In the world of music, Olivier Messiaen is considered an outsider, due to his colorful and immediately recognizable harmonic language, but mainly because of the very special way in which he handles the notion of time. By manipulating the musical time, the composer tries to turn music into a transcendental, even religious experience. In this sense the Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps is perhaps his most idiomatic work. Besides using extremely slow tempi, he plays with ingenious rhythmical techniques that undermine the traditional dynamic flow of the music. This makes the listener’s attention shift to a sensuous, almost hypnotic sound perception of the moment.
Messiaen composed this 'musical vision' during his detention in the prisoner of war camp Stalag VIIIa, in Görlitz, Silesia. Impressed by the hopelessness of the situation and the appalling conditions in the camp, he chose the biblical Apocalypse as a source of inspiration.
He builds up a sound world in which impressive archangels adorned with colorful rainbows announce the end of times, alternated with hymns of praise in honor of Christ.
Birds are assigned a very special, mystical role. Messiaen, besides being a composer also an accomplished ornithologist, regarded them as the messengers of God and often let their song play a crucial, connecting role in his music.
Messiaen was eventually able to convince an art-loving camp guard to organize a concert evening to premiere the ‘Quatuor’ in front of hundreds of fellow inmates.