Quartet for the end of time (Messiaen)

Olivier Messiaen - Quaturo pour la fin du temps (1941)
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Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Inspiration
This work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation and it is quoted in Messiaen's Preface in the score.
"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 ... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth .... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever ... that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished ..." (Rev 10:1–2, 5–7, King James Version)

Messiaen's notes on the first movement
"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."

Story
Messiaen was a composer living and writing in France during World War II. Eight months after the beginning of the war, Germany invaded France and took the country in a month. Messiaen was captured by the German army in June of 1940 and sent to a prisoner of war camp in modern day Poland. While waiting to be transported to the camp, Messiaen met up with Henri Akoka, a world class Algerian Jewish clarinetist, and Jean le Boulaire, a violinist. Messiaen had been working on a score for a new piece for solo clarinet and Akoka sight read, complaining about the difficulty the whole time. When the arrived at the camp, Messiaen found Étienne Pasquier, a cellist. Messiaen managed to acquire a small amount of paper and a tiny pencil from a sympathetic guard named Carl-Albert Brüll. Over the next months, Messiaen wrote Quatuor pour la fin du temps, known in English as Quartet for the End of Time, a piece for clarinet, violin, cello, and himself on piano. 

Messiaen's notes on the second movement
"The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of this mighty angel, a rainbow upon his head and clothed with a cloud, who sets one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. In the middle section are the impalpable harmonies of heaven. In the piano, sweet cascades of blue-orange chords, enclosing in their distant chimes the almost plainchant song of the violin and cello."

Premier
On January 15, 1941, the piece was premiered at the camp outdoors and in the rain. The instruments they used were decrepit, some smuggled in by the guard, Brüll, and the and some bought by donations from fellow inmates. Messiaen later recalled that, "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension." Brüll helped in the liberation of the performers by forging papers with a stamp made from a potato shortly after the initial performance.

The end of time
This is the most hauntingly beautiful piece of music that I have ever encountered. My dad introduced it to me when I was much younger and explained the story to me as he knew it. Since then the piece has been an ever-present part of my musical life. The story behind the composition of the piece gives the listener such a vivid sense of where the music is coming from that it is impossible to not feel the power of it. I thought this would be the best way that I could present my final blog post, as it is, as the title suggest, for the end of time.