The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Olivier Messiaen · Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, a quartet for clarinet in B flat, violin, cello and piano · eight movements, with the composer’s preface printed in the score · about forty-five to fifty minutes in performance
Mode
Sacred chamber music as an argument about time; cycle, solo, unison and sustained praise in place of dialogue and development
Mythos
The Apocalypse: the Angel who swears there will be no more Time, the seventh trumpet, the abyss, and eternity as praise
Phase
Eight movements with breaks between them; from birds at dawn to a violin’s ascent out of hearing, each half closed by a Praise in E major
Presentation
Concert music; a score in eight movements for clarinet in B flat, violin, cello and piano, with French titles and a composer’s preface, and no sung words
Register
From a single clarinet swelling out of silence to four instruments in unison at full force; two slow movements slower than anything in the chamber repertoire before them
Scale
One Angel, two birds, four players; about three quarters of an hour
Governing Proposition
A clarinet and a violin sing as birds over two clocks that will never agree, an angel’s music is heard and heard again, one voice holds a note in an abyss, four instruments strike as one, and twice a single line is laid over a pulse that goes nowhere. The wager of the work is that the end of time can be made audible: that duration without metre, held long enough, is not stillness but eternity, and that eight movements for four players can state it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins before dawn. The first movement, Liturgie de cristal, Crystal liturgy, is set by the composer’s preface between three and four in the morning, at the waking of the birds. The clarinet is a blackbird and the violin a nightingale, and they sing, in notation, as birds do: short figures, repeated, not developed. Beneath them run two mechanisms. The cello plays a cycle of five pitches in harmonics against a cycle of fifteen durations, and the two realign every fifteen notes. The piano plays a cycle of twenty-nine chords against a cycle of seventeen durations, and these would coincide again only after some five hundred chords, far beyond the end of the movement.
Two clocks that will never agree, and birds singing over them. The texture sounds free; it is made by rule. A liturgy is an excerpt of something endless, and the movement states the problem the rest of the work will answer: time as cycles that do not close. Harmony here is not a progression but a colour, drawn from the modes of limited transposition, and rhythm is not a metre but a count of durations, some of them lengthened by a note or a rest that the composer called an added value. Nothing in the movement is going anywhere, by design, and it ends long before its clocks could meet.
The score is for clarinet in B flat, violin, cello and piano, in eight movements played with breaks between them. The printed score carries a dedication to the Angel of the Apocalypse who raises his hand to heaven and says “Il n’y aura plus de Temps”, there shall be no more Time, and then a preface by the composer: an epigraph paraphrasing the tenth chapter of Revelation, where the strong angel comes down with a rainbow on his head and swears that there will be no more Time, and that at the trumpet of the seventh angel the mystery of God will be accomplished; a note on why there are eight movements; a commentary on each; and a small theory of the rhythmic language and the modes. The preface is part of the work, and the work can be heard with it or against it.
Movement II
The Angel enters in the second movement, Vocalise, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps, Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of Time. It is in three sections. The outer two are short and violent, the power of the strong angel crowned with a rainbow and clothed in cloud, in the preface’s account. The long middle is for muted violin and cello in octaves, a slow line of chant-like character high in their registers, over soft high chords in the piano, which the preface describes in colours, blue and orange among them, as the impalpable harmonies of heaven. The violence and the distant chords are one music, and the work will bring it back.
Then the quartet is reduced to one instrument. Abîme des oiseaux, Abyss of the birds, is for clarinet alone, marked Lent, expressif et triste, slow, expressive and sad, and it is among the longest movements in the work: for about a sixth of a quartet, one player. A slow melody; then a held note that begins from near silence, swells over many slow beats to fortissimo and dies away again, while nothing else happens. That is what waiting is, time felt as weight. The clarinet’s power to begin a note from nothing is the whole means, and the passage has been a test of the instrument since.
Out of the held note breaks birdsong, fast and bright, in the same instrument, and then the slow music returns. The preface gives the movement its sentence: “L’abîme, c’est le Temps”, the abyss is Time, with its sadnesses and wearinesses; “Les oiseaux, c’est le contraire du Temps”, the birds are the contrary of Time, our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant song. The music does what the sentence cannot. A listener who holds none of the creed still receives the weight of the held note and the release of the song as a statement about human time. The sentence is received; the condition is uncovered.
