Word: messaien
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JUST AFTER the fall of France in 1940, the Germans seized composer Olivier Messaien and took him to a concentration camp in desolate Silesia. Confined in Stalag VIII, undernourished and brutalized, he created perhaps his greatest piece the Quartet for the End of Time. He wrote it for the few available musicians and with them performed it there in the barracks...
...cellist played an instrument with only three strings, and Messaien did his best on a piano with several broken keys. Together with a clarinetist and a violinist, heavily clothed against the extreme cold, they performed one of the masterpieces of 20th century chamber music for an audience of soldiers, workers, and farmers, their fellow prisoners of the Third Reich...
...lack of food in the Stalag had caused Messaien to have a hallucination of "the rainbow of the Angel amid strange shifting colors"--the destroying angel from the Book of Revelations who announces the "end of time" at the apocalypse. This vision, embodying the extreme terror of the end of the world and the perfect peace that must follow is the essence of this remarkable piece. With his highly individual blend of Hindu rhythms, natural sounds like bird songs, and suggestive harmonic textures. Messaien has created music of the greatest emotional power that is at the same time an expression...
With the emphasis on chamber music this weekend, your best bet should be the all-Messaien concert at Kirkland House on Friday. The program will feature the superb Quartet For The End Of Time, which Messaien composed in a German prisoner of war camp. The limitations he faced there gave rise to some of his best writing. Four of the best undergraduate musicians will be performing...
...Merie Noire and Quartet For The End Of Time by Olivier Messaien; Marilyn Chohaney, flute, Lynn Chang, violin, David Kass, clarinet, Craig Hogan, cello, and Hugh Wolff, piano; Kirkland JCR; 8:30; free...