Messiaen wrote a masterpiece for the only four instruments in his prison camp
Captured at Verdun in 1940, the French composer Olivier Messiaen found a clarinettist, a cellist and a violinist among his fellow prisoners. A sympathetic German guard slipped him paper and pencils. The Quartet for the End of Time premiered in a freezing camp in January 1941, played to inmates and guards.
Messiaen was born in Avignon in 1908 to a poet mother and a father who translated Shakespeare. During the First World War his mother took her sons to Grenoble, where he recited Shakespeare to his younger brother in a toy theatre with cellophane backdrops and embraced Catholicism, a faith central to his music. Largely self-taught at the piano, he asked for opera scores as Christmas presents. A teacher's gift of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande hit him, he said, like a thunderbolt.
He entered the Paris Conservatoire at 11 and gathered prizes in harmony, fugue, organ and composition. Marcel Dupré recalled that Messiaen, who had never sat at an organ console, listened silently for an hour and returned a week later playing Bach's Fantasia in C minor impressively. In 1931 he became organist at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, a post he kept for 61 years, until his death. That same year he heard a gamelan for the first time, beginning a lifelong fondness for tuned percussion.
Poor eyesight made him a medical auxiliary rather than a soldier, and after capture he was held at Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz for nine months. The trio he first wrote for his fellow prisoners grew into the quartet, with Messiaen himself at a battered upright piano. Its title nods to the Book of Revelation and to his radical handling of musical time. Soon after his release he became professor of harmony at the Conservatoire, and his pupils would include Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis, whom he urged to put mathematics and architecture into his music.
Several quirks shaped his sound. He saw colours when he heard certain chords and used those combinations as he composed. He notated birdsong around the world and wove it into his scores, built harmonies from what he called modes of limited transposition, and wrote for the electronic ondes Martenot. His private life held tragedy too: his first wife, violinist Claire Delbos, lost her memory after an operation late in the Second World War and spent her remaining years in institutions.
Source: Olivier Messiaen
