Quatuor pour la fin du temps

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Quatuor pour la fin du temps, also known by its English title Quartet for the End of Time, is a piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. It was written in 1941 and is generally regarded as one of his finest works.

1 Composition and first performance
2 Inspiration
3 Structure
4 Further reading

[edit] Composition and first performance

Messiaen had been captured by the German army during World War II and was being held as a prisoner of war. Finding a violinist, (Jean le Boulaire), a cellist (Étienne Pasquier) and a clarinetist (Henri Akoka) among his fellow prisoners, he wrote a short trio for them. He later wrote the Quatuor for the same trio, plus himself at the piano. This combination of instruments is unusual, but not without precedent: Walter Rabl had composed for the same forces in 1896, and Paul Hindemith in 1938. The Quartet was allegedly premiered to an audience of 5,000 fellow prisoners of war and prison guards in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany (currently Zgorzelec, Poland.) on January 15, 1941: but there is reason to suspect that the audience may in fact have been much smaller. Messiaen later recalled the occasion: "Never have I been heard with as much attention and understanding."

[edit] Inspiration

Messiaen wrote in the preface to the score that the work was inspired by text from the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation:

"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…"

[edit] Structure

The work is in eight movements.

I. Liturgie de cristal (Liturgy of crystal) - for the full quartet

Messiaen described the opening of the quartet as:

‘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’ – Quatuor Pour La Fin Du Temps - Preface (english translation)

And so the opening movement, Liturgie de cristal, begins with the solo clarinet imitating almost literally a blackbird's song. This is soon passed on to the violin that imitates the nightingale’s song.

While the melodies and ornamentations are left to the clarinet and violin alone in this movement the underlying pulse is kept by the cello and piano. The cello plays the same fifteen note melody continuously using only the notes C, E, D, F# and Bb. Another point of note on the cello melody is that it is also palindromic, that is to say it is the same backwards as it is forwards.

The piano line is made up of a seventeen-note value rhythm but this time consisting of twenty-nine chords. Unlike the cello however this is simply repeated over and over.

It is thought that Messiaen chose to give the accompaniment these lines to enhance the feeling of timelessness, with no set beginning or end.

II. Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps (Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time) - for the full quartet

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 violoncello.

III. Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of birds) - for solo clarinet

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.

A test for even the accomplished clarinetist, Messiaen's extremely slow pulse (quaver = 44), diverges rhythm from the common perception of regular metric musical time. As it has no written time signature, it is implied that the performer is to play 'out of time', but not out of rhythm. That is to say that the semiotic comprehension of musical time is to be ambiguous. This 'stillness' in the piece is not only to freely interpret the 'sadness' of the abyss that is 'Time', but also to enforce Messiaen's breakdown of the listener's personal feeling and interpretation of musical pulse. This seemingly paradoxical notion of a movement with continual rhythms as opposed to regular metrical intervals conveys the 'sadness' of 'Time' and the endless void that is its passing.

IV. Intermède (Interlude) - for violin, cello, and clarinet

Scherzo, of a more individual character than the other movements, but linked to them nevertheless by certain melodic recollections.

V. Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus (Praise to the eternity of Jesus), for cello and piano, extremely slow and ecstatic

Jesus is considered here as the Word. A broad phrase, infinitely slow, on the violoncello, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of the Word, powerful and gentle, ... "In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God."

VI. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets) - for the full quartet (in unison)

Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece in the series. The four instruments in unison and octaves take on the aspect of gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse were followed by various catastrophes, the trumpet of the seventh angel announced the consummation of the mystery of God). Use of added [rhythmic] values, rhythms augmented or diminished... Music of stone, of formidable, sonorous granite...

VII. Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps (Mingling of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time) - for the full quartet (same style as II.)

Certain passages from the second movement recur here. The powerful angel appears, above all the rainbow that covers him... In my dreams I hear and see a catalogue of chords and melodies, familiar colours and forms... The swords of fire, these outpourings of blue-orange lava, these turbulent stars...

VIII. Louange à l'immortalité de Jésus (Praise to the immortality of Jesus) - for violin and piano, extremely slow and ecstatic (same style as V. but with melody in the violin range.)

Expansive solo violin, counterpart to the violoncello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second encomium? It addresses more specifically the second aspect of Jesus, Jesus the Man, the Word made flesh... Its slow ascent toward the most extreme point of tension is the ascension of man toward his God, of the child of God toward his Father, of the being made divine toward Paradise.

A typical performance of the work lasts about fifty minutes.

Movement descriptions are translated from the score, which is published by Durand S.A. Editions Musicales, United Music Publishers Ltd. Londres.