Quartet for the End of Time On Music, Grief & Birdsong
MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS
Quartet for the End of Time
Also by Mich A el s y MM ons Robe R ts
POETRY
Soft Keys
Raising Sparks
Burning Babylon
Corpus
The Half Healed
Drysalter
Selected Poems
Mancunia
Ransom
FICTION
Patrick’s Alphabet
Breath
NON- FICTION
Edgelands (with Paul Farley)
Deaths of the Poets (with Paul Farley)
Quartet for the End of Time
On Music, Grief and Birdsong
Mich A el s y MM ons
Robe R ts
J ONA THAN CA PE
LO NDO N
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Copyright © Michael Symmons Roberts 2025
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In memory of my parents
I did not in any sense want to comment upon the Apocalypse. My only wish was to articulate my desire for the dissolution of time.
Olivier Messiaen
Liturgy of Crystal
Crystals. Liturgies. Neither conjures much for me. Diamond stylus like a mouse tooth. Meth. Wireless set. Amethyst the size of a fist, worth next to nothing. ‘Liturgie de cristal’ starts before dawn. Small hours between 3 and 4 a.m. The birds wake up and most of us will miss it. I have missed it. Most days I still miss it. Messiaen says you can hear a blackbird, he says you can hear a nightingale. One of each in this first movement. They improvise inside a cloud at haloheight. A blackbird has a bright, gold halo around each eye, then a soft honeycomb iris funnelling into the black hole of the pupil at the centre. In spring, there is daily eye-to-eye contact with the one outside my window. Like Elizabeth Bishop’s tremendous catch in her poem ‘The Fish’, this blackbird has its eye on me, ‘but not / to return my stare’.
I knew they were already gone, so I had no fear of losing them. We took a bag with the ashes of our parents in two urns and dropped them in Lake Coniston. We said a prayer
Quartet for the e nd of t ime and let them go. I felt nothing much. If anything, release. Then that night I woke in horror at the thought that they were drifting in the deep: dissipated, inchoate, lost and cold and drowned. It felt like those nightmares every parent has, when you take your eye off your child for a second and they vanish. Only now in reverse. I had mislaid my parents and their clouds had bloomed in water, spreading and fading as they grew. Maybe we had made a mistake. That is why people are buried in the ground. It holds them in one place. Even an urn can be interred or kept on a mantlepiece. It means there is a location, a physical trace. In water there is no regathering. But this sounds like the end of a story instead of its beginning.
When the composer Olivier Messiaen died in 1992 at the age of eighty-three, my first thought was that I’d missed him. I’d had it in mind, ever since I was a student, to go to Paris and sneak in at the back of the Église de la SainteTrinité towards the end of Sunday morning Mass. He was made organist at the church in his early twenties and held the post for the rest of his life. Reputedly, if the spirit moved him, the organ play-out at the end of Mass would turn into an extended improvisation, a free concert for all comers by one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century. I discovered his music by chance. As a student in the mid-1980s, I was flicking for the first time through the small classical section of my local record shop. Not my natural
A l
territory, but I was looking for something new. It was the title that grabbed me – Quatuor pour la fin du temps – so I bought it. On first listening, I found it decidedly strange. It was hypnotic, furious, at times ecstatic then achingly spare and still. I couldn’t stop playing it. It sounded like a wild, idiosyncratic mystic modernism I hadn’t heard before. It didn’t seem too big a leap from some of my other listening at the time – like the Cocteau Twins and the Cure – but it opened up new imaginative spaces. The record sleeve told an amazing story about the making of this piece. He had written it while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia, for the only four – rather battered – instruments available. This all added to its mystique. I tried to track down more of his music, but couldn’t find much. I managed to find LPs of the Turangalila Symphony and a piano suite called Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. I loved his titles. Or rather, I loved some of them.
