File Under?

Tonight’s program also commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) with a performance of his ground-breaking work Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time). At first glance, one might not see much see much similarity between Messiaen, a lifelong Catholic and longtime organist at La Sainte-Trinité in Paris, and the Israeli composers presented here. But there is a historical link between them. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was composed in 1940 and premiered on 15 January 1941 at Stalag VIIIA in Görlitz, Germany, where he was held captive as a prisoner of war. The composer played the piano part, performing on an instrument in terrible disrepair. He was joined by instrumentalists who were also fellow captives. The audience on that bitterly cold day consisted of guards and other POWs.Messiaen was fortunate enough to be repatriated in February, 1941, escaping the fate of so many prisoners at the hands the Nazis. But the quartet shares a kinship with stirring works written during the Second World War at other internment camps, such as Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, composed at Terezin. They are symbols of defiance when faced with repression, affirmations of the spirit in spite of the genocidal hatred and brutality of the Nazi regime. Both Messiaen and composers of Israel have had to come to grips with the destruction and havoc wrought during World War II as an intrinsic aspect of their personal histories.     There are musical affinities between the composers on this program as well. Like Messiaen, who based his quartet on scriptural references (from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible), Wiesenberg’s “Like clay in the potter’s hand” is inspired by a religious text, from a prayer traditionally said on Yom Kippur. Ben-Haim’s interest in the scales and rhythms of Middle Eastern music are mirrored in Messiaen’s incorporation of a wide variety of musical resources from both Near and Far East. And all of the composers heard tonight have viewed folksong traditions as a significant touchstone.There is much lore surrounding the circumstances of the creation and premiere of Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen scholar Rebecca Rischin has done a commendable job sifting through the various stories to clarify numerous points in her book For the End of Time: the Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Cornell University Press, 2003). Rischin debunks apocryphal legends about the first performance: that it included a cello with only three strings and a clarinet with a melted side-key, for instance. But where she pares away some colorful anecdotes, she also restores a measure of the astonishment with which the work was greeted in 1941, both in its Stalag VIIIA and subsequent Paris premieres. While few of those in the audience at either of these events probably ‘understood’ the quartet, so novel was its language and approach, we are told by Rischin and elsewhere by Messiaen and others that they were very respectful towards this piece and its performers. Indeed, the composer often said that he had never been listened to more attentively.What made Quartet for the End of Time so astonishing to audiences in 1941 and, correspondingly, makes it such a fresh-sounding piece even for seasoned concert-goers today? A number of aspects of the work are noteworthy: Messiaen’s famous fluency in birdsong, which is found throughout the quartet; his use of harmony, which has a synaesthetic component – it is purported that Messiaen  ’saw’ certain colors when hearing specific chords; his innovative approach to rhythm, which incorporated aspects of both Medieval isorhythms and Indian tâlas. But what is truly staggering about the quartet is the way in which Messiaen is able to combine all these various techniques to suspend the traditional formal constraints and directed trajectory of Western concert music: to give glimpses of eternity by making time seem to stand still. Finally, there is a daring fervency, an overtly programmatic religiosity found in the piece that marks it as something quite unusual, especially for a chamber work in the mid-Twentieth century.It is no accident that, shortly after his return to Paris upon repatriation, Messiaen attracted a number of student followers who were eager to learn more about his polyglot approach to contemporary composition. Numbered among them are composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, the pianist Yvonne Loriod (who would become Messiaen’s second wife), and, later, the pianist Peter Hill and composer George Benjamin. And while Messiaen attracted devotees, one can honestly say that no other composer writes music that sounds like his. This is not for lack of materials to study: there are numerous scores and recordings of Messiaen’s works in print, as are his multi-volume treatises describing his approach to composition. Yet there is a singularity of application of these various techniques which puts an indelible personal stamp on his music.        The verses upon which Messiaen bases Quartet for the End of Time describe a banishment of temporal reality in favor of an eternity in which “the Hidden purpose of God will have been fulfilled”(Revelation 10:7). The incorporation of a program inspired by the Book of Revelation into Quartet for the End of Time may understandably be a bit off-putting to non-Christians; but it needn’t be if one considers that Messiaen’s ardent Catholicism never extended to parochialism: he was very interested in a wide variety of faiths’ musical and cultural traditions. In addition, it is worth noting that one of the performers at the Stalag VIIIA premiere of the quartet was Henri Akoka, a Jewish clarinetist. According to Rischin, the string players were both lapsed Catholics: one agnostic and one atheist (Rischin, p. 42).