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For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet

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It was January 15, 1941, in the midst of a very bloody World War, and a very cold winter. In Gorlitz, Silesia, Germany, the temperature routinely dipped below -22 degrees Fahrenheit. In Stalag VIII A, something without precedent was happening: Olivier Messiaen, a renowned French composer and prisoner of war, was premiering his newest work, a chamber piece destined to be considered one of the greatest works of the twentieth century, Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time, written - of course with the help of a couple of sympathetic German officers, the composer had even to be given pencil and paper, after all -- while he was a prisoner of war at that stalag.

I must first issue a disclaimer. I own this quartet. I also own Messiaen's "Catalog d'oiseaux," ("Catalog of Birds," the composer loved birds) and Olivier Messiaen: Turangalīla Symphony; L'ascension. I listen to them, and I love them. They are modernist, and I don't understand them. In fact, though I own, listen to, and love quite a bit of recorded classical music, I don't understand much of it. The piano teacher of my teenage years, Roz Strumpf, made Herculean efforts to teach me music theory: I clearly remember poring over the score of Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony with her. But I found it so much easier and more fun to understand rock and roll at that time. SO: don't expect a technical discussion of this work of art, in eight movements, lasting nearly an hour, from me. Rebecca Rischin, a professor of music at Ohio university, and a talented musician herself,has done a great deal of research, and interviewed many people, to make this story available, largely for the first time, in this book. Thanks to her efforts, I am equipped to discuss the music's remarkable, too-little known history, as she conveys it: and only that.

The Quartet's composition and debut must rank as one of the great uplifting World War II stories: a triumph of human faith --Messiaen seems to have been born a religious Roman Catholic---and endurance in the worst of circumstances. However, before we embark on this, we must recognize that, desperate as stalag conditions were, even granting fully the multitudes of unfortunate prisoners of war that died in them; they were not the Nazi death camps. You cannot equate a stalag to Auschwitz. That being said, it's time to quote Messiaen himself:

"Conceived and composed during my captivity, the `Quartet for the End of Time'was premiered in Stalag VIIIA, on 15 January 1941. It took place in Gorlitz, in Silesia, in a dreadful cold. 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: Etienne Pasquier's cello had only 3 strings; the keys of my upright piano remained lowered when depressed.... It's on this piano, with my three fellow musicians, dressed in the oddest way - I myself wearing a bottle-green suit of a Czech soldier - completely tattered, and wooden clogs large enough for the blood to circulate despite the snow underfoot... that I played my `Quartet for the End of Time,' before an audience of 5,000 people. The most diverse classes of society were mingled: farmers, factory workers, intellectuals, professional servicemen, doctors [and] priests. Never before have I been listened to with such attention and understanding."

To quote the author Rischin,"This was a special occasion indeed, and the camp commandant ensured that it would be remembered as such. He ordered programs to be printed listing the name of the camp, the title of the composition, the name of the composer, the date of the premiere, the names of the performers, and the camp's official stamp,'Stalag VIIIA gepruft'[Stalag VIIIA approved]....these programs also served as invitations to the historic event."

Rischin's researches make clear that the composer began work on this quartet before his imprisonment, and that 5,000 men could not have squeezed into Barrack 27, used as the theater. Etienne Pasquier, when interviewed, insisted that his cello had the requisite four strings - he couldn't have played it otherwise, and that Messiaen had exaggerated a bit in that regard, as well. Rischin continues," Recounting the war..., the actions of a kind German officer, the miraculous premier,...Messiaen's subsequent fame, and the heavenly music that united them all in a time notorious for unimaginable barbarism, Pasquier, then 90 years old, remarked: `C'est un roman policier. Mais, c'est vrai, cette histoire.'[It's a detective novel. Only, it's a true story.]" Who could say it better?

In my last performance of the "Abyss of the Birds" from the quartet, I used what I learned from reading this book, both in my performance of the piece and in my introduction to the audience. It really changed the way I approach and think of this piece. (I have studied the piece extensively in the past, when I performed the whole quartet.) The author includes information from her research that you can't find elsewhere. You really get to know the original performers and their experience at Stalag 8A. Highly recommended.

