The Soul Embodying Hope: Olivier Messiaen

As part of my "new" listening I am drinking in Olivier Messiaen's, "Quartet for the End of Time" - Quatuor pour la fin du temps. 

If you have never heard a Messiaen work it will likely sound different than anything you have heard before.  . . . And may ever hear again. 

The story of this particular work is extraordinary.  Messiaen was in a German POW camp.  Cobbling together the instruments (rather beaten up for the most part) and happily finding some other French musicians, he composed, extensively rehearsed and the piece had its "premiere" in the camp. 

Messiaen, himself, was a person of deep faith and the work is one of spiritual engagement and imagination.  It is not hard to understand why he was inspired to compose a work meditating on the "end of time".  Yet, like some of his other works, the goodness of the natural world, of flora and fauna play an important role in exemplifying this extraordinary human experience of a journey into hope in the face of concrete deprivation and inhumanity. 

Listening to the work both during my prayer time and outside of it, it is clear to me that the music simply expresses with a depth and texture an integral bodily and spiritual experience that cannot be similarly expressed in words. 

Apparently the music even moved the musicians' captors who eventually sent them back to France.  Messiaen's music was a transformative engagement of a Christian's faith life being shared with a "public" who might well have been turned off.  Taking this risk of self-revelation it became part of a salvation that occurred in the midst of conflict.  

The recording I have also benefits from being a live one with dedicated musicians recorded at a top flight musical venue, the Salzburg Festival.