The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda.

His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings). These are among the most lovely works of devotional music to have come out of interwar Europe. The hushed intensity of the music, which has scarce metre or pulse, later left its mark on Miles Davis, for one, who saw in the French composer a pre-jazz master of the sonic impressionist sketch. There was a stillness in early Messiaen that suggested new horizons.

His most famous composition by a long chalk is Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time). Written for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it was first performed in the winter of early 1941 at Stalag VIII-A, a German POW camp in Görlitz, Silesia, where Messiaen was a prisoner. The ‘end’ in the title refers to the abolition of time as proclaimed by the Angel of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. The Quartet’s wild and whirling passages reflect the drama of St John’s prophecy, but overall the impression is of a quiet, melancholy contemplation of the divine. The piece was a signpost in the development of contemporary classical music; its third movement, ‘Abyss of the Birds’, evokes a blackbird’s song and is utterly beautiful or, as the poet and librettist Michael Symmons Roberts puts it, ‘heartsore in its longing’.