Day Twelve: Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Given the precarious situation that we all find ourselves in, yesterday evening’s concert live from the Wigmore Hall was a deeply moving and inspiring affair. The Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective took to the stage at extremely short notice to give a stunning performance of the Quatuor pour la fin du temps by Olivier Messiaen. In their words: “Given the many twists and turns of this past year, we wanted to offer music that provides a chance to reflect on whatever emotions we might be processing at the moment.”

The piece premiered on January 15, 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp, in Görlitz, Germany, where the composer had been confined since his capture in May 1940. The Quartet is in eight movements and is scored for piano, violin, cello and clarinet, the only instruments (and players) that were available to the composer in the rather unbelievable circumstances that he found himself in. Messiaen dedicated the work “in homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse who raises his hand towards Heaven saying ‘There shall be no more time.’ ” Indeed, the individual movements all take their name from the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament.

In contrast to a lot of Western music that prefers stricter rhythmic structures and adherence to meter, Messiaen’s desire to have the clarinet and the violin, in parts, to imitate the flight, freedom and song of a bird leads him to use highly unpredictable and ever-changing rhythmic patterns. This is evident in the first motif we hear in the clarinet, introducing an element of rhythmic instability from the very beginning. It is this main thematic idea, given by the clarinet at the beginning, which will weave its way in and out of the rest of the piece, providing a leitmotif of sorts to the freedom of a bird, something which given the circumstances of the composition is a rather sobering thought.

The first movement is characterised by highly flowing lines, haunting in character with rather eerie harmonic glissandi in the celli. The second movement is a stark contrast, the music violent and tormented. Interestingly, it is very seldom that the four instruments play altogether in this piece, the texture often just being duos, trios and, in the case of the third movement, a long solo for the clarinet.

The “Abyss of the Birds” is an extraordinarily difficult movement for the solo clarinet, not least for the tempo marking of quaver=44. Messiaen writes: “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.”

The fourth movement is a nimble scherzo for the violin, cello and clarinet, some of the melodic ideas of the first movement reappearing to bind the movement to the rest of the work. The fifth movement is a highly emotive moment in the work, the composer employing just the cello and the piano to play a sequence of long, disembodied phrases, sometimes with no clear underlying beat.

The sixth movement, the dance for the seven trumpets is the most vivacious, rhythmically speaking, of all of the movements. Unusually for this piece, the quartet plays in full and Messiaen himself comments:

“Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece of the series. The four instruments in unison imitate gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse followed by various disasters, the trumpet of the seventh angel announcing consummation of the mystery of God) Use of added values, of augmented or diminished rhythms, of non-retrogradable rhythms. Music of stone, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness. Listen especially to all the terrible fortissimo of the augmentation of the theme and changes of register of its different notes, towards the end of the piece.”

The seventh movement sees a lot of material from the second movement appear again, the angel coming back to announce the end of time. Again the cello takes centre stage at the opening of this movement before there is a musical contest, a tournament of suffering between the four instruments. Eventually, the work culminates in a second eulogy, a counterpoint to the solo cello movement. The violin begins its excruciatingly slow ascent to the extremes of its register, the musical depiction of the child of God ascending to his Father. With the work finishing in almost silence, it really does give the listener the chance to reflect on the deeper aspects of life.