The players rehearse with frost-crippled fingers. For two months, they work the same impossible passages again and again. Thrown together for so long at this fevered music, while winter comes down on Silesia and their camp blankets them in death, the four of them alter. Their technique pushes into a new place. Even-tempered agnostic, gloomy atheist, messianic Catholic, and Trotskyite Jew crouch over the parts of the recalcitrant piece by dim light, in a prison bathroom, and locate, in their shared focus, birdsong’s answer to the war.
THE CAMP PRINTS programs for the premiere:
Stalag VIII A-Görlitz
PREMIÈRE AUDITION DU
QUATOUR POUR LA FIN DU TEMPS
D’OLIVIER MESSIAEN
15 Janvier 41
Against regulations, the commandant authorizes even the quarantined prisoners to attend. Something is happening in this corner of confinement, far away from the annihilating front, the wolf pack strikes, the desert pendulum offenses, the fire raids on London, the steady gearing up of machinic carnage on scales no human can comprehend. The next world’s debut.
The day opens like hundreds before it. Ersatz at dawn. A morning of mind-fogging work at the assigned duties. A lunch of cabbage soup, and more forced labor all afternoon. For dinner, another cup of ersatz, a slice of bread, a little fromage blanc. No messenger comes to break open the eternal tomb.
The concert starts at six, in Barrack 27, the camp’s crude theater. Half a meter of snow carpets the ground and buries the roof. Snow gusts through the barrack doorway. The dim house is packed, a few hundred prisoners of several nationalities, from every class and profession—doctors, priests, businessmen, laborers, farmers . . . Some have never heard chamber music before.
The audience crowds together on the benches, wrapped in gray-black coats. Clouds of frozen breath fill the room, whiffs of rotting gut exuded by malnourished men in oil-stained rags. What heat the barrack manages on this bone-numbing night comes only from these wasted bodies. Infirm men from the hospital block are borne in on stretchers. The music-loving German officers take their reserved seats in the front rows.
The quartet shuffles out onto the improvised stage in tattered jackets and bottle-green Czech uniforms. Wooden clogs are the only shoes in camp that can keep their feet thawed for fifty minutes. Messiaen steps forward, his suit bagging. He tells the audience what they’re about to hear. He explains the eight movements, one for each of the six days of creation, the day of rest, and the Last Day. He talks of color and form, of birds, of the Apocalypse, and of the secrets of his rhythmic language. He speaks of that moment when all past and future will end and endlessness will begin.
The prisoners cough and squirm on their benches. Hardened faces turn suspicious. No one knows what this scarecrow is raving about. Pasquier caresses his cello. Le Boulaire nurses his violin. Akoka, clarinet on his lap, looks out at his comrades and smiles a joker’s last smile.
The lecture ends, the musicians raise their instruments, and the crystal liturgy begins. Two birds start a predawn song they’ve sung since long before human time. The clarinet channels a blackbird; the violin, a nightingale. The cello skates about in a fifteen-note loop of ghostly harmonics, while the piano cycles through a rhythm of seventeen values, divided into a pattern of twenty-nine chords. This whirling solar system would take four hours to unfold its complete circuit of nested revolutions. But the movement lasts a mere two and a half minutes—a sliver between two infinities.
A shimmer of sound, according to Messiaen’s program notes. A halo of trills lost very high in the trees . . .the harmonious silence of Heaven. But before the dazed prisoners can tell what they hear, morning is over.
Then the angel appears, one foot on land, one on the sea, to announce the end of time. Bright, crashing chords, a race of doubled strings. Violin and cello, in a unison chant, wander as far from this camp as imagination can reach. The piano descends in waterfalls of chords. Fanfare returns, jarring the audience. No one can say what on earth these four performers think they’re doing.
Music drifts past the bundled listeners, through the snow-buried barrack, beyond the last twist of barbed wire that seals this camp in. The movement ends, releasing a fit of coughs. Numb listeners shift on their benches, and the third movement starts. This one reworks that fantasia for solo clarinet that Akoka sight-read out in the empty field near Nancy, so long ago. The abyss of birds. The abyss is Time, Messiaen explains, with its weariness and gloom. The birds are the opposite of Time. They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.
The clarinetist who once played in a wallpaper factory band now plays himself into the future. He chirps and trills. His crescendos swell from silent to shattering, like an air-raid siren issuing its final warning. The song demands staggering control. It asks even more of the audience, who begin to divide, in the gaslight, between those who hear escape and those who make out only tedium.
The fourth movement, a little music-box trio, lasts ninety seconds. It could be a trifle from before the war, a lark from back when the largest crisis facing civilization was still skirt length. Eternity, too, needs its interludes.
Bombs fall tonight in the south of England. A cordon tightens around Tobruk. The savage tank battles across North Africa pause for a few hours, delayed by darkness. In Berlin, a two-hour drive northwest, Hitler’s staff work late, firming up the invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece. But here in Barrack 27, Stalag VIII-A, halfway through Messiaen’s fever dream, the cello spins a melody out of itself. It rides on the waves of the piano, which wanders through endless, patient modulations. Each sprung chord pushes the duet into a new color.
