrating his 25th Anniversary with the orchestra, plays chamber music with clarinetist Richie Hawley, violinists Alexander Kerr and Peter Sirotin, violist Michael Isaac Strauss, and cellist Julian Schwarz in the Quartet for the End of Time by French composer Olivier Messiaen, and the Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major by Antonin Dvořák. (Oh, and I’m told there is supposed to be a surprise on the program but I can’t tell you about it because, well… it’s a surprise.)

These two works were both premiered in very different Januaries in very different eras. Dvořák’s Piano Quintet which concludes the program (I’ll cover it in a separate post which you can read here) was first heard in Prague on January 6th, 1888, three months after its completion, during an era between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the start of World War I in 1914 known as the Belle Époque. 

Messiaen’s Quartet was given its first performance on January 15th, 1941, at Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi prison camp located near the present-day borders of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, before some 5,000 fellow prisoners-of-war (or so the story goes).

It is impossible to separate the music you’re about to hear (“experience” might be the better word) from the conditions in which it was composed and premiered. Inspired by a passage from the Bible’s Book of Revelation (Rev10:1–2, 5–7), which includes the line, “that there should be time no longer.” It is not so much the concept of the Apocalypse which the connection with Revelation might suggest, but this concept of “the end of time.” Is it significant the original title Messiaen chose was Quatuor de la fin du Temps ("Quartet about the End of Time") – see the program booklet cover, below – which he later changed to Quatour pour la fin du temps (“Quartet for the End of Time”)? How does a composer convey a sense of Timelessness?

Here are a few facts culled from the Carnegie Hall website’s post from 2021, “Five Things to Know…”: 

Messiaen was called to active duty by the French Army in 1939, serving as a hospital nurse. Soon after, he was captured by German troops and sent to Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany. According to violinist Jean Le Boulaire, who performed in the quartet’s premiere, conditions in the camp were harsh: Nearly 50,000 French and Belgian prisoners were huddled in 30 barracks built to hold 500 prisoners each. Prisoners were underfed and unprotected from the brutally cold weather.

“When I arrived at the camp, I was stripped of all my clothes, like all the prisoners,” Messiaen said. “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.”

Some of the movements made us of material from earlier works Messiaen had composed. “The Intermède (Interlude) was the first movement completely written in the camp, and it was rehearsed in the camp’s bathroom.”

While there are no contemporary records of the premiere, the story goes that cellist Êtienne Pasquier played an instrument with only three strings and that five thousand prisoners attended the premiere. In an interview done shortly before his death, Pasquier said his cello actually had all four strings, and an audience of approximately 400 prisoners and German officers attended the first performance. Messiaen’s piano did have keys that would randomly stick when played, and conditions in the hut that also served as the camp’s theater were freezing. One of the prisoners designed a program booklet (see photo, above, stamped with the prison's permission).

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Given Messiaen’s title, a typical first reaction is, “I expected something apocalyptical, but I got something heavenly and beautiful.”

This performance at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing, includes the former music director of the New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert (violin), with friends Carter Brey, (cello), Anthony McGill (clarinet), both principal players in the Philharmonic, and Inon Barnatan (piano), recorded in 2021.

The composer added his own commentary to the published score which Lucy Murray quotes in her program notes (in case you want to follow along during the performance as the piece progresses) and which I will quote here (compared to what I’ve found on-line, I prefer her translation’s more poetic nuance). 

Some of the technical description the composer provides might prove baffling so just let it slide by… In addition to his religious mysticism, especially as it translates into music, Messiaen also makes use of Hindu rhythms, the ideas that pitches as well as rhythms can be played in longer or shorter durations – his “augmentations and diminutions” – and also in palindromic phrases. Above all, he has always been fascinated by the sounds of nature – note especially the different layers, each instrument playing independent lines, of the opening movement; then compare that to the “Dance of the Seven Trumpets” where all four instruments play a single line in unison. The two movements marked louange – the first with cello; the second with violin, accompanied by a heartbeat of soft, timeless chords in the piano – also balance each other.

I. (at 1:13) – "Liturgie de cristal" (Crystal Liturgy) – Four in the morning, the wakening of birds; a solo blackbird extemporizes, surrounded by sounding dusts, by a halo of trills which lose themselves high in the trees symbolizing the harmonious silence of heaven. Transpose this to the religious plane: you will have the harmonious silence of heaven. The piano provides a rhythmic ostinato based on unequal augmentations and diminutions – the clarinet unfolds a bird song.

II. (at 3:53) – "Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" (Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time) – The first and third parts evoke the power of that mighty angel, his hair a rainbow and his clothing mist, who places one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. Between these sections are the ineffable harmonies of heaven. From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords [Messiaen saw colors when he heard music, a phenomenon called synesthesia] encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant recitative of the violin and cello.

