Klarinet Archive - Posting 000476.txt from 2001/03

From: "Kevin Fay (LCA)" <kevinfay@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Music for Holocaust Memorial
Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 18:50:56 -0500

Sue asked:

<<<I've been asked to play for a Holocaust Memorial Service next month,
and need recommendations of pieces that might be appropriate. They'd
like a short selection before and after the speaker, ideally on
Jewish-sounding themes with a plaintive quality.>>>

The solo movement ("Abyss of the Birds") from Messiaen's Quartet for the
End of Time is ideal. He composed it while a prisoner in a
concentration camp. What follows is an anonymous record review from
www.amazon.com; it may have some details a bit incorrect historically,
but in general is in accord with what I remember from my research from
college (i.e., not yesterday):

<<<"the overwhelming grandeur...", July 6, 2000=20
Reviewer: happydogpotatohead (see more about me) from New Orleans, LA
USA
Messaien wrote "Quartet for the End of Time" in a Nazi prison camp. This
work was first performed by half-starved prisoners on broken
instruments, to an audience of arrogant Nazi prison camp guards and
officials, and the people they had enslaved in the name of the Third
Reich.

The work that Messaien composed in the face of this titanic evil was not
a work of anger or bitterness. It was not a work of resignation to an
inevitable fate or a hymn to depression. Messaien chose to represent,
musically, the end of all things, as described in the Book of
Revelations in the Bible. In its austerity and its serenity, the Quartet
informs the Nazis: You are in control now, in this place, at this time,
but your control is not absolute. Your Reich will not last 1000 years.
You may attempt whatever you like and kill millions, but your time will
be done, and you will be banished to nothingness.

Messaien hid his message behind the context of the Book of Revelations,
which he interpreted not in the fashion of modern day "born again"
fundamentalists, but in a mystical way, as a spiritual event that had
resonance in his time. What was Hitler but an Anti-Christ, a beast
attempting to set himself up as a God? Messaien called upon the power of
the Word and set it to music, a music that was intended to work as a
memory of redemption, a reminder that evil cannot, and will not, triumph
over good no matter how profound the evil may be. It is also the sound
of a man calling on his God to avenge the evil that has overtaken the
world. If the Nazis had truly known what Messaien was telling them, they
would have shot him.=20

Musically, Messaien was forced to write the Quartet for the instruments
he had available to him. He also had to take into account that the
instruments were half-broken; for example, the piano that was used in
the original performance was missing strings and therefore there were
notes that it could not play. Messaien wrote with all this in mind, and
with his subject matter in mind.

The Quartet is definitely a 20th Century work. Messaien had been writing
works outside of the accepted "classical" form for some time, but here
he abandons time signatures, uses extreme chromaticism and wide tonal
variations, sweeps of dynamic range, and unexpected, perhaps
unprecedented, tonalities and atonalities.

But he did all this with focus. So many 20th Century composers made
music that seemed an academic exercise. Messaien, here, uses every
musical expression in his power, every type of music that he knows how
to write, every sound that he hears in his head, to write the Quartet
for the End of Time, in the service of God and Man and Freedom. This
sets the Quartet utterly apart, in my mind, from any other piece of 20th
Century classical music, and elevates it to a higher level than nearly
any other 20th Century music. Only the musician Albert Ayler would come
close to expressing the kind of intense spirituality combined with
overwhelming musical technique expressed here.

I can only add here that this performance, by these artists, is and has
been the definitive performance of the Quartet for the End of Time, and
that they bring this music to life with conviction and clarity.

It feels cheap and commonplace to tell people that they should "own"
this piece of music; it is far too majestic to be "owned" in any sense
by anyone. The Quartet for the End of Time is one of the most profound
works of art that the human race has ever produced. You should have
this, not out of any sense of acquisitiveness or one-upmanship, but
because it provides a doorway into the heart of God and the heart of
humanity that is nearly unparalleled in the history of music.>>>

This review is written better than I could. I agree with it.

kjf

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