Olivier Messiaen

• Born: December 10, 1908, Avignon, France
• Died: April 27, 1992, Paris

Quatour pour la fin du temps (“Quartet for the End of Time”)

• Composed: 1941
• Premiere: January 15, 1941, in the prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany
• Duration: approx. 52 minutes

In 1939, French composer Olivier Messiaen, serving in the French Army, was captured by German troops and sent to the prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany. Living conditions were brutal: nearly 50,000 prisoners huddled in 30 barracks, underfed, and unprotected from the winter cold. The German soldiers considered Messiaen harmless; they permitted him to keep the handful of miniature scores he had arrived with and provided him with writing supplies. Thus, Olivier Messiaen did what he knew how to do: he set pencil to paper and composed music.

Before the war, Messiaen had already distinguished himself as a musician of impressive talent and imagination. Entering the Paris Conservatory at age 11, he had won first prizes in counterpoint, accompaniment, organ and composition. He later recalled that, at the conservatory, he had been the only student who had studied the scores of Schönberg’s Pierrot lunaire and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but that these modernist monuments were not the works that influenced him most strongly. “I was closer to Debussy. I remained loyal to my childhood loves: Debussy, Mozart, Berlioz, Wagner.”

With him in the Stalag were three other musicians: a clarinetist, a violinist and a cellist. Messiaen wrote “an unpretentious little trio,” for them, the Intermède that would eventually become the centerpiece of his Quatour pour la fin du temps. Then he transcribed two of his earlier compositions to append to the trio, and ultimately created the remaining movements that surround it. Each one called for a different combination of instruments, thus the full ensemble of four plays only in the first, second, sixth and seventh movements.

The composer, profoundly religious, chose to pursue the spiritual through his own innovative musical language; indeed, several of his works from the 1930s foreshadowed the religious elements in the musical idiom of his Quatour. He later explained, “This Quatour comprises eight movements. Why? Seven is the perfect number, the six days of Creation, sanctified by the Divine Sabbath; the seven of this rest is prolonged into eternity and becomes the eight of everlasting light, of eternal peace.” Thus, the Quatour represents the complete marriage of the theological with the technical in Messiaen’s view: “Its musical language is essentially immaterial, spiritual and Catholic. Modes which achieve a kind of tonal ubiquity, melodically and harmonically, here draw the listener towards eternity in space or the infinite. Special rhythms, beyond meter, contribute powerfully in dismissing the temporal.”

Each movement of the work corresponds to a passage in chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, cited by the composer in the preface to the published score: 

¹ And I saw another 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:
² and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.
⁵ And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, 
⁶ And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever... that there should be time no longer:
⁷ But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished. [KJV]

The premiere performance of the Quatour pour la fin du temps took place in the camp on the evening of January 15, 1941. For many in the audience it was the first chamber music they had ever heard. For those prisoners for whom Görlitz was just a layover en route to the death camps, it was unquestionably the last. It may well be on behalf of those thousands that Messiaen intended the published dedication, “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises a hand toward Heaven saying: ‘There shall be time no longer.’”

—Dr. Scot Buzza