A grim quartet

Quatuor pour la fin du Temps; Olivier Messiaen, composer; Joshua Bell, violin; Steven Isserlis, cello; Olli Mustonen, piano; Michael Collins, clarinet

I remember how a news crew from KELO TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, once took their cameras, on April 15, to ask the ultimate question to hundreds of people standing in line at the local post office: Why did you wait until today to file your taxes? The news crew received many answers – excuses, mostly. One answer, though, stood out from all of the others: “Oh, I had my taxes done weeks ago. I waited until today so that I could make new friends while I was standing in line.”

The scene was truly pathetic when a new clarinet friend of mine at CCM at the University of Cincinnati asked me, “Hey, Erik. Would you like to play Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet For The End Of Time’ with me and two other people?” Would I?!? It’s only my favorite piece in the whole world!! So beautiful! “Okay,” she said, “You’ve never heard this piece have you?” Um, … no. “Well, then, why did you respond the way you did?” I was afraid you might ask somebody else … and I could use some new friends. Pathetic.

By agreeing to play such a piece without taking the time to investigate its magnitude of difficulty first, I found myself with a bowlful of stiffer cookie dough than I anticipated. The piano part was about as strenuous and complex as anything I had ever tackled. But I got to work on it right away and, pretty soon, fellow piano students who had heard me practicing it in the practice rooms came to me to ask, “How did you find people to play this with you?” I just shrug my shoulders, smiled and said, They came to me.

Olivier Messaien was captured by the German army during World War II and placed in a prisoner of war camp. En route to the prisoner of war camp, M. Messaien met three other professional musicians – a clarinetist, a violinist and a cellist. For these new friends, he wrote a trio which eventually developed into the monumental eight movement work called “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” for piano, clarinet, violin and cello. It was first performed for about four hundred fellow prisoners and prison guards on January 15, 1941. The composer once recalled, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”

M. Messaien, a devout Catholic for his entire life, couldn’t see a positive end of World War II. He was convinced that the apocalypse had come and was haunted and inspired by the passage of scripture from the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire … and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth … And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever … that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished …

Using musical, numerical and theological symbolism, Oliver Messiaen composed a masterpiece of elegance, excitement and optimism.

On a whim, in the summer of 1994, my friends D. and G. convinced me to join them on a visit to Dakau. In many ways it was right to do so. But I wasn’t prepared for it. I don’t know how one prepares for it, but I keep thinking I could have properly tensed and steeled myself for the onslaught of emotions that I encountered. I haven’t recovered. So, I ask you this: Do you recover? and Should you recover?

Credits: To my friend J. for asking me to play the "Quartet For The End Of Time". You guys were great "new" friends.