Movement III
The fourth movement, Intermède, Interlude, is a scherzo for the three melody instruments without the piano, short and quick, and the composer’s preface sets it apart as of more external character than the others, tied to them by some melodic recalls. It is the one movement that keeps ordinary time, and the one the argument would not miss. It separates the abyss from the first Praise, and it is the last music of the first half: four movements, a little more than a third of the running time. The weight of the work is still ahead.
Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus, Praise to the Eternity of Jesus, is for cello and piano, in E major, marked Infiniment lent, extatique, infinitely slow, ecstatic. The piano plays even repeated chords, with no metrical weight on any of them. The cello plays one long sustained line above, which will not hurry. The preface says that Jesus is considered here as the Word, and quotes the opening of John: “Au commencement était le Verbe”, In the beginning was the Word. The movement runs some eight minutes, and a line is kept alive across all of them.
It is a pulse with no metre and no goal under a line that does not develop, and that is what the end of time would be: not stillness but duration without consequence. The music was not written for the quartet. It reworks a movement of Fête des belles eaux of 1937, for six ondes Martenot, and the plan of the quartet was fitted to it: the form fits the argument rather than being born of it. The slowness is at the edge of the practicable, and how slowly the Louanges can be taken is still argued wherever they are played. The first half ends in E major, in praise, and the second will end there too.
Movement IV
The second half opens with the trumpets. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes, Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets, marked Décidé, vigoureux, granitique, un peu vif, decided, vigorous, granitic, a little lively, puts the four instruments in unison or octaves for nearly the whole of its six minutes, with no harmony at all. The preface calls it “Musique de pierre, formidable granit sonore”, music of stone, formidable sounding granite, and has the four instruments take on the manner of gongs and trumpets. Four unlike instruments are made one sound. The unison is the point: the trumpet of the Apocalypse is one will, and harmony would make it a crowd.
Its rhythm is made by adding and mirroring values rather than by a beat. The theme is built with added values; it returns in augmentation, each duration lengthened, and in diminution, each shortened; and throughout there are the non-retrogradable rhythms the preface points to, patterns that read the same backward as forward, so that the rhythm itself cannot be turned round in time. No listener can count a metre. The augmented return is the most dreadful music in the work, grandeur as weight. It is the centre of the second half, as the solitary clarinet was the centre of the first, and with it the seventh trumpet of the epigraph has sounded.
Then the Angel returns. Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps, Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of Time, brings back the second movement’s music, violence and distant chords both, in alternation with a slow dreaming theme first given to the cello, and rises to passages in which the four instruments and the piano’s cascades of chords are superimposed. The preface describes a dream in which heard chords and seen colours pass into a whirl of sounds and colours: swords of fire, flows of blue and orange lava, sudden stars. The alternation runs past what the argument needs, the cascades have become a device by now, and the piano covers the strings in the climaxes; those are the costs of the whirl.
Movement V
The last movement is the second Praise. Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus, Praise to the Immortality of Jesus, is for violin and piano, in E major again, marked Extrêmement lent et tendre, extatique, extremely slow and tender, ecstatic. The piano plays even chords; the violin’s line climbs, over seven or eight minutes, to a very high sustained E, the piano fading beneath it. The first Praise was to the Word before time; this one, the preface says, addresses Jesus as man, the Word made flesh risen immortal, and its slow ascent to the extreme treble is the ascent of man toward his God, of the deified creature toward Paradise. Like the fifth movement it was not new: it reworks the second half of the organ Diptyque of 1930.
The preface explains the count. Seven is the perfect number, the creation of six days sanctified by the divine sabbath; the seven of that rest extends into eternity and becomes the eight of “la lumière indéfectible” and “l’inaltérable paix”, the unfailing light and the unalterable peace. Two Angel movements frame the whole, two Praises close its halves, one voice alone stands at the centre of the first half and four voices as one at the centre of the second, and a liturgy of cycles that never close opens what two praises of pulse without direction end. About half the running time is slow music for one or two players, and no instrument plays throughout. The structure is heard. The meaning of eight is told.
