Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Quatuor pour la fin du temps, also known by its English title Quartet for the End of Time, is a piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. It was written in 1940 and is generally regarded as one of his finest works.

Structure

The work is in eight movements.

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"Liturgie de cristal" (Liturgy of crystal) - for the full quartet

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Messiaen described the opening of the quartet as:

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?Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven? ? Pople,Quatuor Pour La Fin Du Temp p.17 Cambridge University Press

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And so the opening movement, Liturgie de cristal, begins with the solo clarinet imitating almost literally a blackbirds song. This is soon passed on to the violin that imitates the nightingale?s song.

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While the melodies and ornamentations are left to the clarinet and violin alone in this movement the underlying pulse is kept by the cello and piano. The cello plays the same fifteen note melody continuously using only the notes C, E, D, F# and Bb (all from the same whole tone scale which Messiaen prized so much). Another point of note on the cello melody is that it is also palindromic, that is to say it is the same backwards as it is forwards.

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The piano line is made up of a seventeen-note value rhythm but this time consisting of twenty-nine chords. Unlike the cello however this is simply repeated over and over.

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It is thought that the reason that Messiaen chose to give the accompaniment these lines was to enhance the feeling of timelessness with no set beginning or end.

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"Vocalise, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps" (Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of time) - for the full quartet

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"Abîme des oiseaux" (Abyss of birds) - for solo clarinet

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"Intermède" (Interlude) - for violin, cello, and clarinet

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"Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" (Praise to the eternity of Jesus), for cello and piano

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"Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes" (Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets) - for the full quartet

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"Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps" (Mingling of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time) - for the full quartet

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"Louange à l'immortalité de Jésus" (Praise to the immortality of Jesus) - for violin and piano

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A typical performance of the work lasts about fifty minutes.

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