Eight-four years ago today, 15 January 1941, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia, a remarkable first performance took place. Remarkable enough for being a performance of modernist chamber music in that very difficult context that the story does not need the embellishments and additions that have accrued to it. The composer himself used to say that the ‘cello used was missing two of its four strings, though the ‘cellist himself suggests that that was not only untrue but simply unrealistic given the difficulty of the music.

For the purposes of this blog, even more remarkable because the composer was the faithful Catholic Olivier Messiaen, who claimed that his music’s value all lay in the illumination of the truths of the Christian religion, and indeed specifically that his music was ‘theological’ (rather than mystical or spiritual). For this reason (not to mention the tastes and expertise of the writer) it seems likely that Messiaen will feature again on this site.

Our topic, though, is not the dramatic story of the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, but the ways in which it engages with theological ideas. The imagery of the movement superscriptions are predominantly taken from the biblical book of Revelation, as is the title, which references the angel who announces ‘that there should be time no longer’. That is the Authorised Version: the Greek reads ὅτι χρόνος οὐκ ἔσται έτι. Aside from the implication modern readers might bring to the auxiliary ‘should’ – given that the Greek verb is future indicative (shall/will be), the translation is quite literal. While the idea of time no longer passing is relatively unintuitive – and many commentators suggest that the idea is better conveyed as ‘no more delay’ rather than no more existence of time – it is quite clear that Messiaen himself wanted to understand the verse as a cessation of time – inherently difficult to convey in a temporal medium such as music.

It is also clear that, as a faithful Catholic, Messiaen did not think of this end as a point of disaster, but of fulfilment and hope: apocalyptic (that is, pertaining to the book of the Revelation, called Ἀποκάλυψις in Greek) imagery can be violent and is often very strange, but the association of the end of the world with disaster is a secular one. For Messiaen the end in the sense of termination is closely bound up with the end in the sense of purpose and direction.

What about the music can reflect these theological observations? The first thing many people point to is the ostinati in the first movement: the piano and the ‘cello both repeat pitches and rhythms, though in sequences of different prime numbers, such that a full cycle of the plan in which pitches and durations would recur would take a lot more time than the movement is allowed. This implies the incompleteness of the temporal situation in which the music is played, and unsettles the cyclical nature of time as we experience it.

The other observation is that the two slow movements for solo strings with piano accompaniment, each called a louange, both reuse music from elsewhere. One of them is based on music for a light and water festival for which Messiaen had written music for the electronic instrument Ondes Martenot. The water reference engages baptism as the route to eternal life. The other louance borrows a melody from the second half of an earlier organ diptych which meditated upon the contrast between the chaotic nature of earthly living and the serenity of heaven.

The title of the first movement identifies it as a liturgy. The liturgical references in Messiaen’s music are a significant part of what enables it to function as theological – liturgy being theology-in-action, another theme we are likely to return to. His music reflects a theology of time which takes up the ‘eighth day’ nature of liturgical time – perhaps the opening of this post celebrating the anniversary of this performance should stand corrected by a higher notion of the nature of time than that encapsulated in a mere repetition of regular cycles?