III. (at 9:08) – "Abîme des oiseaux" (Abyss of the birds) – Clarinet solo. The abyss is Time, with its sadness and tediums. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant outpouring of song! There is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird-songs (desire of the eternal light).

IV. (at 16:12) – "Intermède" (Interlude) – Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references.

V. (at 17:54) – "Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" (Praise to the eternity of Jesus) – Jesus is here considered as one with the Word. A long phrase, infinitely slow, by the cello, expiates with love and reverence on the everlastingness of the Word. Majestically the melody unfolds itself at a distance both intimate and awesome. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

VI. (at 25:37) – "Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes" (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets) – Rhythmically the most idiosyncratic movement of the set. The four instruments in unison give the effect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse attend various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announces the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of extended note values and augmented or diminished rhythmic patterns. Music of stone, formidable sonority: the movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or ice-like frenzy. Listen particularly to the terrifying fortissimo of the theme in augmentation and with change of register of its different notes, toward the end of the [movement].

VII. (at 31:48) – "Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" (Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time) – Here certain passages from the second movement return. 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 in to 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!

VIII. (at 38:49) – "Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus" (Praise to the immortality of Jesus) – Expansive violin solo, balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. 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 surpreme 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.

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The title – with its apocalyptic implications – may seem an odd work to begin a New Year (say what you want about the expectations of the year ahead). Yet despite those implications, the end result, I think, is one of hope. After all, considering the circumstances under which it was written – and especially the sheer “not knowing” of what was to come – it should give us all hope, whatever the convictions of our own beliefs (religious, political, or otherwise).

I conclude this post with notes from a post for an earlier performance (which may duplicate some of the details above). But first, I include a You-Tube audio of that 1956 recording Messiaen made with the original cellist, his fellow prisoner, from the premiere along with two additional performers replacing the violinist and clarinetist. It is worth listening to just for the historic nature of its cast – after all, one doesn’t always get to hear composers performing their own music, much less recreating (at least in part) the memories of such a cathartic premiere!

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You would think a composer planning a work inspired by an apocalyptic theme – nothing less than the End of the World as we know it – would write it for a vast orchestra with a huge brass section (with at least seven trumpets), probably numerous choruses and several vocal soloists to give proper weight and power to the terrifying words of the last book of the Bible.

At the time of the premiere of this work, Olivier Messiaen (photographed here in 1946) was a prisoner-of-war which had something to do with why such a piece of music – complete with a “Dance for the Seven Trumpets” – was composed for only four instrumentalists.

The first people to perform and to hear this amazing music were not sitting in a famous concert hall in Paris but in a Nazi prison-camp on a cold day in January, 1941. Scored only for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it was called “Quartet for the End of Time.”

Born in 1908, Olivier Messiaen was recognized as one of the greatest composers in the world when he died in 1992, at the forefront of New Music at often as he was an outsider. His style changed as he evolved – as did Stravinsky’s or Beethoven’s – and he introduced concepts from the wider world into his own musical vocabulary – as did Debussy or Bartok – that creates an innately unmistakable voice (as do any of those lucky enough to be considered Great Composers). 

At heart, a “Catholic Mystic” who brought a bit of the Medieval Past into the 20th Century Present long before the pop world became fascinated by Gregorian Chant (a music fad long faded from memory, now), he also absorbed serial techniques and applied them to aspects of music other than just the notes. He built vast structures out of smaller building blocks borrowed from Indian music. He collected the songs of birds from around the world and quoted them in his music as other composers collected and quoted folk-songs. Time, in many of his works, stands utterly still whether it’s in the static meditations of his opera, St. Francis of Assisi or the ecstatic whoops in some of the wilder moments of his Turangalila Symphony. The Quartet is certainly his most famous single work and probably the most frequently performed: every time it is, it’s an event to experience.

Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is a long work in eight movements that alternates between despair, terror and, despite the implications of the title (especially in this day and age), hope. With its emotional sweep, this is a work that must be as emotionally draining to play as it is difficult technically to perform. One of the biggest challenges, after all that, is for the clarinetist and the cellist to sit absolutely still during the final movement so as not to distract from the violinist and the pianist!

The clarinet’s solo movement, “The Abyss of the Birds,” covers an enormous dynamic range between the low-register despair of the abyss itself and the contrasting innocent-sounding bird-song which is the element of hope: beginning almost imperceptibly, the sound grows sometimes to a roar, sometimes to a wail, without ever distorting its core. The two serene movements, the meditations on Jesus’ eternity and on His immortality, are almost motionless but with an intensity that underscores the simplicity of the music to bring out its interior ecstasy, supported just with simple steady chords, the pulse behind the music but also the world-force that rises at the climaxes to drive the music into another sphere of awareness.

