Quartet for the End of Time

Olivier Messiaen

1909-1992, France

"In his Guide to Chamber Music, Melvin Berger calls Olivier Messiaen a person who always went his own way. Starting at age eight, he taught himself to play the piano and to compose. At the Paris Conservatoire, he garnered all the traditional prizes, even as he devoted himself to the study of complex Hindu rhythmic patterns and became proficient in recognizing and notating bird songs and sounds-two skills that profoundly influenced his musical style. But the overriding inspiration for many of his most important compositions derives from his profound religiosity, and from his deep, mystical attachment to the Catholic Church.

Throughout his years as church organist, teacher, member of the French Army in World War 2 (including 2 years in a German prisoner of war camp, and professor, Messiaen continued to compose music.  He produced an impressive list of major orchestral works along with many choral, piano and organ compositions.

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time is judged by many to be his finest work, one of the most important of all twentieth-century chamber compositions and perhaps the most significant piece of music to come out of the experience of World War 2.  While imprisoned in Silesia, he turned to composing to help him survive what he termed the "cruelty and horrors of the camp."  The unusual scoring of this piece was determined by the talents of fellow prisoners-a violinist, a clarinetist, a cellist-with himself as pianist. The four men first performed the quartet before an audience of 5,000 other inmates on January 15th, 1941. "Never," Messiaen later said, "was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."

Messiaen based the quartet on a quotation from the Revelation of St. John, Chapter X, verses 1 to 7, which follows below along with the composer's description of the music.

"I saw a mighty angel descend from heaven, clad in mist; and a rainbow was upon his head. His face was like the sun, his feet like pillars of fire. He set his right foot on the seas his left foot on the earth, and standing thus on sea and earth he lifted his hand to heaven and swore by Him who liveth for ever and ever, saying There shall be no time longer; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be finished."

1 Liturgy of crystal

Between the morning hours of three and four, the awakening of the birds; a thrush or a nightingale soloist improvises, amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills that lose themselves high in the trees. 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

2 Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time.

The first and third parts (very short) 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 chord, encircling with their distant carillon the plainchant-like recacitivo of the violin and cello.

3 Abyss of the birds 

Clarinet solo. The abyss in Time, with its sadness and tedium. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song! Thee is a great contrast between the desolation of Time (the abyss) and the joy of the bird-songs (desire of the eternal light).

4 Interlude

Scherzo. Of a more outgoing character than the other movements, but related to them nonetheless by various melodic references.

5 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."

6 Dance of fury, for the 7 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 trumpets  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; movement as irresistible as steel, as huge blocks of livid fury or icelike 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 piece.

7 Cluster 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 envelopes him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, wisdom, of every quiver of luminosity and sound). In my dreaming I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then, following this transitory stage I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars. Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!

8 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 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.

And I repeat anew: All this is mere striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject! "