Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Ross takes a moment to single out this recording as the finest of this work, saying: "The group Tashi achieved [the total unanimity that makes a great performance of the Quartet seem like a mind-reading seance] in an as yet unsurpassed recording on the RCA label."

The last sentences of the Ross piece are wonderful: "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."

The sound given the artists is as truthful, lean, and haunting as their performance.

[Running time: 47:25]

The work that Messaien composed in the face of this titanic evil was not a work of anger or bitterness. It was not a work of resignation to an inevitable fate or a hymn to depression. Messaien chose to represent, musically, the end of all things, as described in the Book of Revelations in the Bible. In its austerity and its serenity, the Quartet informs the Nazis: You are in control now, in this place, at this time, but your control is not absolute. Your Reich will not last 1000 years. You may attempt whatever you like and kill millions, but your time will be done, and you will be banished to nothingness.

Messaien hid his message behind the context of the Book of Revelations, which he interpreted not in the fashion of modern day "born again" fundamentalists, but in a mystical way, as a spiritual event that had resonance in his time. What was Hitler but an Anti-Christ, a beast attempting to set himself up as a God? Messaien called upon the power of the Word and set it to music, a music that was intended to work as a memory of redemption, a reminder that evil cannot, and will not, triumph over good no matter how profound the evil may be. It is also the sound of a man calling on his God to avenge the evil that has overtaken the world. If the Nazis had truly known what Messaien was telling them, they would have shot him.

Musically, Messaien was forced to write the Quartet for the instruments he had available to him. He also had to take into account that the instruments were half-broken; for example, the piano that was used in the original performance was missing strings and therefore there were notes that it could not play. Messaien wrote with all this in mind, and with his subject matter in mind.

The Quartet is definitely a 20th Century work. Messaien had been writing works outside of the accepted "classical" form for some time, but here he abandons time signatures, uses extreme chromaticism and wide tonal variations, sweeps of dynamic range, and unexpected, perhaps unprecedented, tonalities and atonalities.

But he did all this with focus. So many 20th Century composers made music that seemed an academic exercise. Messaien, here, uses every musical expression in his power, every type of music that he knows how to write, every sound that he hears in his head, to write the Quartet for the End of Time, in the service of God and Man and Freedom. This sets the Quartet utterly apart, in my mind, from any other piece of 20th Century classical music, and elevates it to a higher level than nearly any other 20th Century music. Only the musician Albert Ayler would come close to expressing the kind of intense spirituality combined with overwhelming musical technique expressed here.

I can only add here that this performance, by these artists, is and has been the definitive performance of the Quartet for the End of Time, and that they bring this music to life with conviction and clarity.

It feels cheap and commonplace to tell people that they should "own" this piece of music; it is far too majestic to be "owned" in any sense by anyone. The Quartet for the End of Time is one of the most profound works of art that the human race has ever produced. You should have this, not out of any sense of acquisitiveness or one-upmanship, but because it provides a doorway into the heart of God and the heart of humanity that is nearly unparalleled in the history of music.

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