“What comes from the organ is invisible music, propelled by wind, yet whose instrument gives no sign of activity, and whose player normally cannot be seen. Organ music symbolizes and makes real the contact between the mundane and the eternal.Indeed it makes a sacrament of all the world.” - Olivier Messiaen
“With Messiaen, all is prayer.” - Charles Tournemire, French composer and organist
“Paul Dukas always told me to listen to the birds.” – Olivier Messiaen
The Miracle of Stalag 8A – A Beauty Beyond the Horror:
Olivier Messiaen and the Quartet for the End of Time
by John William McMullen
In January 2009 while searching for organ works by Bach at the downtown Evansville library, I came across a collection of organ works by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (10 December 1908 - 27 April 1992).
I had heard a piece by him in the past, but I really didn’t know much about him. I then began to explore more of his musical world and soon discovered that he loved birds and composed for and played the pipe organ. Immediately upon listening to his Apparition de l'église éternelle, Vision of the Eternal Church, I knew I had met a kindred spirit.
Speaking for myself, music was always a part of my life as I grew up; from my parents playing the radio or listening to albums to the good Sisters of Providence getting us to sing every morning at Mass. Yet I can attribute my initial interest in classical music to a performance by the IU Music Department at Vincennes on the occasion of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 300th birthday, March 25, 1985. I am forever indebted to my Philosophy professor, Dr. Verkamp, and his insight into encouraging me to attend the concert. Bach’s music opened a door to another world and he has been a constant companion ever since. Father Columba Kelly, O.S.B., of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, a Gregorian Chant scholar and musicologist, then deepened my love for music while I was a student in his Music Appreciation class at Saint Meinrad in 1986.
Ever since my youth, however, I have had a love for the pipe organ. It all began with hearing our church organist playing the works of J.S. Bach, Charles-Marie Widor, César Franck, Marcel Dupré, and Maurice Duruflé on the pipe organ at the Old Cathedral in Vincennes, Indiana. Over the years the works of Francis Poulenc, Felix Alexandre Guilmant, Josef Rheinberger, John Tavener and John Rutter have enriched my life.
From hearing the pipe organ at the Old Cathedral in Vincennes, Indiana and Saint Meinrad, Indiana, and later attending recitals in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.; Westminster Cathedral in London, England; Notre Dame in Paris, France; and the Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence, Italy; or from listening to Pipe Dreams on Public Radio, my love for the instrument has not diminished.
In April of 2009 my wife and I attended an organ recital at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana and one of the pieces played was the organ work L’Ascension by Olivier Messiaen. The weather was beautiful and the monks had opened the abbey church’s windows. Interestingly as the Messiaen piece began I noticed an unusual number of birds singing and chirping: sparrows, crows, a Mockingbird, but in particular there was a Blue Jay that must have been perched on one of the ledges of the windowsills. He seemed intent on making his voice heard. I wondered if perhaps Olivier Messiaen was smiling upon us, for he loved bird songs very much.
As for L’Ascension, regardless of one’s religious sentiments, I was immediately caught up Messiaen’s his sonorous harmony and subtle theological reflections upon Jesus’ Ascension into Heaven, especially the last movement which rises to the heavens and the sounds seemingly evaporate into the clouds. Messiaen wrote, “What comes from the organ is invisible music, propelled by wind, yet whose instrument gives no sign of activity, and whose player normally cannot be seen. Organ music symbolizes and makes real the contact between the mundane and the eternal. Indeed it makes a sacrament of all the world.”
My wife and I sat next to Father Columba Kelly, O.S.B. at this recital. A renowned Gregorian Chant scholar and humble musical genius, he was also my former music professor while a student at Saint Meinrad College. It was indeed Father Columba who deepened my love for music. After the performance he gave us an impromptu exposition on the piece and further enlightened us on the genius of Messiaen.
The more I read on Messiaen’s life, the more intriguing his life and work became. I soon began collecting his works and found myself returning to them often, meditating upon them. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire (1919-30) with Paul and Marcel Dupré and taught there (1941-78) while also serving as organist of the Church of La Trinité in Paris.
Yet Messiaen was an enigma to the world: an avant-garde composer and also a devout Catholic. However, most of the musical world remembers Messiaen for his Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time), a work composed while Messiaen was a prisoner of war in a German Stalag. I soon obtained a copy of the Quartet for the End of Time and learned of the unique story behind its composition.
The story of Olivier Messiaen, French composer, organist, ornithologist, and devout Catholic drafted into the French army on the eve of Hitler's blitzkrieg is an amazing tale.
Rebecca Rischin’s work, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Cornell University Press, 2003; 2006), chronicles the composition well. Messiaen, who served in the French army, was captured at Verdun by the Germans and sent to Stalag 8A in Gorlitz, Germany, where he composed the great work, Quotor pour la fin du temps, creating musical history in the most unlikely of places.
“Certainly, there are many reasons that Messiaen thought fit to compose a piece for the end of time,” MIT graduate student Sudeep Agawala writes. “Messiaen’s musical narrative takes place at the end of a social and political era—World War II was ushering in a world of economic hardship for the national leaders of the free world; Nazi persecution, torture, and mass murders were re-defining the image of humanity and the regard for human life in terrifying new ways; scientific developments magnified human power over nature to previously unthinkable levels and revolutionized its perception of reality. The ways in which the old regimes were changing were not necessarily exciting or hopeful. In fact, many of the recent developments seemed the opposite. However, written in a German war camp, about the end of the world, the end of time, Messiaen’s piece, steely in its portrayal of God and the Apocalypse still manages optimism. Messiaen’s end is not one of fire, inhumanity and mass destruction. His world saw the end in praise of eternal comfort and glory.”
