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?
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
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