For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet

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For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet by Rebecca Rischin

The writing and first performance of French composer Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, in a German POW camp in the bitter winter of 1941, is one of the great stories of 20th century music. Ohio University music professor Rischin has gone to heroic lengths to separate the facts from the legends that have grown up about it. Some of these legends, as she demonstrates, were encouraged by the composer himself, who would tell interviewers the whole work was composed at Stalag VIIIA in Silesia, that its form was dictated by the instrumentalists available there (piano, cello, violin and clarinet), that the cellist played with only three strings and that there was a rapt audience of thousands. In fact, Messiaen (1908-1992) had written the work's celebrated clarinet solo, "Abyss of the Birds," some time before with clarinetist Henri Akoka's participation; cellist Etienne Pasquier had his full quota of strings; and the camp building could hold at most 400 or so. Rischin tracked down the elderly Pasquier and violinist Jean La Boulaire (who lived his postwar life as an actor) and also talked to Messiaen's widow and Akoka's surviving family. Oddly, none of them had been interviewed about the occasion, which made the work Messiaen's most celebrated. These interviews show a remarkable picture of life at a desperate time - and of how the German authorities were anxious to show their civilized side to the French. The players come off better than the deeply religious, aloof, rather ethereal Messiaen, who seems to have been so otherworldly as to recoil from life's messiness. This is a fascinating, and finally believable, account of a remarkable occasion.

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Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time premiered on January 15, 1941, in Stalag VIII A, outside of Gorlitz in Silesia. Inmate Messiaen (1908-92), a devout Catholic who chose the prediction of the Apocalypse in the Revelation of St. John to guide his composition, based three movements on earlier-composed material and wrote five in the camp. A friendly German guard provided Messiaen with paper, pen, and rehearsal time with the other inmate musicians. Rischin carefully describes conditions in the camp, how Messiaen was able to compose, the eventual release or escape of the four musicians, and the musical ideas expressed in the quartet's rhythms, tempi, and sonorities. Cellist Etienne Pasquier, principal informant on the quartet's creation, played in orchestras and the Pasquier Trio after the war; violinist Jean Le Boulaire turned to acting; and clarinetist Henri Akoka, who had escaped, played in French orchestras. Pianist Messiaen taught at the Paris Conservatory and resumed playing the organ. A concise book full of insight into a chamber music classic and its first performers.

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Et Messiaen composa... : Genèse du Quatuor pour la fin du Temps de Rebecca Rischin

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Book challenges old myths and uncovers new surprises about famed quartet

May 9, 2008 -- Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” which premiered in Stalag VIIIA on the Polish-German border in sub-zero weather in January 1940, has become one of the most acclaimed and performed works of the 20th century. In May alone, there are two major performances scheduled in New York: one by Mitsuko Uchida & Friends at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on May 17, and another at Town Hall on May 5 by Peter Serkin, who for this concert has reconstituted the quartet he founded nearly 40 years ago specifically to play this music.

Now, debunking or clarifying some of the myths and uncovering new surprises about this work, Rebecca Rischin’s landmark book, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (published in 2003 and updated in 2006), examines the aura of the remarkable work and its historical context. As other writers have before, Rischin reports that for the French POWs, life in this transit camp was difficult, but by no means as hellish as in the death camps. (Even Messiaen himself made this point, when I interviewed him in 1988.) But most especially Rischin also brings into focus two characters in particular, without whom this composer’s life and career might not even have been saved: Henri Akoka and Karl-Albert Brüll.

Messiaen’s fellow prisoner Akoka, the clarinetist, turns out to have been Jewish, and a daredevil in possession of the only musical instrument in the camp. An eternal optimist who charmed everyone, Akoka was an Algerian Jew, a self-taught intellectual and one of a large family of musicians. He insisted that if Messiaen believed God willed him to be a prisoner, he should at least compose something interesting for him and others to perform.

Brüll, on the other hand, was a bilingual Belgian camp guard who happened to be anti-Nazi; he not only made the composing possible, providing scarce paper and isolation for composing, but he also helped acquire the three other instruments. By forging papers with a stamp made from a potato, Brüll even connived for the musicians’ liberation shortly after the performance. The ruse worked for Messiaen and the cellist. The composer made it back to Paris, and within months was installed as professor of harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. He took the place of André Bloch, who was forced out by the Statut des juifs, the infamous Vichy laws that forbade Jews to occupy any position of influence. After the war, Brüll made a special trip to visit the composer he’d helped, but when he arrived at the door, Messiaen sent word, without explanation, that he refused to have him admitted.

Unfortunately, Brüll’s liberation scheme did not succeed for Akoka, as another guard pulled him off the truck at the last moment, surmising him to be Jewish. But Rischin reports that Akoka’s motto was “A prisoner is made for escaping.” After two more attempts, Akoka did manage to get away by jumping from a moving transport train — with clarinet under his arm. At great personal risk, a local doctor hid him for the month it took to heal his injuries from the jump. On May 16, 1941 — the same day that Messiaen sent the score of his quartet to his publisher — Akoka arrived in the French Free Zone to resume his orchestra job. In December 1941, Akoka’s father, Abraham, was arrested by the French police. Messiaen, by this time already installed in Paris, refused to intervene on his friend’s behalf. The police handed Abraham to the Germans, and to his death in Auschwitz.

Akoka lived until 1975. Although he often played Messiaen’s music with the orchestra, there was no personal communication between the two men again, except for a letter of condolence from Messiaen to the Akoka family upon Henri’s death.

