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 January 1941—The End of time?
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Page 1 - Page 2 The premier of the Quatour took place in January 1941, in the Stalag. The performers included the previously mentioned trio with the addition of the composer at an upright piano. Of the premier Messiaen writes, After my lecture, they brought in an upright piano, very out of tune, and whose key action only worked intermittently. It was on this piano, with my three fellow musicians, dressed very strangely, myself clothed in the bottle-green uniform of a Czech soldier, badly torn, and wearing wooden clogs…that I was to play my Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, in front of an audience of five thousand, among which were gathered all the different classes of society: peasants, laborers, intellectuals, career soldiers, medics, priests… 5The title, Quatuor pour la fi du Temps, is a reference to chapter 10 of the book of revelation. The score is inscribed, “in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises a hand towards Heaven saying: ‘There shall be time no longer.’” This idea of “the end of time,” can be seen, and heard, in a number of ways. There is the theological aspect; Messiaen’s lifelong devotion to the Catholic faith provides the inspiration for the piece. There are the circumstances of Messiaen’s imprisonment; the end of time is not an abstract concern to the prisoner of war. Finally, there is the structural aspect. The techniques employed by the composer actively conspire to negate a conventional sense of time in the experience of music. As Paul Griffiths has noted, the “end of time” is achieved sonically through a number of innovative musical means: […] by strongly repetitive forms, circling through the same events; by the “modes of limited transposition,” which dissociate diatonic chords from their normal functions; by processes of potentially enormous duration (“Liturgie de cristal”); and by extremely slow tempos (the two “Louanges”). 2For Messiaen, these areas, the theological and the musical, were inseparable. As the composer said, “Without musicians, time would be much less understood.” |
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