There are, considering the subject with many of the movements’ titles taken from The Book of Revelation, more violent moments as well – the Dance of Fury for the Seven Trumpets where everyone plays in unison or octaves throughout (no harmony) and the next-to-last movement depicting the angel who announces the End of Time – that in some performances sounded more apocalyptic to me than I thought possible with only four players and more fearsome than I remembered them in the several live performances and recordings I’ve had the chance to experience since I first heard the work when I was a student at Susquehanna University in the early-70s.

This is music Olivier Messiaen composed while being held as a prisoner-of-war in a Nazi prison camp in World War II. The music is inspired by lines from the Revelation of St. John (most of Messiaen’s music in based directly or indirectly on his strong Catholic faith). How do you write a piece like this, with its implication of the end-of-the-world, when you are a prisoner-of-war in a Nazi prison camp? If you’ve ever been distracted from something you really needed to focus on, perhaps by the radio in your co-worker’s cubicle, the every-day sounds of life coming from your neighbors, or the incessant jangling of the telephone, multiply that by the questions and privations of living (if one can call it that) in a prison camp! This was not a concentration camp – Messiaen was in the army and had been captured by the Germans following their invasion of northern France – but it was, still, a prison camp, and the composer, his performers and his audience were all prisoners. I can think of no other great musical work of art that came about under such circumstances.

The story Messiaen tells may be slightly different from the reality of the events themselves. The instruments were certainly not in the best shape: he said the piano was missing some keys and then there is the legendary cello with only three strings which may have been a partial fabrication of the composer’s memory (the cellist apparently chided Messiaen later for this little-white-lie, saying “I had four strings and you know it”). He and the cellist met the clarinetist, Henri Akoka, on the train while the prisoners were being transported to the prison. Akoka had his clarinet with him and the first performance of the solo clarinet movement of the Quartet, “The Abyss of the Birds” (or at least a draft of it), took place in an open field during their move from France to Stalag VIII-A in Silesia (now in Poland).

The idea of the entire work appears to have begun before Messiaen was captured: the “Abyss” may have been composed en route to the prison. What could be more of an abyss than being in a train herded across Europe to an unknown future? It is true that the commandant of the camp cut Messiaen some slack and German guards supplied him with manuscript paper and pencils so he could compose. It is also true, ultimately, that Messiaen, a recognized composer even before his incarceration, was released because of his status as an artist, and the other three musicians of that performance were released with him. Though the clarinetist, a Jew, would survive the war, his father would die in another Nazi prison camp, one that had become a concentration camp instead.

The musical language is Messiaen’s own, absorbing Hindu rhythms to create great palindromic phrases that ebb and flow in units of time outside the standard Western Classical vocabulary, melodies that are built on scales of an equally exotic nature and harmonies that, on one hand, are based on “non-traditional” chords that have their own inner logic and tension but, on the other hand, can often be pure traditional triads, sometimes with added notes that remind one of popular songs from the ‘20s and ‘30s.

At one of those “talk-back” session at a performance I heard years ago, now, one questioner asked about this language and remarked that, for a composer who had won a conservatory prize in counterpoint (the art of creating a harmonically integrated fabric out of recognizably independent musical lines: you might think of a round as its most innocent form, or a fugue as a more intellectual conception), there was almost "no counterpoint in this piece."

True, in the more limited 18th Century sense of the word when "counterpoint" was synonymous with "Bach." But in the Quartet's opening movement, for instance, Messiaen creates a sense of suspended time with each instrument playing an independent and virtually unchanging line without apparent reference to one another, a “temporal” counterpoint not too far removed from the opening of Schubert’s expansive C Major String Quintet, another work that manages to suspend a listener’s sense of time, with its interior line of long sustained chords moving slowly in between the cello in the bass and a bird-like line of the first violin.

This is just one element of the variety of textures Messiaen employs throughout his great musical arc: as it begins with time suspended in the liquid flow of all four instruments, it ends with the simple heart-beat-like pulsations of the piano’s supporting chords for one final meditation rising to the heavens and ultimately beyond the scope of our hearing and our earthly experience.

In a 2004 article in the New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross wrote of this music, “In the end, Messiaen’s apocalypse has little to do with history and catastrophe; instead, it records the rebirth of an ordinary soul in the grip of extraordinary emotion, which is why the Quartet is as overpowering now as it was on that frigid night in 1941.”

It is a long work, as I mentioned, but how long in most performances I’ve been lucky to hear, I couldn’t tell you: if the performers manage to translate Messiaen’s transcendence of time with the proper intensity, it becomes but the flash of a moment, one that may live long in your memory.

-- Dick Strawser