Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time

"Birds are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs"

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was an unquestionable musical giant of the 20th century, and he was the ultimate composer whose music was inspired by birds - he wrote enough to fill over 50% of my blogposts, something I might eventually have to do when I run out of ideas. Messiaen to bird-music is like running water to rivers, pollen to bees, Shakespeare to English, Columbo to crime, or Phil Taylor to darts.

As an introduction to Messiaen's bird-music, I'm going to copy everyone else who's ever written about his bird-music, and start with Quatuor pour la fin du temps, the Quartet for the End of Time. 
Originality is massively overrated.

In the Sibelius symphony and the Schubert song I've already written about, they use birds in a non-literal way, there's no attempt to represent birds or their songs with any real accuracy, it's not all that important. But for Messiaen accuracy became everything, birds became his obsession, and in the Quartet for the End of Time you can hear his first stabs at portraying a singing Blackbird and a Nightingale.

The incredible story behind the Quartet's composition has been covered a million times elsewhere - I could easily just add a couple of links - but I need some content to bulk this post up a bit, so I'll copy+paste it out of Wikipedia. To be fair, that's what everyone writing about anything does. Originality is massively overrated.



It was the 15th of January, 1941. The place was Stalag VIII-A prisoner of war camp near the German town of Görlitz on the border with Poland, 20 miles north of what's now the Czech Republic. Of course this is all relative, but to have been captured by the Germans and sent to Stalag VIII-A was almost a blessing, as life seems to have been a lot easier than it was in most German POW camps.

Messiaen, serving in the French army as a medical auxiliary, had been captured at Nancy in May 1940 during the German invasion, and was sent to Stalag VIII-A. Another blessing for Messiaen was Carl-Albert Brüll, a lawyer from Görlitz who worked in the camp as a guard and French interpreter, and it was Brüll who gave Messiaen some paper and a pencil with which he wrote the Quartet. But the greatest blessing of all was that there were three other very good professional musicians in the camp, in particular a Jewish clarinetist Henri Akoka.

On that day in 1941, 5,000 captured soldiers made up an audience that heard Messiaen playing on a battered upright piano with these three other musicians (clarinet, violin and cello) in the first performance of the Quartet. For such a difficult piece of music, conditions were terrible - for a start, Étienne Pasquier's cello only had three strings - but Messiaen later recalled that "Never was I listened to with such attention and understanding."



Great story, but unfortunately it's not true. A few years ago I interviewed the pianist and musicologist Peter Hill for a BBC Radio 3 programme about Messiaen, and Peter is someone who knows more about Messiaen than probably anyone else. Peter told me that if there had been 5,000 POWs in the audience then the performance must have taken place outside, no building in the camp could hold that many people, in which case they would have all died of hypothermia in what was one of the coldest winters of the century. And after Messiaen died in 1992, the cellist finally admitted that not only did the first performance take place inside for an audience of about 300 people (and a lot of them really didn't enjoy it!), but that his cello wasn't missing a string either.



What a shame. I hate it when facts and truth rear their miserable heads and ruin all the fun. Although it's hard to understand why Messiaen conjured up this story about the first performance - I mean, isn't writing a piece of music in a POW camp, having three other professional musicians at hand to play it, and getting any sort of an audience not a good enough story in itself?



The title 'End of Time' comes from the cheery, lighthearted Book of Revelation in the Bible (Messiaen was hardcore Roman Catholic), and the Quartet is in 8 completely contrasting movements. A full performance lasts about 50 minutes. The two videos below are just a tiny glimpse of a massive work. The opening movement is Liturgie de cristal, the Crystal Liturgy, and here's Messiaen's own description of the birds in his music: 

Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven.

It's a fantastic explanation of really beautiful music. The clarinet opens with the Blackbird, and the Nightingale soon joins in on violin. The piano and cello, playing crystalline high pitched harmonics, provide a background which creates a translucent carpet of stillness, presumably that's the "shimmer of sound" and the "harmonious silence of Heaven".





The third movement is the Abyss of Birds for solo clarinet. No bird is specifically quoted (it starts singing at 1:50 in the video below), and it's more of an idealised version of birdsong. Again, Messiaen describes it superbly:

The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.

The use of birdsong in the Quartet for the End of Time is pretty basic compared to how Messiaen's music was to develop in the immediate decades after the war. It was in the 1950s when Messiaen completely threw himself into detailed study of birdsong, and much of his music became totally dominated by birds up until his death. As I wrote earlier, lots more Messiaen to come this year.