Quatuor pour la fin du temps album coverThe Globe and Mail
If anything good has come from all things Trump, Brexit and our other motley anxieties, it is Martin Frost's decision to record the most hopeful music he knew as an antidote to a world of stifled hope.
The work in question, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (Quatuor pour la fin du temps) had its debut on Jan. 15, 1941, at Stalag V111A prisoner-of-war-camp in Goerlitz, Germany, just over 100 kilometres east of Dresden, where the already famous French composer was held prisoner along with 1,000 or more fellow French detainees.
In less trying circumstances, a luminous reading of the eight-movement quartet was given Dec. 5 at Koerner Hall in Toronto by Frost, arguably the world's most cutting-edge clarinetist, with violinist Janine Jansen, cellist Torleif Thedeen and pianist Lucas Debargue, the same lineup found on a recently released Sony Classics recording. A distinction must be made here, though. The CD version comes out of headphones note perfect. But the live Koerner Hall performance seemingly arrived out of thin air. All apocalypses should be so gentle.
In Messiaen's later telling of it, the work's debut took place "in front of an audience of 5,000 people." But Étienne Pasquier, the original cellist, later revised the number down to some 400 people. Pasquier, who gave up on a promising solo career, remembered the bleakness of the day itself: "It was bitterly cold inside the hut, and there was snow on the ground and on the rooftops." (Records show it was minus-20 C outside at the concert's 6 p.m. start. Barrack 27B was unheated, even though some Nazi brass had showed up.)
"Even so," the cellist went on, "their thoughts were turned inward, even those who may have been hearing chamber music for the first time. It was extraordinary."
The Swedish-born Frost first heard the Quartet when he was 13 at a summer music camp in Riihimaki, Finland, and was instantly transfixed. "I'm not sure that it had to do with the piece's history," he told me a few days before the Toronto concert on the phone from Quebec City, a stop on a mini-tour ending Thursday night at Carnegie Hall in New York.
"It's about the silence it has. It's the listening to other people play. We spoke about recording it 10 years ago. But I have the feeling this piece is more relevant now than ever before. We are turning back to our future, particularly if you compare now with Messiaen's time."
Rufus Wainwright, a recent fan of the Messiaen piece, gets the work's sense of resiliency just about right when he says, "There's a sadness there but it sounds optimistic. It doesn't sound destroyed."
The Koerner concert opening half had Bela Bartok's Contrasts, for clarinet, violin and piano (1938) – commissioned by Swing King Benny Goodman, no less – and Karol Szymanowski's Mity (Myths) (1915). Both pieces, aggressively executed, help tune our ears to the individual playing to come in the Messiaen Quartet: to Debargue's sudden spurts of electrifyingly muscular playing, to cellist Thedeen's unimaginably broad range of dynamics and to Jansen's buttery sound.
Even so, the Messiaen Quartet has a back story the other pieces lack, one filled with an entire movie's worth of characters. It includes:
- Karl-Albert Brull, a music-loving, francophone camp guard. He helped Messiaen get out of the camp by providing him with forged documents. Brull made sure the composer had a steady supply of paper for his scores. Sadly, Messiaen years later refused to receive him when Brull arrived at the composer’s flat in Paris.
- Henri Akoka, the clarinetist at the debut, escaped by arranging for a transfer to another camp. He then jumped off the roof of the cattle car to escape, with his clarinet tucked under his arm. Akoka was an Algerian-born Jew. Escape was his only hope.
- Jean Le Boulaire, the violinist, gave up playing for acting (under the name Jean Lanier), appearing in a number of French New Wave films such as Last Year at Marienbad and in the pot boiler Modigliani of Montparnasse. He grew more morose the older he got. “Afterward everyone resumed his life,” he told a visitor. “When we part we say, ‘We’ll phone each other.’ But we never phone.” Having played the Quatour kept him going. “It’s a jewel that’s mine,” he said, “and that will never belong to anyone else.”
As for Messiaen, the pianist for the occasion, he seemed barely to have noticed that he was, in fact, a prisoner of war. Survival seemed no more of a challenge for him than finding a way to write for an oddball combination of instruments. Other French composers joined the resistance; Messiaen composed epic piano concertos when he made it back to Paris. Yet he subsequently emerged as 20th-century composition's version of Henri Matisse.
For one thing, both Matisse and Messiaen had a thing about birds, although the painter preferred his in cages while the composer infused his work with birdsong transcribed live to produce the chirpy clarinet bits in Liturgie de cristal (Crystal Liturgy), the first of the Quatuor's brief eight movements. (As a young music student, I found Messiaen's bird mania well, feather-brained. Now it's welcome.)
Like the painter, Messiaen uses colour as structure. The expressive, tonal shifting clarinet line in Abîme des oiseaux (Abyss of the Birds) filled every corner of the concert hall's surrounding silence as if it were a light show.