The quartet was composed in 1940 and 1941 while Messiaen was a prisoner of war in Stalag VIII-A at Görlitz in Silesia, and first performed in the camp on 15 January 1941, by Henri Akoka, clarinet, Jean Le Boulaire, violin, Étienne Pasquier, cello, and the composer at a poor piano, before several hundred prisoners and guards. That is documented history; it is not in the score, and the music stands without it. Messiaen was repatriated that year and appointed to teach harmony at the Paris Conservatoire, where the rhythmic thinking of this work passed to Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis. In 1973 the ensemble Tashi was formed around the work. The music has been played for eighty years by players born long after it. The story is set beside the music, and the music has outlived it.
Act III · The Twelve
The architecture resists the subtractive test. Eight is seven and eternity; two Angel movements frame the whole; a Praise closes each half; the Abîme alone is the centre of the first half and the unison of the trumpets the centre of the second. Remove the first movement and there is no time to end; remove the sixth and the seventh trumpet never sounds. The test finds give in three places. The Intermède is, by the composer’s own account, of more external character; the two Louanges existed before the quartet, for other instruments, so the plan was fitted to them; and the Fouillis alternates its blocks past what the argument needs. Length is not charged.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and the preface states it: the abyss is Time, and the birds are the contrary of Time. In the Abîme a single voice holds one note from near silence to a shout: that is waiting, time felt as weight. In the Louanges a pulse with no metre and no goal is what the end of time would be: not stillness but duration without consequence. That holds whether or not one holds the creed. Two costs hold it at the gate. The work’s sentence is theological and received, so what the music adds is a phenomenology of time, not a social condition; and the consolation is total; no voice in the work doubts it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Height reaches the top and frequency is high. The Louange à l’Éternité is the sublime of stasis, a line moving as slowly as a line can. The Louange à l’Immortalité climbs to a high E: the sublime as ascent. The Abîme’s swells from nothing are terror and transport in one voice; the Vocalise’s middle is cold, distant beauty; the Danse de la fureur is force, and its augmented return is dreadful grandeur; the Fouillis’s climaxes are the whirl the preface describes. Six of eight movements rise. Held below the top because the Intermède does not aim at height, the Liturgie keeps its beauty small by design, and the Danse’s elevation is weight more than height for stretches.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. Revelation 10 supplies the Angel, the oath that there will be no more Time and the seventh trumpet, and the score builds a form from them. The Angel’s music is stated in the second movement and returned in the seventh; the trumpets are unison; the abyss is one creature alone; eternity is pulse without progress; and the count of movements is itself the figure, seven and then eight. The particular stays particular: a blackbird and a nightingale, a real clarinet in a real abyss. Held down by the preface: without titles and commentary the score builds time against timelessness, but not this Angel, and the meaning of eight is told, not heard.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is French chamber music after Debussy and Ravel and Messiaen’s own organ cycles of the 1930s. The departures are many: duration treated as a quantity, with added values and non-retrogradable rhythms in place of metre; an opening movement whose harmony and rhythm run on independent cycles; birdsong as thematic material; a six-minute movement in unison; two slow movements slower than anything in the chamber repertoire; and a theology printed in a chamber score. The stake: dialogue, development and balance given up for an argument about time that could have been heard as a private system. Held below the top by the composer’s own path: the modes and rhythmic devices are in the organ works of 1935 to 1939, and two movements are transcriptions.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: the difference between time as measured pulse and time abolished. The Liturgie knows it as cycles of seventeen and twenty-nine durations that do not close within the movement. The Abîme knows it as one voice holding a note, which only a solo can say. The Danse knows the trumpet as unison; harmony would make it a crowd. The Louanges know eternity as pulse without hierarchy under a climbing line; a developing form would give eternity a plot. Held below the top because the Intermède knows nothing the others do not, the Fouillis’s alternation is nearer a container, and the Louanges’ forms were made for other instruments and fit the argument rather than being born of it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence, not promise, over eighty-five years in three streams. Analytic: the composer’s Technique de mon langage musical (1944); Robert Sherlaw Johnson’s Messiaen (1975); Paul Griffiths’s Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time (1985); Anthony Pople’s Cambridge handbook on the quartet (1998). Historical: Rebecca Rischin’s For the End of Time (2003); Hill and Simeone’s Messiaen (2005). Performance: the tempo of the Louanges, the Abîme’s swells and the balance of piano against strings in the Fouillis, all still argued. The Liturgie’s isorhythm is a standard teaching example. Held below the top because the preface closes questions the score alone would leave open, a share of the literature is about the story, and the analytic schools are fewer.