Quatuor pour la fin du temps

No. 351 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast351

 
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January 15 marks the 80^th anniversary of the first performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet For the End of Time) for cello, piano, clarinet, and violin. The work was composed in a POW camp in Nazi-controlled Silesia.

Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered World War II. He was captured by the German army in June 1940. Not surprisingly, some of Messiaen’s fellow detainees were professional musicians; clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire  and cellist Étienne Pasquier. He managed to befriend a sympathetic guard and obtain some paper and a small pencil. Messiaen wrote at first a short trio for them; this piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio with himself at the piano. The combination of instruments was unusual at the time, but not without precedent: Walter Rabl had composed for it in 1896, as had Paul Hindemith in 1938.

This is how the composer recalled its premiere in early 1941: 'The Stalag was buried in snow.  We were 30,000 prisoners (French for the most part, with a few Poles and Belgians).  The four musicians played on broken instruments … the keys on my upright piano remained lowered when depressed … it’s on this piano, with my three fellow musicians, dressed in the oddest way … completely tattered, and wooden clogs large enough for the blood to circulate despite the snow underfoot … that I played my quartet.'

This recollection has been challenged by many, including the other members of the quartet: while Messiaen remembers thousands in the audience, the camp hall could hold at most 500; his piano was not as imperfect as he describes; and his insistence that the cellist only performed with three strings has been repeatedly denied by the cellist himself.  Nonetheless, few dispute the significance of the work itself, one of the most important to be produced in the 20th century.

Messiaen and Etienne Pasquier (cellist at the initial premiere) later recorded the quartet on LP for Club Français du Disque (1956), together with Jean Pasquier (violin) and André Vacellier (clarinet).

Two other works complete the montage. Cantéyodjayâ is a work for piano written in 1949.The work's compositional bases are the Hindu rhythms often found in Messiaen's work. The composer's research into Hindu rhythms was based partly on the 120 rhythms listed in the thirteenth-century Sangita Ratnakara of Sarangadeva. The score includes names that are taken from this work, and also from Carnatic musical theory.

The five rechants form the last part of the "Trilogy of Tristan" after Harawi and the Turangalîla-Symphonie . The title of this work refers to the Printemps by Claude Le Jeune , “a masterpiece of choral writing and a masterpiece of rhythm” according to Messiaen. As in this work, verses (songs) and refrains (rechants) alternate. The melody has its source in the harawi or yaravi , a folk love song from Peru , and in the alba , a dawn song from the Middle Ages.

I think you will love this music too.