David Krakauer (*1956)
Akoka

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992)
Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940–41)

I. Liturgie de cristal. Bien modéré, en poudroiement harmonieux
II. Vocalise, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps. Robuste, modéré – Presque vif, joyeux – Presque lent, impalpable, lointain
III. Abîme des oiseaux. Lent, expressif et triste – Presque vif
IV. Intermède. Décidé, modéré, un peu vif
V. Louange à l’éternité de Jésus. Infiniment lent, extatique
VI. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes. Décidé, vigoureux, granitique, un peu vif – Presque lent, terrible et puissant
VII. Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps. Rêveur, presque lent - Robuste, modéré, un peu vif – Extatique – Robuste, modéré, un peu vif
VIII. Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus. Extrêmement lent et tendre, extatique

Socalled (*1976)
Meanwhile… (A Messiaen Remix)

A Work of Vast Spiritual Scope
Reframing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time

Paul Griffiths

Before the End of Time

“It seems like a piece that really resonates now—unfortunately, in terms of what is going on around the world, and the space of the world, and the fact that we haven’t learned our lessons.”
—Matt Haimovitz

“It’s a very intense time that we’re living in, and so I think that doing the piece in this way, with this attitude, is very timely, right now.” —David Krakauer

Six years have passed since Matt Haimovitz and David Krakauer made these statements, but we can hardly say their observations have become any less pertinent. Their intention, in “reframing” the piece in question—Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps—was to let it resonate, even explode, exactly by containing it, pressing on it.

The quartet is a work of vast spiritual scope, made in a prison camp. This reframing, in which Messiaen’s music is given a new approach before and a new resonance after, may hope to reflect and even express those circumstances of confinement and boundlessness. The quartet was also made for prisoners to perform. As a lens to focus on the work, the musicians take the figure of one of them, the clarinetist Henri Akoka (1912–1976)—hence the project’s name and also the title of the structured quasi-improvisation Krakauer devised as a prelude. Through this, Messiaen’s music arrives as not so much a withdrawal from a harsh outer world, more a fiercely focused confrontation of that world.

At the same time, Krakauer conveys in his driven piece how Akoka, as a Jew, might have been torn not only by the war but in some unknowable measure by the work he was helping bring to birth—a work, it could even be said, he had instigated, for it was when he and Messiaen first came together, before their transfer to the camp, that Messiaen wrote for him a solo piece that was to take its place as the quartet’s third movement. A Jewish presence, brought into the open by the klezmer-style lamentation of Krakauer’s contribution, completes what we may judge to have been missing in the Quatuor as a Second World War memorial.

The End of Time

Called up for military service in 1940, Messiaen was sent to join an army orchestra in Verdun, where he was taken prisoner with two colleagues: Henri Akoka and the cellist Étienne Pasquier. The three of them were transferred with many other French troops to Stalag VIII A (a Stammlager, or basic camp, made for enlisted men), in Silesia, where they teamed up with a violinist who had been brought there earlier, Jean Le Boulaire, to create an ensemble that could entertain fellow prisoners and German officers. Almost inevitably, even though he had very little experience of writing chamber music, Messiaen set about composing for the forces he had to hand. A sympathetic German officer provided pencils, erasers, and manuscript paper. Hence the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, which received its first performance in a hut that served as a theater on January 15, 1941, under freezing conditions, before an audience of prisoners and camp officers. “Never,” Messiaen later recalled, “have I been heard with as much attention and understanding.”

Circumstances dictated the chamber scoring, but the form of the work—a sequence of meditations on a spiritual theme—is that of his more usual cycles for organ, for voice and piano, or for orchestra. Characteristic, too, is the variety of style from movement to movement, to create a catalogue of possibilities all prompted by a scriptural subject—in this case a passage from Revelation that Messiaen, in his preface to the score, abridges as follows: “I saw a mighty angel, descending from heaven, clothed in a cloud, having a rainbow on his head. His face was as bright as the sun, his feet as columns of fire. He placed his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the earth, he raised his hand towards heaven and swore by Him who lives for ever and ever, saying: There will be no more Time; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God will be completed.”

The ending of time, which is the ending of progression, is expressed in the music by various means: by strongly repetitive forms, circling through the same instants; by the composer’s “modes of limited transpositions” (modes with repeating sequences of intervals, such as the octatonic scale, alternating major and minor seconds), which dissociate chords from their normal function of creating harmonic advance; by processes of potentially enormous duration (Liturgie de cristal); and by extremely slow tempos (the two Louanges). At the same time, the text is addressed almost pictorially by vivid timbres and harmonies, and by the force the four instruments can exert together. There is the further symbolism of the number of movements. As Messiaen explains, seven, the perfect number, “extends into eternity and becomes the eight of indefectible light, of unalterable peace.” Notes on these eight movements follow.

I. Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy). The piano keeps repeating a sequence of 17 rhythmic values, draped with a sequence of 29 chords. Simultaneously the cello has a five-note motif repeating through another rhythmic pattern. The whole mechanism of musical cogwheels would take nearly two hours to get back to its starting point; the small portion Messiaen offers is celebrated by birdsong solos from violin and clarinet.

II. Vocalise, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps (Vocalise, for the Angel who Announces the End of Time). The angel’s song, sustained by violin and cello in double octaves with “rainbow water drops” in the piano, is encased in music evoking the heavenly being’s might.

III. Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of the Birds). The abyss is a frequent symbol of negation in Messiaen’s music, of the human experience of time as oppressive, pointing towards death, while birdsong, still more commonly, is his image of spiritual joy, of participation in eternity. Here the solo clarinet brings the two images together: the abyss in great crescendos, in arpeggios straddling the instrument’s range and in slow melody, the birdsong in lively flights.

IV. Intermède (Interlude). A scherzo, omitting Messiaen’s own instrument: the composer rests to listen.

V. Louange à l’éternité de Jésus (Praise to the Eternity of Jesus). Jesus as Word is praised by the cello, with piano accompaniment, in modally becalmed E major. Messiaen recalls here a melody he had used in Fête des belles eaux, music commissioned from him to accompany a play of fountains at a Paris exhibition in 1937. The marking is “Infinitely slow, ecstatic.”

VI. Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes (Dance of Fury, for the Seven Trumpets). Messiaen describes this as “music of stone,” of the “irresistible movement of steel, of huge blocks of purple fury, of abandonment frozen”; his preface also draws attention to how the four instruments together suggest trumpets and, later, gongs. The piece is based on a powerfully rhythmic theme, worked to a climax in which it is distended in time and register.

VII. Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps (Bunches of Rainbows, for the Angel who Announces the End of Time). There are references to the second movement, whose melodic and dynamic ideas are first alternated, then combined. Again Messiaen’s preface demands quotation: “In my dreams I hear and see classified chords and melodies, known colors and forms; then, after this transitional stage, I pass into the unreal and submit in ecstasy to a wheeling, a gyrating interpenetration of superhuman colors. These swords of fire, these blue and orange lava flows, these sudden stars: here is the tangle, here the rainbows!”

VIII. Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus (Praise to the Immortality of Jesus). This is a renovation of the fifth movement, in the same stilled E major, and marked “Extremely slow and tender, ecstatic.” As before, Messiaen draws on his memory, in this case of the second part of his Diptyque for organ of 1929. The violin, accompanied by the piano, sings the praises of Jesus as Resurrected Man, as victor over time.

After the End of Time

The music is over but it does not end. It resonates through a postlude, Meanwhile…, created from archival material and specially recorded instrumental sounds by Joshua Dolgin, professionally known as Socalled. It resonates in the improvisations the musicians add, incorporating memories of the Messiaen. And it will go on resonating after we have left the hall.

Paul Griffiths has been writing on music for more than 50 years. He also writes novels, including most recently let me go on (2023).

Akoka: The End of Time

Cellist Matt Haimovitz, clarinetist David Krakauer, and beat maker and producer Socalled developed a new project centered around Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Given that this piece was composed in a prisoner-of-war camp in the midst of tremendous world conflagration, and that its subject matter describes cataclysmic events (the end of time itself), Haimovitz and Krakauer were interested in creating a program of music framing and commenting on this aspect of Messiaen’s work.

The point of departure for the program was the individual story of the clarinetist, Henri Akoka, who performed the premiere of the Quartet for the End of Time with Messiaen in the camp. When all of the other members of the original quartet were released, Akoka was put on a train toward a more sinister fate in another camp, as he was the only one who was Jewish. Miraculously, Akoka escaped by jumping off the train (with his clarinet under his arm!), made his way back to France, and survived the war. Metaphorically, to focus on Akoka’s story (not literally, but rather poetically through music) is to bring out the human aspect of the Quartet for the End of Time as seen through the “eyes” of one individual caught up in terrifying events beyond his control. Messiaen’s work is framed by two new compositions in a way that “lifts” it out of the polite confines of a normal chamber music performance. The 70-minute program, which proceeds without intermission, opens with a structured improvisational composition by David Krakauer with a raw quality that anticipates some of the musical gestures heard in the Messiaen. The Quartet follows, performed in its entirety.

At its conclusion, there is an immediate segue into a composition by Canadian hip-hop artist and producer Socalled that mixes beats, sequences, and samples with the acoustic playing of the ensemble. This includes menacing and violent sound images that comment on and frame the turbulence of the Quartet in a contemporary 21st-century context. Indeed, as the forces of fundamentalism, intolerance, and violence intensify in different contexts in today’s world, this project seems all the more timely.