Quatuor pour la fin du temps

It is one of the most extraordinary works in 20th-century music, not least because Messiaen was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner of war camp in Görlitz, in German-controlled Silesia, when he set about writing this piece. The guards had allowed Messiaen to keep a bag of miniature scores, pencils, rubbers and music paper. And so he composed, conceiving the new work for the four instruments that were available to him—cello, clarinet, violin and piano—and drawing on the talents of three other professional musicians who were imprisoned at the camp: clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier. It is impossible to imagine how deeply this sublime music—performed on broken instruments with Messiaen at the piano—would have touched those who first heard it, when inmates and Nazi guards crowded into a freezing cold barracks that day in January 1941. Even in isolation, without the knowledge of the composer’s struggle to bring the work into being, it possesses a profoundly haunting beauty. Suffused with his Christian faith, each of Messiaen’s eight movements is inspired by the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. At the outset we hear the composer’s love of birdsong as dawn breaks in “Liturgie de cristal”, and between lively movements come oases of ethereal calm: in the intensely questing cello line that fades into otherworldly harmonics in ”Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus", for example, or the plaintive violin melody that transcends time in "Louange à l'Immortalité de Jésus".