music rev. of interest to GR readers

[pynchonoid]

REVELATIONS

by ALEX ROSS

The story behind Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of
Time.”

Issue of 2004-03-22
Posted 2004-03-15


The most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth
century was first heard on a brutally cold January
night in 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-wa 
camp, in Görlitz, Germany. The composer was Olivier
Messiaen, the work “Quartet for the End of Time.”
Messiaen wrote most of it after being captured as 
French soldier during the German invasion of 1940. The
première took place in an unheated space in Barrack
27. A fellow-inmate drew up a program in Ar  Nouveau
style, to which an official stamp was affixed: “Stalag
VIIIA 49 geprüft [approved].” Sitting in the front
row—and shivering along with the prisoners—were the
German officers of the camp.


The title does not exaggerate the ambitions of the
piece. An inscription in the score supplies a
catastrophic image from the Book of Revelation: “In
homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his
hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no
longer.’” It is, however, the gentlest apocalypse
imaginable. The “seven trumpets” and other signs of
doom aren’t roaring sound-masses, as in Berlioz’s
Requiem or Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, but
fiercely elegant dances, whose rhythms swing along in
intricate patterns without ever obeying a regular
beat. In the midst of these Second Coming jam sessions
are episodes of transfixing serenity—in particular,
two “Louanges,” or songs of praise. Each has a
drawn-out string melody over pulsing piano chords;
each builds toward a luminous climax and then vanishes
into silence. The first is marked “infinitely slow”;
the second, “tender, ecstatic.” Beyond that, words
fail.


Last week, the Met Chamber Ensemble, an all-star group
from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, played the
Quartet at Carnegie’s Weill Hall. I arrived with some
mighty spiritual sounds ringing in my head; earlier
that afternoon, at Lincoln Center, Philippe Herreweghe
and assorted Franco-Belgian forces had presented
Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” and the same conductor
had led Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” two nights
before. Messiaen’s quiet answer to the ultimate
questions of fear and faith stayed with me the
longest, not because he was a greater composer than
Bach or Beethoven but because his reply came out of an
all-too-modern landscape of legislated inhumanity. In
the face of hate, this honestly Christian man did not
ask, “Why, O Lord?” He said, “I love you.”



The clarinettist Rebecca Rischin has written a
captivating book entitled “For the End of Time: The
Story of the Messiaen Quartet.” Her research dispel 
several long-cherished myths about the 1941 première.
As Messiaen told the story, he and three friends
performed under the most trying circumstances—usin 
dilapidated instruments, including a three-stringed
cello—and won the hearts of five thousand hardened
soldiers. In fact, the instruments, while inferior,
wer  adequate to the task, and the crowd was more like
three hundred. In Rischin’s telling, the Quartet is
less a triumph of individual genius and more a
collectiv  creation. Messiaen wrote every note,
certainly, but the music would never have existed
without the collaboration of the prisoners—and
guards—of Stala  VIIIA


Rischin lovingly brings to life the other
musicians—Étienne Pasquier, cellist; Henri Akoka,
clarinettist; and Jean Le Boulaire, violinist—who
played with Messiaen, the pianist at the première. You
can sense something of their personalities in the
instrumental parts of the Quartet. Pasquier was a wry,
gentle man who might have had a major solo career if
he had desired one. Akoka, as vibrant and
unpredictable as the Quartet’s long clarinet solo,
“Abyss of the Birds,” was an Algerian-born Jew who
survived the war through blind luck and mad courage.
He tried several times to escape, and, in April, 1941,
he succeeded: while being transferred from one camp to
another by train, he jumped from the top of a
fast-moving cattle car, with his clarinet under his
arm. Le Boulaire, moody and withdrawn, later abandoned
the violin for acting. He took the name Jean Lanier
and appeared in New Wave films such as “The Soft Skin”
and “Last Year at Marienbad.” When Rischin interviewed
him, she perceived him to be a bitter, unhappy man,
but at the mention of Messiaen’s Quartet his eyes
brightened. “It’s a jewel that’s mine and that will
never belong to anyone else,” he said.


