Liturgie de Crystal

Vocalise pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps

Abîme des oiseaux

Intermède

Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus

Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes

Fouillis d’arc-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps

Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus

Messiaen composed his Quartet for the End of Time during his captivity as a Prisoner of War at Stalag VIII-A in the autumn of 1940. With three fellow-prisoners to write for – a violinist, cellist and clarinetist – he began by composing a short movement for them to play without piano – the ‘Intermède’. Once the camp authorities had found Messiaen a piano, he set to work on a piece that explores the possibilities of the unusual ensemble in typically inventive ways, using the four instruments together on only a few occasions. The clarinet plays a long solo (‘Abîme des oiseaux’) while the cello and violin each have a slow movement with piano – the two ‘Louanges’, both of which Messiaen recycled from works he’d composed in the 1930s: the Fête des Belles Eaux for the 1937 Paris Exposition and the Diptypque for organ. The first performance of the Quartet took place on 15 January 1941 in one of the camp huts, to an audience of a few hundred prisoners. The audience was either entranced or baffled by what they heard on that extraordinary night. A review in the camp newspaper likened the occasion to the premiere of The Rite of Spring, noting that “it’s often a mark of a work’s greatness that it has provoked conflict on the occasion of its birth.”

Nigel Simeone © 2012