08 May 2009 | Friday 20:30
Notre Dame de Sion
Duration: 45'
Full: 18 TL Discount: 12 TL
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Interpreted by Trio Cérès and Jérôme Voisin
Violin: Julien DIEUDEGARD | Cello: Guillaume Lafeuille | Piano: Jonas VITAUD | Clarinet: Jérôme Voisin
Among Olivier Messiaen's works, Quartet for the End of Time, played here for the first time in Turkey, is the one in particular whose affective structure oscillates between awe and fear, hope and joy - exhibiting in 49 minutes a range of emotions one can encounter in a lifetime. Instead of affirming the orderly flow of everyday existence, this is music which acknowledges only two essences: the instantaneous and the eternal.
Quartet for the End of Time is a piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-92). Messiaen was captured as a prisoner of war by the Germans during the Second World War in 1939 and taken to a camp in Görlitz where he discovered among his fellow prisoners a clarinetist, a violinist, and a violoncellist. The success of a trio which he wrote for them led him to add seven more movements to this interlude, with himself at the piano, to create the Quartet for the End of Time. It was first played in front of hundreds of prisoners on January 15, 1941.
The spiritual references of the work are quite complex. Messiaen's religious mysticism found a point of departure for the Quartet in the passage of the book of Revelation (Chapter 10) about the descent of the seventh angel, at the sound of whose trumpet the mystery of God will be consummated, and who announces that "there should be time no longer." According to Messiaen, the piece was not intended to be a commentary on the Apocalypse, nor to refer to his own captivity, but to be a kind of musical extension of the Biblical account, and the concept of the "end of time" as the end of past, future, as the beginning of eternity. There are eight movements because God rested on the seventh day after creation, a day which extended into the eighth day of timeless eternity. It should be noted that, although Messiaen dealt with religious subject matter, he did not consider himself a mystic. He claimed no special access to wisdom, only that he illuminated the teachings of his faith. He did not deal with conventional themes often dealth with by Christian music such as the passion of the Christ, or the Crucifixion, either. Rather, his theology was of glory, of the joy of the encounter between the divine and the human.
Quartet induces in the listener a trance-like state of heightened response, a state where s/he experiences simultaneously different rates of time-flow. This is achieved by superimposing several rhythms, some of which are contrasting. One feels outside of time, so that all movement seems to be complex decoration for an eternal stillness. A correspondence with Eastern music by which Messiaen was inspired as much as he was inspired by infinite range of bird songs can be heard in a quality of mind: abandoning the logic and continuity characteristic of the western tradition, his music does not elaborate a proposition as create conditions for mental excitation or reflection. Narrative thrust is replaced by ritual and liturgical order. The music is structured in self-contained blocks, and proceeds as a statement followed by a new statement where conventional western composition will seem to unfold as altered through time. Messiaen's discontinuous music rather provides an environment within which time itself can be observed, colored, as he would say, by rhythm.
Trio Cérès was founded in 2005. It developed rapidly with the support of Jean-Claude Pennetier. They stood out among others with the awards they received in prestigious international festivals and competitions such as “Trio di Trieste” and “ARD” in Munich (September 2007). Their album comprising of Fauré, Ravel and Hersant will be released in May 2009.
Further Reading:
A wonderful visual resource on the Book of Revelation by Deborah Topliff
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