A product of apocalyptic time and circumstances, the work was inspired by the apocalypse of the New Testament. A devout Catholic, Messiaen makes overt theological associations within the work that have always raised questions. Rischin discusses the question of whether music can be theological at all, but, curiously, the detailed history has numerous references to the presence of priests (for example, at a talk given before the Stalag VIIIA premiere), of churches etc., that are mentioned only in passing.

Rischin brings back to life the extraordinary people and times behind the “Quartet for the End of Time,” whose creation, she makes clear, could have happened only exactly when it did. And she makes one hear all these voices within this extraordinary, timeless music.

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100th birthday of Messiaen celebrated with a concert series

November 5, 2008 -- Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) had an astonishing debut on the bitter, sub-zero night of January 15, 1941. The venue was the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, on the Polish-German border of Silesia. The audience included about 400 prisoners and prison guards. The 32-year-old composer, a French soldier, had been captured at Verdun during the German invasion nearly a year before.

Bad luck — but maybe not. Messiaen had a special guide and a special protector, besides the divine ones he evoked in his apocalyptic Quartet. Henri Akoka, one of Messiaen's fellow prisoners, an Algerian Jew, was a bit of a wild card and an unquenchable optimist. He possessed the only musical instrument in the camp — a clarinet. He convinced Messiaen, a profound Catholic, that if God had willed Messiaen to be a prisoner, he should at least compose something for them to perform.

Messiaen's protector was Karl-Albert Brüll, a music-loving lawyer fluent in French (his mother was Belgian), who was Messiaen's guard at the stalag. Brüll had given Messiaen pencils, erasers, music paper and, above all, time and solitude to create in an empty barrack. A guard at the door turned away intruders so that the composer could create one of the musical masterpieces of the 20th century.

Stanford audiences will have a chance to experience Messaien's ethereal and otherworldly quartet at 8 p.m. Thursday, November 13, in Memorial Church — the launch of Lively Arts' three-month celebration of the 100th anniversary Messiaen's birth.

The Lively Arts centenary focuses on the life and work of the composer, including two interpretations of the seminal quartet. The first, a traditional performance on November 13, features Scott St. John (violin) and Christopher Costanza (cello) of the St. Lawrence String Quartet with special guests Todd Palmer (clarinet) and Jamie Parker (piano). (Messiaen composed for this unusual combination of instruments because they were the only ones available at the stalag.) The program also features Stanford organist Robert Huw Morgan in selections from Messiaen's substantive output for this instrument, including excerpts from his last major organ work, Livre du Saint Sacrement (1984).

Prior to the performance, at 7 p.m., there will be a free pre-concert talk by author and critic Paul Griffiths, whose book Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time will be republished in paperback by Faber & Faber (London) in late November. The discussion will take place in Room 120 of Building 60.

At 8 p.m. January 28, 2009, cellist Matt Haimovitz, clarinetist David Krakauer (known for his klezmer performances) and DJ Socalled present Akoka, a "Messiaen Remix." Recreating the world premiere of Quartet for the End of Time through the eyes of Akoka, Haimovitz and Krakauer explore the perspective of this Sephardic Jew performing an intensely Catholic-inspired piece for prisoners of war and German officers in a time of terror and upheaval.

At 2:30 p.m. February 22, pianist Christopher Taylor will conclude the series by performing Messiaen's most significant work for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, a sequence of 20 meditations on the theme of the Nativity.

Reflections on the quartet

"I composed this quartet in order to escape from the snow, from the war, from captivity, and from myself," Messiaen said in a later interview. The composer found inspiration in the natural world as well as the spiritual one (he considered himself an ornithologist as much as a musician, and much of his music is based on birdsong) — but the textual jumping-off point for the quartet was the passage in St. John's Revelation where the seventh angel descends, "clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun," and announces "that there should be time no longer."

The "end of time" of the title is not purely an allusion to the Apocalypse, however, but also refers to the way in which Messiaen, through the rhythms and harmonies, used music to try to reach into eternity. Messiaen, who died in 1992, said that the quartet was not intended to be a commentary, nor to refer to his own captivity, but to be a kind of musical extension of the biblical account.

It seemed to work. "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension," Messiaen recalled of the quartet's unorthodox premiere. A few months afterward, Brüll proved again to be the musicians' guardian angel. Forging papers with a stamp made from a potato, he arranged for the freedom of some of the musicians, including Messiaen, who returned to France.

Brüll repeatedly advised other French Jewish prisoners not to escape, that they would be safer in Stalag VIIIA than in Vichy France. In the case of Akoka, he may have had a point. After Brüll finagled Akoka's exit, a guard pulled him off a truck at the last moment because of his Jewish looks. But the indefatigable Akoka felt that "a prisoner is made for escaping." After more attempts, he finally leapt to freedom from the top of a fast-moving transport train, with his clarinet under his arm. He returned to his post at the Orchestre National de la Radio, in the Free Zone of Marseilles. His sister, in a memoir, recalled, "He could make a stone laugh."

Brüll's postwar years were harder. He returned to practicing law under the new East German government, but after a 1948 insurrection was sentenced to three years of forced labor.

Publicly acknowledged his debt to Brüll, the composer credited him with his liberation, so no one knows why Messiaen refused to see Brüll when he came to Messiaen's Paris home years later. The German was very upset.

Messiaen tried to make amends later, attempting to contact Brüll several times without success, according to Messiaen's wife. If true, Messiaen may have been trying to reach a dead man; Brüll was killed by a car.

Tickets for the November 13 event are $44 for adults and $22 for Stanford students. Seating is general admission. Half-price tickets are available for young people age 18 and under, and discounts are available for groups and non-Stanford students. For tickets and more information, call 725-2787 or visit online Stanford Lively Arts.