By illuminating the personalities and circumstances of the Quartet's composition, first performance, and eventual place as a seminal 20th Century work, the author increased my appreciation of it as no amount of musical analysis could have. This story needed to be told, and perhaps what is most surprising is that no one had conducted research on this level or interviewed the participants before. In the end, the Quartet is about the incredible richness and beauty of life. This book is indispensable for anyone interested in Messiaen or the Quartet.

FOR THE END OF TIME is Rebecca Rischin's story of Olivier Messiaen's piece "Quatuor pour fin du Temps", written mainly when the great French composer was imprisoned in Stalag VIII A as a prisoner of war in 1940-1941. While many people connected to the quartet are now deceased, Rischin was fortunate to interview Etienne Pasquier, the cellist, and Jean Le Boulaire, violinist. Since Henri Akoka, who performed clarinet, passed away in the early 1970s, she interviewed his family.

There is little analysis of the music, and nary a score sample can be seen. For those wishing to know more about the actual music, I'd recommend Anthony Poole's work (Cambridge University Press, 1998) in the Cambridge Music Handbook series. Rischin is concerned with the environment in which the piece was written. She begins with the composer's meeting Pasquier and Henri Akoka on military service in early 1940. It is there, Rischin shows, that the quartet began. Messiaen had already begun to compose the "Abyss of the Birds" movement, and Akoka performed it for him in the middle of a field after the trio had been captured by the Germans and were awaiting transport to the camp.

The description of Stalag VIII A and the various characters and events there makes up the middle portion of the book. Rischin tracks the writing of the quartet, but notes again that not all of it was written on the spot, as two movements are based on earlier compositions. The story of the work's premier is generally in line with what Messiaen has stated: a freezing makeshift concert hall, an out-of-tune piano whose keys stuck, and an audience of all walks of life who, because of their shared suffering, understood him perfectly. She doesn't stop there, however, but tells of how the four musicians left the camp (Akoka daringly escaped) and what they did after the war. The final chapter, "Into Eternity" attempts to describe how the piece continues to touch the hearts of listeners when the generation in which it was composed passes away. Two appendices are provided, one begin Messiaen's own preface to the work, and the second a discography.

The book attempts to correct some of the distortions spread by Messiaen himself about the piece's origins, including that it was played "before thousands" (the barracks serving as concert hall held only around 400 people). However, I find it strange that she relied so much on the testimony of the composer's widow Yvonne Loriod, for Mrs. Loriod did not meet the composer until after his liberation and wouldn't know anything about the writing of the piece beyond what the untrustworthy Messiaen had told her. Beyond that, I found that Rischin's book contained enormous amounts of repetition, which is very noticiable in a work of hardly more than 100 pages. It could have used tighter editing and review by other scholars; there are some mispellings and a non-standard transliteration scheme for Sanskrit which could have easily been ironed out. There is also a hero-worship which is inappropriate in an academic work.

If you love Messiaen's quartet, a great work which served as a basis for the much greater works which were to come over the following fifty years, I'd recommend first the book by Poole, which will expand one's appreciation of the piece greatly. Rischin's history can be left to those who want to read everything possible about the quartet.

Rischin's book is not mainly a musical analysis of Messiaen's masterpiece and was not intended to be one. As other reviewers here have pointed out, there are excellent books devoted to that subject.

Her study instead is a "biography" of the quartet and the musicians who made it happen, not just Messiaen himself, but the other three original performers as well. All four were remarkable people and survived a horrible period of history, midwifing this musical gem almost by accident.

Rischin is a distinguished clarinetist herself and has performed the quartet multiple times. (I've never heard her performances.) There are several outstanding ones available here on Amazon as recordings. My personal favorite is that of the Tashi Quartet.

Rebecca Rischin masterfully describes the terrible ordeal that confronted Messien when he wrote and presented his Quartet -The End of Time while he was a POW in a German camp.
She gives musical insights into the complexity of Messien and his music. She also brings to life the differing personalities of the three musicians-violints, cellist and clarinets who performed the quartet on January 15 1941 in barracks of Stalag V!!!.