Quartet for the End of Time
In a prisoner-of-war camp in 1941, Messiaen wrote a quartet about eternity for broken instruments.
Related
Time and place
15 January 1941, at Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp near Görlitz, Silesia. He was held there as a French soldier, and the premiere was in a cold barracks before prisoners and guards.
What happened
Captured in 1940, he met a violinist, a clarinettist and a cellist in the camp and wrote eight movements for them and piano. The camp had no proper instruments. The cello was missing a string, the piano pedals and keys were unreliable. The work takes Revelation 10 as its frame, with movements titled after birdsong, the abyss and eternity. The fifth movement, Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus, lets the cello sing over long piano chords.
What changed
Music written under extreme conditions did not need to be grand; damaged instruments could carry a whole sense of time. Messiaen brought his modes of limited transposition and added rhythms into one work, which became his international starting point. Chamber music proved it could be a testimony, not a salon or concert-hall item.
Listen to the turn
Begin with the fifth movement, where cello and piano stretch time. Then Webern's piano variations, where a contemporary packed stillness into a short span. Finally the night music of Bartók's Out of Doors, where darkness and strange colour are imagined. Three kinds of quiet, three answers to time.
Related
This turn belongs to Modern; see Mode, and Clarinet and Cello.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Sources
- Grove Music Online, entry "Quatuor pour la fin du temps" — premiere, instruments and movement titles checked, not quoted
- Nigel Simeone, Olivier Messiaen, A Musical Biography (Yale University Press) — camp context checked, not quoted
Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.