En hommage à l’ange de l’Apocalypse, qui lève la main vers le ciel en disant: «Il n’y aura plus de Temps»

Olivier Messiaen composed the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps in the German prisoner of war camp at Görlitz, in Silesia, and the work had an amazing première: on 15 January 1941 it was played in the camp by the composer with three other deported musicians, Jean le Boulaire (violin), Henri Akoka (clarinet) and Étienne Pasquier (cello), “to an audience of five thousand other prisoners”.
While Europe was living its own Apocalypse, the French composer entrusted his creative will, and the very idea of humanity, to music. With music as the extreme, intransigent tension aimed at truth and justice, the Quatuor illustrates how art can resist, beyond any abyss. Messiaen tells us that he sought that truth using John’s Book of the Revelation, which he quotes in the preface to the score, saying he had been inspired by the holy text:

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 had in his hand a Little Book open: 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 [the trumpet] shall begin to sound, the Mystery of God should be finished….

Maybe there weren’t exactly five thousand listeners at that tragic première, as Messiaen claims, and quite possibly they were not all as attentive either (“Jamais je n’ai été écouté avec autant d’attention et de compréhension”), but the sense of the work remains, hovering out over the abyss of desperation to recuperate memory and hope. And its value remains too, even though it was an assemblage of earlier compositions. The Intermède comes from a trio for violin, clarinet and cello; the two Louanges are transcribed from memory from the Fête des belles eaux for six Ondes martenots (1937) and arranged from the second part of the Dyptique for organ (1930); there are also some bits of the Danse de la fureur based on L’Ange aux parfums taken from Les corps glorieux (1939). However, neither these details, nor the anomalies of form and substance erase our conviction that the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is increasingly seen as an emblem of the relationship between the moment in history in which it was so dramatically conceived and the transcendental eternity of the values it has come to convey, in the composer’s own intentions at the time and at a critical reading later.
In the first movement all four instruments play together, from the black hole of non-sense, shooting out bird calls, one of Messiaen’s typical touches. The quartet comes apart in the second movement, where the violin and cello play in unison over chords on the piano, with the clarinet coming in only at the beginning and at the end. The third movement is a clarinet solo, its timbre mutating in extenuating melodic evolutions until the long notes start to hypnotize us. The fourth is a short scherzo for a three instruments, again with parts in unison.
The first Louange – “to the Eternity of Jesus” – is a painful dialogue between the cello and the piano.The sixth movement is marked by corrosive rhythm and violent unison sections. The seventh, in episodes, is a chaotic assembly of sound. The second Louange – “to the Immortality of Jesus” – pushes the violin and piano beyond their uppermost limits, as if in ecstatic witness of the Word.

Monica Luccisano