Anywhere else, this movement would last eight minutes. But here in this barrack, with its drafty rafters and frosted windows, packed with men who’ll live here for years, who’ll die in this hole unable to recall the look of home, the beat between any two wandering chords gets lost for hours. For some, the pulsing phrase is a shade less deadly than the boredom of their captivity. For others, it’s a bliss they’ll never find again.
On the shoe-box stage, the quartet digs in, releasing the “Dance of Fury, for the Seven Trumpets.” All four instruments chase each other around in jolting cadences of jagged unison, a mounting game of crack-the-whip. Music of stone, says Messiaen, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness.
The angel returns, tangled in cloud and rainbow. There have been elations in the piece before now, but none to match these raptures. For Messiaen: I pass through the unreal and suffer, with ecstasy, a tournament; a roundabout compenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, this blue-orange lava, these sudden stars . . . !
The end of the End, when it arrives at last, comes as a solo violin above piano throb. Pared back to its essence, the melody abides, burnt pure in the crucible of the war. Out of a cloud of shimmering E major chords—the key of paradise—the violin hints at all a person might still have, after death takes everything. The violin rises; the piano climbs along toward some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing. The praise wanders higher, into C minor, through a frozen minefield of ambiguous diminished and augmented chords, rising again to another E major, then one more in the octave above. From out at the edge of the key- and fingerboards, the line glances back at a lost Earth on a cold night, when there is time no longer.
When the last notes die out in the frozen air, nothing happens. The captive audience sits in silence. And in silence, awe and anger, perplexity and joy, all sound the same. At last there’s applause. The prisoners in their clogs and bottle-green Czech uniforms fall back into the world and make an awkward bow. And then, Le Boulaire will recall decades later, lots of unresolved discussions, about this thing that no one had understood.
. . .
TWENTY DAYS AFTER the premiere, fifteen hundred Polish Jews in Stalag VIII-A are rounded up and sent to Lublin for destruction. Akoka is saved by his French uniform. Two weeks later, Messiaen, P
asquier, and Akoka try to board a convoy, with papers forged by the same Captain Brüll who made the quartet possible. A German officer stops Akoka: Jude. The clarinetist pulls down his pants, hoping his botched circumcision will look like gentile integrity. The officer arrests him and brings him back to camp.
In March, the Algerian-born Akoka passes for an Arab in a group being shipped out of the camps. He ends up in Dinan, Brittany. He’s put on another freight heading back east. He jumps from the moving train in the night, still cradling his clarinet. Somehow, he makes his way across the Demarcation Line to Marseilles, in Vichy. There, a note reaches him in his father’s hand, tossed from the window of another moving train: I’m leaving for an unknown destination.
Le Boulaire flees the camp late in 1941, with papers covered in official-looking stamps made with a carved potato. Soon after his escape, the violinist breaks down. He abandons his musical career and changes his name to Jean Lanier. He starts a whole new life, free from a past he doesn’t care to remember. He commences a distinguished acting career, including a role in the wartime classic Les Enfants du Paradis. The men with whom he played on that night of January 15, 1941, will become total strangers. A stroke in his eighties leaves him hallucinating, believing that the war is still going on, that he’s being chased by the Germans, that he’s hiding in a deep cellar, afraid to move. Jean Lanier, born Le Boulaire, dies a prisoner of war.
Pasquier returns to occupied Paris, where he premieres the Quartet for the End of Time. He plays it countless times afterward, throughout a long and distinguished career. Until his death, he carries in his wallet a faded card:
Stalag VIII A Görlitz
PREMIÈRE AUDITION DU
QUATOUR POUR LA FIN DU TEMPS
D’OLIVIER MESSIAEN
15 Janvier 41
The back of the program is inscribed by Messiaen, urging the cellist to remember the rhythms, the modes, the rainbows, the bridges to the beyond.
Messiaen passes through the conflict hearing sounds beyond all earthly politics. He lives out his life writing music of spectral harmonies and birdlike rhythms. But no piece will reach more listeners than the Quartet. He sees Pasquier and Akoka now and then. Captain Brüll tries to visit him in Paris, decades later, but the concierge turns him back, saying Messiaen does not want to see him. Brüll goes away devastated. Later still, Messiaen tries to contact the German who gave him paper and pencils, the man who, at great risk to himself, faked the composer’s exit papers. But by then Brüll is beyond the reach of time.
If I composed this quartet for anything, Messiaen will write, it was to escape from the snow, the war, captivity, to escape from myself. What I gained most of all from it was that, among three hundred thousand prisoners, I was perhaps the only one who wasn’t a prisoner.
And of that night in January 1941: Never was I listened to with such attention.
The best music says: you’re immortal. But immortal means today, maybe tomorrow. A year from now, with crazy luck.
Eight days after that winter Stalag concert, Peter Els is born. Over the course of seventy years, he hears the piece a hundred times. He ages with it, and the notes change each time he listens. The piece, forever a week and a day older than he is, grows from an elusive puzzle to a venerated classic. In an undergraduate lecture, his professor calls it one of the three seminal works of the war. In graduate school, his circle of friends take it for granted, a thing that has always existed and needs to be escaped from, like the pitches of the major scale—music lost forever in lore and reverence, too classic to trouble anyone.
