four-thirty-three

I was going to do a post about “Revolution 9″ by the Beatles, but 2008 ends in a few hours, and since this waning year is the centenary of French composer Olivier Messiaen I wanted to get this post in under the wire.

I first heard Messiaen’s most famous work, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (in English: “Quartet for the end of time”), in college.  The orchestration is bizarre: clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.  Of course, when you’re writing a piece of music in a Nazi POW camp, you end up working with what you have.

More commentary, some videos and the inevitable life lesson below the cut.

Messiaen enlisted in the French army when WWII broke out, serving in the medical corps.  He was captured by the German army in May of 1940, and ended up incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp at Görlitz for about a year.  He met other musicians during his imprisonment, and as a diversion wrote a composition that would eventually develop into the Quatour.  He and his fellow musicians premiered the work in January of 1941 in front of an audience of prisoners and guards, the composer playing a badly-maintained upright piano in the brutal German cold.

The work is apocalyptic in nature, which is unsurprising given the composer’s religiosity and the conditions under which it was written.  Each movement is a musical setting of an image from the Book of Revelation.  The sixth movement, “Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes” (”Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets”) is especially interesting: the quartet plays in unison, and it’s incredibly complex from a rhythmic standpoint.

In the Quatuor, Messiaen uses incredibly slow tempos… one movement is marked “infinitely slow,” which gives one an idea of Messiaen’s artistic goal: the depiction of ecstasy and a sense of the infinite by creating a sense of suspended time.  This is evident in the hauntingly beautiful final movement, “Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus” (”Eulogy to the immortality of Jesus”):

I guess if there’s a larger point, it’s this: As difficult as things can get, as much as we struggle to push that Sisyphean rock, Messiaen shows us that we are capable of thriving under the harshest of circumstances. We create beauty with our hands, our minds, our words and actions in a world that can be ugly beyond our comprehension, and in doing so make the world that much brighter, that much more habitable. Messiaen’s countryman Albert Camus put it perfectly in his essay Return to Tipasa: ” “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Happy New Year. See you in 2009.

This entry was posted Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 7:40 pm and is filed under music, video. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.