On December 10, 1978, Pierre Boulez addressed the audience of the Paris Opera. It was the culmination of over a month of festivities and concerts throughout France; and on that particular day Olivier Messiaen also turned 70 years old. Broadcast on France Musique, Boulez delivered a speech that showed just how much he owed to his former teacher: in his words, Messiaen had “the merit of extricating French music from a weakened tradition, of considering music, at a time of exclusive nationalism, as a global and universal phenomenon, opening its windows onto the whole world. He broadened its expressive range through his research into instrumental sonorities, rhythm and musical time, which has had an immense influence.”
Among Messiaen’s works, there is one that illustrates this statement particularly well: the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet of the End of Time), written and premiered while he was held captive at the start of World War II in the snowy Stalag VIII A, in Görlitz. Although Messiaen might have yielded to understandable musical nationalism in such circumstances, he pushes back boundaries and embraces the world from the very first notes. He describes them as follows: “At around five in the morning, a solo bird improvises, surrounded by sound dust, by a halo of harmonics lost high in the trees. Transpose this to a religious level and you have the harmonious silence of the heavens.”
The rest of the Quartet is no less powerful. Throughout the eight movements, which call on all the playing combinations (from solo to the whole ensemble), Messiaen deploys his science of harmonic and rhythmic modes to sculpt space and time, seeking to touch on infinity and eternity in the midst of suffering mankind. After the sparkling polyphony of the Liturgie de cristal, the second movement evokes the power of the Angel and “the impalpable harmonies of heaven”. Separated by a light, dancing interlude, the third and fifth pieces reach unheard-of dimensions: the solo in Abîme des oiseaux first dilates time, pushing the clarinet’s breath into the void or precipitating the discourse into a number of joyous little notes. As for the Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus, it abolishes any notion of duration: while the piano moves in a concentrated procession, the cello bow traces an absolute melody that defies the laws of harmonic gravity.
The four instruments join in unison to intone the sixth movement’s “music of stone, formidable sound granite; an irresistible movement of steel”. This Danse de la fureur is the only one in the Quartet to evoke the catastrophes of the Apocalypse. The seventh piece is the work’s most complex, alternately developing two contrasting themes: the first is a dreamy cello song reminiscent of the fifth movement’s Louange; the second is a rhythmic scansion corresponding to the second movement’s Ange. The work ends with a final song of praise, this time intoned by the violin, above the irregular palpitations of the piano. This praise “is addressed more especially to the second aspect of Jesus, to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, risen immortal to communicate his life to us. It is all love”.
Before Messiaen, another French composer had refused to adopt the nationalist stance prevalent in his day: Maurice Ravel, who broke away from the Société Nationale de Musique – founded in 1871 in the wake of the French defeat at Sedan – to create the Société musicale indépendante in 1904. The outbreak of World War I did nothing to alter the musician’s universalist approach: in his Piano Trio in A minor, composed in 1914, Ravel sought out singular sources of inspiration, abolishing geographical and temporal boundaries. While its dizzying second movement may recall the lacework of Mendelssohnian scherzos, it is above all a “pantoum”, a poetic form originating in Malaysia in which “two contrasting meanings must continue in parallel from beginning to end”, as the composer himself explained. The “meanings” in question are a bouncy speech and a full song, which Ravel goes as far as superimposing in the middle of the movement. To this science of counterpoint is added an alchemy of timbres that draws the listener into unheard-of worlds, pizzicati, arpeggios, harmonics and bariolages following each other in an unreal whirlwind.
Prior to this pantoum, the first movement returned to the composer’s Basque origins, echoing the swaying rhythm of the zortziko, a five-beat Basque dance. Broad and sombre, the third movement again refers to a dance, but this time Ravel explores time rather than space, harking back to the slow passacaglias of the 17th and 18th centuries. As for the finale, it repeats the five beats of the first movement. Rich in orchestral effects, from the low rumblings of the piano’s left hand to the ringing trills in the violin’s high register, this final page displays a frightening energy, almost evoking a dance of fury well before Messiaen’s Danse de la fureur.
Tristan Labouret
