Today marks the 67th anniversary of a miracle—one which Michael Linton, writing in First Things some time ago, suggested is “the greatest artistic miracle of our times.” On January 15, 1941, in the Nazi POW camp Stalag VIII-A at Görlitz in Silesia, the great French Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen, a prisoner in the camp, premiered his Quatuor pour la fin du temps (“Quartet for the end of time”). Messiaen, who had been given time, space, and resources by the camp commandant to enable him to write, composed the quartet for himself (on piano) and three other musicians among the prisoners, a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinetist.
What makes the work miraculous is not only the place and time in which it was written, but its character. As Linton writes:
In the midst of chaos, Messiaen wrote about the apocalypse in a completely “unapocalyptic” manner. In the previous century, the sequence from the Requiem Mass had given composers the opportunity to unleash all the thunder they could muster to depict the horrific details of God’s day of accounting. Berlioz and Verdi had both written depictions that chill—or more honestly perhaps, thrill—us to this day. And not too long after Messiaen’s quartet was completed, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Britten, and Penderecki would write pieces expressive of the horrors of the Nazis and their war, music full of screams, howls, and cries for righteous justice against the oppressor.
But Messiaen has no place for such neo-pagan hysterics. In the middle of a prison camp, a prisoner unsure if he would ever again see his family or home again, Messiaen composed a vision of heaven where anger, violence, vengeance, and despair are not so much repressed as irrelevant. This work has nothing to do with war, or prison, or “man’s inhumanity to man.” This piece is entirely about the work of God and the glory of Jesus. There is no darkness here. There is no bitterness. There is no rage. Instead there is power, light, transcendence, ecstasy, and joy eternal.
Messiaen’s music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, by any means—it’s modern music, for one thing, and then it’s modern in a different way from most of the music of this past century; but this is a beautiful and powerful piece that deserves to be appreciated. I’m not going to put all of it up (it’s a fairly long composition, in eight movements), but here’s a taste or two. This is a video of the first movement, “Liturgie de cristal”:
Here’s the fourth movement, “Intermède”:
And the fifth, “Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus”:
It’s great music, even if it isn’t to everyone’s taste; but just as much, and something we can all appreciate, it’s a powerful testimony to the way in which the love and the grace of God can overcome human evil.