Then, there was the quasi-angelic figure of
Karl-Albert Brüll, a music-loving guard at Stalag
VIIIA. Excited by the presence of a significant
composer, Brüll gave Messiaen pencils, erasers, and
music paper, and had the composer stationed in an
empty barrack so that he could work undisturbed. A
guard stood at the door to turn away intruders. After
the première, Brüll arranged for Messiaen’s rapid
return to France, conspiring in the forging of
documents. A German patriot with anti-Nazi tendencies,
he kept a sympathetic watch over Jewish prisoners,
repeatedly advising them not to try to escape, because
they would be safer in Stalag VIIIA than in Vichy
France.


Several decades later, Brüll came to Paris and rang at
Messiaen’s door. For reasons that remain obscure,
Messiaen declined to see him. Perhaps he didn’t
remember who Brüll was; perhaps he was unable to
confront this apparition from the past. He eventually
tried to correct his mistake, and sent a message to
the man who had made his masterpiece possible. But it
was too late: Brüll had died, after being run over by
a car.



"There shall be time no longer.” How did Messiaen
understand this eerie phrase? First, it had for him a
precise musical meaning. By 1941, this composer o
longer wanted to hear time being beaten out by a dru
one, two, three, four; he had had enough of that in
the war. Instead, he devised rhythms that expanded,
contracted, stopped in their tracks, and rolled back
in symmetrical patterns. Such music is heavenly to
analyze but devilishly difficult to play. The Met
Chamber Ensemble—Nick Eanet, violinist; Rafael
Figueroa, cellist; Ricardo Morales, clarinettist; and,
in a guest appearance, the veteran new-music pianist
Christopher Oldfather—worked at the highest level.
What they lacked was the total unanimity that makes a
great performance of the Quartet seem like a
mind-reading séance. (The group Tashi achieved this in
an as yet unsurpassed recording, on the RCA label.)
Still, the Met musicians were a joy to hear, not only
in the Messiaen but also in pieces by Mozart, Debussy,
Webern, and Berg, with James Levine joining in on
piano.


For Messiaen, the end of time also meant an escape
from history, a leap into an invisible paradise. Hence
the hypnotically simple E-major chords in the two
“Louanges.” The postwar avant-garde composers who
studied with Messiaen—Boulez, Stockhausen,
Xenakis—wanted to eradicate all traces of the old
world, but their teacher was not afraid to look back.
In fact, Messiaen based the “Louanges” on two of his
prewar compositions—“Oraison,” from a piece titled
“Fête des belles eaux,” for six Ondes Martenot, one of
the first electronic instruments; and “Diptyque,” a
1930 piece for organ. The scholar Nigel Simeone tells
us that “Fête” was written for the Paris Exposition of
1937, one of whose attractions was a “festival of
sound, water, and light.” Women in white flowing
dresses played the Ondes in conjunction with
spectacular fireworks and fountain displays. The
opening phrase of the first “Louange” originally
accompanied a colossal jet of water.


It is disconcerting to associate the Quartet with
Moulin Rouge-style production values. But Messiaen
always took joy in skating between the mundane and the
sublime. He loved God in terms that were sensual,
almost sexual. Human love and divine love were not
opposites, as they are for so many close readers of
the Bible, but stages in an unbroken progression. One
undulating phrase in the final “Louange” is marked
“avec amour.” Eanet, the Met’s brilliant young
concertmaster, played with the lonely ardor of a
forgotten Paganini working in an empty café. This is
the music of one who expects paradise not only in a
single awesome hereafter but also in the happenstance
epiphanies of daily life. In the end, Messiaen’s
apocalypse has little to do with history and
catastrophe; instead, it records the rebirth of an
ordinary soul in the grip of extraordinary emotion.
Which is why the Quartet is as overpowering now as it
was on that frigid night in 1941.

<http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/?040322crmu_music>

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