For The End Of Time
June 2012
In 1988, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), the most influential and widely-performed French composer of the latter half of the 20th century, visited Australia for the first and only time.
He was ostensibly here to participate in an extensive festival of his music, but almost immediately on arrival he was whisked into the bush for some bird-watching. Or rather, bird listening, for Messiaen was a keen and sympathetic observer of these animals and their music, and transcribed their songs – they fly through his own compositions, where he depicts not only their songs but also their plumage and habitats. The birds including the lyrebird, the butcherbird and, of course, the kookaburra, that Messiaen heard in the bush around Sydney and Canberra found their way into his last major orchestral piece, Eclairs sur l’Au-Déla (Illuminations of the Beyond). In this epic cycle of devotional movements by the deeply Catholic composer the birds sing to the glory of God, the avian concert reaching its peak in the movement called ‘The Various Birds of the Tree of Life’ where the Australians are joined by their cousins from Papua New Guinea, Singapore, New Zealand and India.
Messiaen was certainly not the first to encompass nature in his music, or to use it as a metaphor of the divine, but the precision, detail and pervasiveness of his bird music is unprecedented. Messiaen’s music is an attempt to evoke the vastness and timelessness of God, harmony as a force of nature. Consequently, Messiaen’s music is at once disorienting and beatific: designed to dissolve the listeners’ ego into the cosmic flux (sometimes with outright eroticism) but radiating serene confidence. Messiaen was perhaps the one modern artist who never doubted his faith, even when interred in the Görlitz gulag during the World War II. This imprisonment was a turning point that led him to compose one of the greatest works of the 20th century, Quatour pour le Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time). The imagery of the work’s eight movements comes from the Book of Revelations, but in the confines of a POW camp in the depths of the winter of 1941, Messiaen might well have thought that his end was immanent too. Three of his fellow inmates were musicians – a clarinettist, a cellist and a violinist – and so Messiaen composed a trio for them to perform.
Eventually, the piece expanded into a quartet when a piano was brought to the camp by a sympathetic guard. Messiaen hadn’t composed much small ensemble music before, and the limitations imposed by circumstances spurred his resourcefulness. The music he wrote for this unusual assemblage of instruments seems much bigger than the sum of its parts, big enough to evoke the end of the world. It begins with birds, those heralds of the divine, impersonated by clarinet and violin, while underneath the cello and piano expound an inscrutable set of chords and rhythms, independent of one another. These two instruments are a carefully devised musical mechanism, which grind against each other like gears. This machine is constructed so that the parts would sync up again after two hours – a virtual eternity – though the movement is cut off after three minutes. It all hints at something bigger than humanity, an implacable but benign force. Messiaen’s music often moves with glacial, rapt slowness, Infiniment lent, extatique (infinitely slow, ecstatic) is a fairly typical instruction (conversely, sometimes his music is hyperactively quick, there’s just nothing in between). These tempos attune the audience to the beyond, but also make this music a special challenge to musicians who must move with yogic control and discipline. The concentrated inwardness required to perform the Quartet casts an additional halo around the work, which radiates into the auditorium. In the next movements, the angel which announces the end of time appears. Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his Duino Elegies that ‘every angel is terrifying’ and Messiaen’s are no different, but their fierce dances are dispelled by a final ‘Paean to the Immortality of Jesus’, a gentle cradle song which dies away in the stratospheric heights of the violin and piano.
The work was premiered in the camp in January 1941 on a day so cold that the piano keys kept sticking in the barely-above-freezing Barrack 27. The entire camp of 500 inmates assembled (sick prisoners were stretchered in and placed on the floor) to hear this strange, time-stopping music. Thirty or so years later a pianist was boarding with an elderly architect in Warsaw and was practicing for a performance of the Quartet. The old man rushed into the room demanding to know what piece it was because it sounded familiar. It emerged that this man had been in that first audience and had never forgotten the work. Messiaen’s recollection is simple and eloquent: “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”
The Australian Chamber Orchestra performs The Quartet for the End of Time and Schubert’s Trout Quintet at Melbourne Recital Centre, 16, 22, 23 July.
Robert Murray is Director of Marketing and Customer Relations at Melbourne Recital Centre.
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