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The work and its preface set out a rhythmic language, and in the first movement ran rhythm and harmony as separate cycles: parametric thinking before the word, a reorganisation of what a European composer could take rhythm to be. It made birdsong a material and a sacred slow movement of a new type. Discounted because much of the reach runs through the teacher and his later works. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through Messiaen’s Conservatoire class from 1941 the rhythmic thinking passed to Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis; the Liturgie’s method is the seed of Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949); and the combination became an ensemble type, with Tashi formed around the work in 1973.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: in continuous performance since 1941, the most performed of Messiaen’s works and among the most performed chamber works of its century, and recorded many dozens of times. Nothing in the music is fixed to its moment. The preface’s prose has dated a little; the music has not. The risk is particular: a work whose story is told at every performance may be surviving on the story. The evidence is against that. The music has been played for eighty years by players born long after it, and the Louanges and the Abîme are performed on their own. Held at the figure because eighty-five years is a shorter demonstrated span than two centuries.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The making bears weight: the mechanism of the Liturgie, two cycles laid under two birds so that the texture sounds free; the clarinet writing of the Abîme, its whole range and its power to begin a note from nothing; the control of extreme slow tempo in the Louanges; the unison of the Danse, four unlike instruments made one sound; and the balancing of a combination that had no models. The costs: the piano’s chord cascades recur as a device and are formulaic by the seventh; balance in the Fouillis’s climaxes is a known difficulty; the Intermède’s writing is plain; and the metronome marks for the Louanges sit at the edge of the practicable, and whether they can be held is disputed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Danse de la fureur, four instruments in unison at full force, and the Louange à l’Éternité, one cello over even chords, infinitely slow. One law governs both. Duration is the unit, not the beat: the Danse’s rhythm is made by adding and mirroring values, the Louange’s by a pulse with no metrical weight. Harmony is colour, not progression, in the modes of limited transposition in both. And both stand outside time’s ordinary motion, one by a fury that does not develop, one by a stasis that does not end. The tension: the Intermède obeys ordinary scherzo time, the one place the law lapses, and the Fouillis’s blocks are joined by cut rather than by law.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The work holds, and integrates under one eschatological frame: the sacred, as a developed theology, the Angel, the end of Time, Christ as Word and as risen man, eternity and immortality distinguished; the natural order, in birds at dawn, the abyss and the rainbow; consciousness, in the solitary voice of the Abîme and the dream of the Fouillis; time itself, as the subject; and the cosmos, in the heaven and stars of two movements. What holds the axis here is absence. The family, labour, the state, history and society do not appear, and the four in unison are a single will, not a community. The figure says how many orders a fifty-minute chamber work with a printed theology holds.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.2 and The Made at 9.1, with The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 9.0 behind them. Six of eight movements rise, from the stasis of the first Praise to the ascent of the second and the terror of a single held note; a command of a combination that had no models, from two cycles laid under two birds to four instruments made one sound; and a form, a reach, a survival and a law at one level, with nothing above 9.2.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: one eschatological frame holds the sacred, the natural order, consciousness, time and the cosmos, but the family, labour, the state, history and society are absent, and four in unison are not a community. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.4, held by a scherzo the composer himself set apart and two Praises written for other instruments inside a strict plan, and The Unconcealment at 8.5, where a received theology is made audible as a condition of time and no voice in the work doubts it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five, one with no room: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.4, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · the score of the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps as published, eight movements with their French titles and the composer’s preface, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The eight movements and the preface are scored as one work; the movements are not scored separately, and no performance or recording is the object. There are no sung words. The preface is printed with the score and is read as part of the work; it is quoted only where its words are sure, and sparingly, and is otherwise paraphrased; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal. The four tempo headings given are those the desk is sure of, and the others are not given. The circumstances of composition and of the first performance are stated once as documented history and bear on no axis; the stake of the work is argued in musical terms. The shares of running time were computed by script from approximate durations, and the counts of the first movement’s cycles are given as the desk knows them. Figures that could not be verified, among them the date of publication, the date of the first Paris performance, the composer’s metronome marks, the pitches of the cello’s harmonics in the first movement, the names of the Hindu rhythms in the piano’s cycle and the number of recordings, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.