Cage: “Nothing is accomplished by writing, playing, or listening to music.” Hear that or miss everything—even what’s within earshot.
That was the story Els told his eleventh-hour pupils, from memory, with his notes sealed up in a Ziploc bag on their way to a government crime lab in Philly. He heard himself talk, weirdly calm despite the morning, like one of those cool criminals who duck into matinees five minutes after the murder, drawn in by the promise of air-conditioning and popcorn. The lede of his arrest would write itself: terrorist caught while giving lifelong learning class on dead music to dying people.
He warned the group that the work would last fifty minutes.
Klaudia Kohlmann blew a raspberry. At this age? It takes me fifty minutes to tie my shoes.
I have one word for you, Will Bock told her. Velcro.
Els didn’t mention that federal agents might come and arrest him midway through the piece. He pressed the play button on the phone’s screen and settled in to his last chance to listen at liberty.
The crystal liturgy spread through the group like flu moving through a day-care center. Chris Shields, a pizza parlor owner who liked to play “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” and “Somebody Loves Me” on the Shade’s upright piano, shooting the last notes with the gun barrel of his index finger, grappled the conference table and Fletcherized the tangle of notes in his clenched jaw.
Prisms of sun slid across the almond ceiling. The swish of nylon and muffled complaints passed down the hall. A gray head poked through the common room’s double doors, listened for a moment, then withdrew in giggles.
Fred Baroni, financial planner forced into unwilling retirement, using the course to try to hold dementia at bay for another week, shot Els a scared look at the sound of the pulsing lines: Go on without me. Leave me here, by the side of the road, in the falling snow.
By the Intermède, Paulette Hewerdine was cradling her face in her hands. The year before, her eldest son had been killed when an oncoming truck shot across the highway median. A month later her husband sat up in bed, complained of a headache, and died. She listened now, face covered, as if the sinuous music announced the long-expected trifecta.
Sounds filled the room, none of them real: Rain spattering a tenement roof. A girl on a wobbly swing set. The rustle of cotton dresses in a dance hall in wartime. The wind over a Nebraska wheat field. A stone dropped down a well with a long-forgotten wish tied to it. Crickets in a November cupboard.
Lisa Keane, who took notes throughout Els’s impromptu lecture, kept taking them during the music. The week they did Ravel, the apostate nun turned junior high science teacher confessed to the group that music was her North Korea—an unfathomable country that refused her a visa. She heard no more in the average masterpiece than a person might see in a pile of soggy cardboard. She didn’t want to face oblivion deaf to something that made life bearable for so many people.
Hearing the ex-nun’s confession, Els had wanted to tell her: Don’t start here, at the story’s end. Start back where the harmonies are fresh and clear all the way to the horizon. But Keane was stuck with Els and the music of her own failed century. And so she sat pushing her pen across the page like a pilgrim slogging to Compostela.
A burst of color stopped her hand. She lifted her head. Yes, Els willed her. This is it: nothing else to hear but these blocks of purple rage, this icy drunkenness. But a moment more, and Keane’s pen began again.
William Bock gazed out the plate-glass window, where a gray squirrel corkscrewed up the trunk of a white pine. The battle for the soul of twentieth century music struck the former ceramic engineer as an amusing shaggy dog story. He cocked his head at the Messiaen as if it came from an outpost colony on a remote but hospitable planet in a backwater star system on the edge of a galaxy straight out of the pages of Astounding Stories, the pulp bible of his childhood.
Klaudia Kohlmann huddled against the music, a hand like an ice tong on her temple. She kept a violin in a battered case under the dresser in her Shade apartment, although rheumatoid arthritis made playing it impossible. She’d held that instrument on her lap in the backseat of her father’s Opel Kapitän P1 as her family sped west through the junction of the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse and the Sebastianstrasse in Berlin, three days before the Wall went up.
Retirement had shrunk her, and she looked now like an apprentice pixie. Once she’d been Els’s therapist—until a mad mistake made that impossible. Their f
ling was brief and their joint repentance long. Neither could remember whose fault the autumnal wrong turn had been. Later, they sometimes ran into each other at concerts on campus, two cultural recidivists. He stood with her once in the concert hall lobby as she smoked three cigarettes during a ten-minute intermission, trying to fill her veins with enough nicotine to tide her through the all-Rachmaninoff second half. Doesn’t it bother you? she’d asked. Eight-tenths of every piece performed in a major venue, written by one of twenty-five composers?
I’d be fine with it, if it were the right twenty-five.
She sucked in burning air and shook her head at his stupidity. But she, too, was a late-life backslider. The music she loved should have died at that Berlin Philharmonic concert in 1945: Beethoven, Bruckner, and Brünnhilde’s immolation, while bombs rained down and Hitler Youth passed out cyanide. On that afternoon, five-year-old Klaudia was two neighborhoods away, under the family piano, her customary bomb shelter, listening to her father play Hummel’s opus 18 Fantasy. Now she listened to the Quartet, fingers pressed to the side of her skull, with the look of someone who’d just discovered that she still had work to do but not enough remaining time to do it.
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