Track Listing

1. Quartet For The End Of Time: Liturgy of Crystal
2. Quartet For The End Of Time: Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of Time
3. Quartet For The End Of Time: Abyss of the birds
4. Quartet For The End Of Time: Interlude
5. Quartet For The End Of Time: Praise to the Eternity of Jesus
6. Quartet For The End Of Time: Danse of Fury, for the seven trumpets
7. Quartet For The End Of Time: Cluster of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of Time
8. Quartet For The End Of Time: Praise to the Immortality of Jesus

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #740 in Music
• Released on: 1989-08-11
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
This all-star chamber ensemble was specifically formed to play Messiaen's masterpiece. Two decades after this recording was made, it still shows the effects of their intense identification with the music. Some listeners find Messiaen's music longwinded and difficult, and my own opinion varies depending on the work and my mood. But this piece, written in a German concentration camp during the early years of World War II, is truly one of the greatest works of music of the 20th century. Although it lasts nearly an hour, its variety of color and its powerful expressiveness will engross any responsive listener, especially in this performance. --Leslie Gerber

Customer Reviews

Beyond Time
Not long ago, I listened to Olivier Messiaen's *Quartet for the End of Time* for the first time. I did not know what to make of it when it started, but by the time it ended it had made a deep impression. Since then I have listened to it several times more. Without the description provided by Messiaen, I wonder how many listeners would have guessed what the quartet was all about, or called it one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. I can't prove it, but possibly critics would have called it an interesting experiment. Yet the music taken together with its explanation (including the circumstances under which it was composed) communicates a compelling vision. I have attempted to convey some of Messiaen's vision with the aid of quotes from his description (as translated in the liner notes from the original French).

The music itself is unusual. Not only the choice of instruments (violin, cello, clarinet and piano), but the way Messiaen used them, is striking. The full quartet performs in only four of the eight movements that comprise the work. The piano has no part in the brief fourth movement; the fifth movement is for cello and piano only; the eighth movement mirrors the fifth, but this time is for violin and piano; and the third movement - lasting for about eight minutes - is for solo clarinet only. We know that music often expresses emotions, but here Messiaen apparently tried to express visions he had of celestial colors, of rainbows, of the vast cosmos. He related sound to vision. I give fragments of what he wrote: "... amid notes of shining sound and a halo of trills..." (on the first movement); "From the piano, soft cascades of blue-orange chords..." (2nd mvmt); "Music of stone ... as huge blocks of livid fury or icelike frenzy" (6th mvmt); "I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpretation of superhuman sounds and colors. These fiery swords, these rivers of blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: Behold the cluster, behold the rainbows!" (7th mvmt).

The third movement, 'Abyss of the birds', with its eloquent clarinet solo, provides an important key for interpreting the whole. Messiaen writes, "The abyss is Time, with its sadness and tedium." A new and strange idea, at first. Abyss is a spatial term, even when used figuratively. But here the abyss is time with a capital T, not depth. The birds or what they stand for - "they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant outpourings of song!" (in contrast to sadness and tedium) - are trapped in time, awaiting release. In that sense, then, time is the abyss from which there is no escape, not by our own powers. Messiaen based his work on an excerpt from the New Testament Book of Revelation, Chapter 10. Part of the excerpt reads, "There shall be time no longer, but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God shall be consummated." In that only is the release.

Messiaen, a deeply religious Roman Catholic, was a prisoner of war in a German camp during World War II when he wrote the quartet, and had experienced the "sadness and tedium" of time, in addition to suffering the harsh conditions. We can only imagine how that must have affected his thoughts, emotions and creative effort. He dreamt of release - from prison, surely, but perhaps more so from the confines of time - and expressed it in the music. The last movement, 'Praise to the immortality of Jesus', ends with the solo violin, accompanied by soft piano atonal notes, rising upward, upward, ever more faintly, upward. "Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise."

Is Quartet for the End of Time an interesting experiment? Let the listener/ interpreter decide. I think it is much more than that, although I am always wary of using superlatives such as "greatest" or "best". I will add that this was not the only time Messiaen expressed himself in this manner. About eight years earlier, he had composed *L'Ascension* (The Ascension), a set of four pieces that he termed Meditations. The last of these depicts the prayer of Christ rising toward his Father, a reference to verses taken from the Gospel of John, Chapter 17. There, as in the last movement of the quartet, the music keeps rising upward, toward heaven as Messiaen intended to signify. His religion was integral to his life and, inevitably, to his modes of expression.

Fin
I gave my copy of this (favorite) album to my favorite music professor -- now I have to replace it! Other reviewers have stressed the history behind the composition and its premiere in a Nazi POW camp, so I won't go into that, interesting and pertinent as it may be. Other reviewers have focussed on the fact that Messiaen was a devout Catholic mystic, implying that the listener must share the composer's religious convictions in order to fully appreciate his artistic expression. However, because this is a work of art, listeners will hear in it beauties unique to their own sensibilities. The listener can be a complete atheist and respond emotionally to Messiaen's passionate, idiosyncratic, and heart-wrenching composition. This is a piece that brings tears to my eyes and makes me intellectually curious too; I want to get the score so I can see how Messiaen works his magic. It's emotional, odd, intense, riveting, and harmonically sophisticated, right up there with the best of the 20th Century composers' works.

A great work, a Catholic work
This recording of the "Quartet for the End of Time," one of the greatest musical works of the 20th century, is precious to me. Performers Peter Serkin (piano), Ida Kavafian (violin), Fred Sherry (cello), and Richard Stoltzman (clarinet) offer a stunning, heartfelt performance. Olivier Messiaen, a Frenchman born in 1908 who demonstrated an early gift for music as a pianist, composed the piece in a Nazi prison camp for the few instruments he had available, including an out-of-tune piano on which he performed, a violin, a cello, and a clarinet. Imagine. World War II was obviously a dark time, and Messiaen went into the army with some rations and a few musical scores that he kept in his backpack. Not to diminish his suffering, but he was not treated as poorly as Jewish prisoners were in the death camps. He was not made to work in total starvation, nor was he deprived of all contact with the outside world (he was able to write home and have supplies sent to him). However, being a Catholic mystic, Messiaen sensed that the rise of the Third Reich signified the Apocalypse as prophesied in Revelations. Germans being Germans (they do love their music, after all), the camp guards allowed him to perform this piece in the camp with the group of musicians he assembled. His astonishing music captures not only that desperation and discord of the earth's final days, but also the redemption that can only be found through Our Lord Jesus Christ. However, you do not have to be a Christian to feel or understand the power in this music. Christianity has inspired the best music in Western culture (those "scientists" and "mathematicians" and "philosophers" who misguidely try to secularize J.S. Bach are wrong), and while Messiaen's music speaks for itself, his explanation for the final passage of this quartet is eternal: "Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus -- to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love. Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise." Amen to that, son, which is an important message for today's youth.