Throughout his imprisonment, Messiaen suffered numerous hardships, including starvation and freezing temperatures, yet he remained true to his music.
Messiaen had a love for the scripture, especially the Book of the Apocalypse, The Revelation of St. John, with its description of the end of Time. It foretells that Christ’s death and resurrection would ultimately redeem the world. (This is certainly not the typical take on the book of Revelation which, for many, is still about cataclysmic death and destruction).
When Messiaen read the Book of the Apocalypse, or Revelation, he was intrigued by the tenth chapter: “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. In his hand he held a small scroll that had been opened. He then set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the land.…
Then the angel I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by the one who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them, ‘There shall be no more Time….”
The three musicians and Messiaen represent the religious, philosophical, and political viewpoints of their contemporaries of the early 20th century. Nonetheless, these four very different men collaborated as a harmonious quartet to create musical history in the most unlikely of places. The Quartet for the End of Time is hailed as one of the most sublime pieces of chamber music composed in the 20th Century.
“There is no doubt that time stood still while these four prisoners played,” Graham Pellettieri wrote, “bringing warmth and light to so many who desperately needed it, during one of the coldest and darkest times in human history. The uncertainty of both the prison environment and the outcome of the war created a ‘timeless’ effect for the prisoners.”
“By 1941, this composer [Messiaen] no longer wanted to hear time being beaten out by a drum—one, two, three, four; he had had enough of that in the war,” writes Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker Magazine. “Instead, he devised rhythms that expanded, contracted, stopped in their tracks, and rolled back in symmetrical patterns…This is the music of one who expects paradise not only in a single awesome hereafter but also in the happenstance epiphanies of daily life. In the face of hate, this honestly Christian man did not ask, ‘Why, O Lord?’ He said, ‘I love you’.”
Messiaen reminds me of the caged bird who sings despite its captivity. In Maya Angelou’s famous poem, I know why the Caged Bird Sings, I believe she captures the spirit of Messiaen as he composed and sang during his captivity.
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
In the words of Messiaen scholar, Rebecca Rischin, Associate Professor at Ohio University School of Music: “The Quartet stands as Messiaen’s triumph over time. On 15 January 1941, Messiaen realized his dream of the bird. Where all around him men were making war, Messiaen, like a bird, was making music.”
“The first performance of the Quartet for the End of Time at the Stalag in January 1941 has, together with the premiere of The Rite of Spring, become one of the great stories of twentieth-century music,” wrote Paul Griffiths in his 1985 book, Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time.
The four men who comprise the quartet represent the philosophical, political, and theological complexity of the twentieth century. And I believe that Messiaen’s work is important, not only for contribution to music history, but in the way Messiaen faced adversity. Particularly important is the relationship between the members of the quartet. Messiaen and his three companions become the famous quartet of Stalag 8A. These four very different men collaborated to create musical history in the most unlikely of places.
“While the musical world interprets the miracle of Stalag 8A as the perfect performance of the ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ in inhuman conditions by musicians suffering from cold and slow starvation,” Writes Dr. Philip Pierpont, Former Academic Dean of Vincennes University, “I regard the coming together as one the four musicians: Messiaen, the faithful-Catholic and mystic composer; Pasquier, the agnostic cellist; le Boulaire, the atheist violinist; and the irrepressible Akoka, warrior Trotskyite Jew and master of the clarinet, as yet another miracle.”
Messiaen’s music marks the end of the World War I era and the beginning of World War II. In the face of the economically distressed world, Nazism and Communism were on the rise, and redefining humanity, diplomacy, and warfare. Messiaen’s Quartet, composed in a Stalag, transforms man’s inhumanity to man with hope.
Yet to the avant-garde, Messiaen was too traditional and too religious; to the traditionalists and religious, he was too avant-garde. As a result he will always stand somewhere outside of Time. In the words of Messiaen: Eternity is not a long period of time; it is no time at all.
Rebecca Rischin put it well when she wrote: “On 15 January 1941, in a German prison camp in Silesia, music triumphed over Time, breaking free of rhythm and liberating a quartet of French prisoners and their listeners from the horrors of their time. The Quartet for the End of Time… its musical beauty, at once terrifying and sublime, exalts listeners and performers alike, and the story of its creators stands as a testament to the powers of music and human will to transcend the most terrible of times.”
Messiaen’s Quartet transforms man’s inhumanity to man with hope. In the words of Messiaen: “The future may seem black, but the flowers are in bloom, the sun is shining, and the birds are singing.”
In the words of Messiaen scholar, Rebecca Rischin: “The Quartet stands as Messiaen’s triumph over time. On 15 January 1941, Messiaen realized his dream of the bird. Where all around him men were making war, Messiaen, like a bird, was making music.”
To the avant-garde, he was too traditional and too religious; to the traditionalists and religious, he was too avant-garde. As a result he will always stand somewhere outside of Time. In the words of Messiaen: Eternity is not a long period of time; it is no time at all.
“It would be the highest compliment to me as a composer, Messiaen said, “if you had a spiritual experience because of hearing my music.”
John William McMullen is a Permanent Deacon, Theology Instructor at Mater Dei High School in Evansville, Indiana, and has taught philosophy and ethics at the University of Southern Indiana and Ivy Tech Community College. He is the author of several books: The Last Blackrobe of Indiana and the Potawatomi Trail of Death; Roman; Poor Souls; and Utopia Revisited. His latest work is entitled: THE MIRACLE OF STALAG 8A - Beauty Beyond the Horror: Olivier Messiaen and the Quartet for the End of Time. (Bird Brain Publishing). McMullen resides in Evansville, Indiana, with his wife and children.