For each section of the Quatuor , Messiaen wrote an explanatory paragraph. These are by turns intense, infuriating, inspiring and downright unhelpful. Their translation from French into English no doubt blurs or skews them, but for years – and still – I can’t decide if I should ignore them, try to get past them, or engage with them. Now, unable to un-read them, I find myself arguing with his explantations, jabbing at them, riffing off them. Here’s a taster in English translation of Messiaen’s note for the Quartet ’s seventh section, from Anthony Pople’s musicological handbook: ‘I pass beyond reality and submit in ecstasy to a dizziness, a gyratory interlocking of superhuman sounds and colours. These swords of fire, these flows of
Quartet for the e nd of t ime blue- orange lava, these sudden stars; this is the tumult of rainbows!’ The musicologist and clarinettist Rebecca Rischin in her For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet points out that some critics of the Quartet ’s early French performances were snippy about these written statements of intent from the composer. He meant them. Every word. No critic doubted that, but some were baffled by these texts, some put off by their mystical accounts of how the music worked.
Pictured on the back cover of my first LP of Quatuor pour la fin du temps was a benign eccentric with thick glasses and an even thicker home-made purple scarf. The picture seemed out of kilter with the visionary power of the music. As I read about Messiaen, he intrigued me more and more. Here was a major modernist composer, teacher of many great musicians – the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez and Quincy Jones – drawing on musical styles and structures, rhythms and harmonies from all over the world and inventing his own. He was a Catholic visionary, an obsessive ornithologist who believed that birds had escaped or been spared the Fall, surviving intact in our wounded world. This survival included their voices, so to listen to birdsong was to hear the authentic music of Eden. If I believed that birds in the field behind our house were performing the soundtrack to Paradise each dawn then I’d get up earlier and give them more attention. If I believed it and I happened to be a composer, I’d be doing more than just listening.
It is not a battlefield. It is not farmed nor tended. It is not hallowed ground. It is not a place where miracles happen. It is not flat enough for games. It is not a place to walk at night. It is wasted ground. It is the first day of October. I am woken at first light, not by the sounds of Hall Hill, but by the sounds in my head, fears and losses and calculations. I hear something like a dawn chorus from the field at the end of the road. I’m not usually awake this early. I have no clue about birdsong. I reach for my phone and open the bird ID app I downloaded in the summer and have barely used. I hold it up to the window and it starts to flash up names of birds: European robin, house sparrow, Eurasian blue tit, longtailed tit, common chaffinch, a chiding Eurasian jackdaw plus one oblivious Canada goose passing over on its way to the millpond. It’s not an exotic list. But I like drawing out those names from the cloud of song, that sense of listing and codifying. It helps. At night, the sounds of the field, especially in summer with windows open, are vivid and gothic – vixen screams, dog fox hollers, colicky owls – the field, so close but never entered, has become a presence only known by sound and distant sight. It lies about ten paces from my front door, but I haven’t set foot in it for years. How many years? Maybe five. Maybe more. I want to keep it that way.
In dreams about my house there is often a room I can’t find but know is there. Knowing it’s there is enough. I like to think Hall Hill works like that for the people in the houses that surround it. Its sounds interrupt my poems and find their way into them. The voices of the field, and my imagining of them, bled into an elegy for my dad I took three years trying to write. And the water in and under the hill seeped
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into the elegy for my mum which started off as a poem about the number eleven and ended up as a poem about reckoning up, about counting as a futile attempt to order grief.
Not countryside, not farmland, not urban wasteland, not wilderness, not parkland, not garden, nothing special, not even much of a hill, though there is a rise in the top left corner sufficient to see the chimney of Lowerhouse Mill and the skeletal steel drill tower at the back of the fire station. It is easier to say what Hall Hill isn’t than what it is. It’s a sort of brownfield, but with one foot in the greenbelt. When my sons were younger we would pick our way along the desire path by the fence – the middle of the field was too overgrown even in winter – dragging the wooden sledge too heavy to do more than sink, or the blue plastic one that shot down like a luge. As sledge-runs go it was far from precipitous but set with traps of gorse and hawthorn. In summer, the top of the rise was once a place for phone calls – good signal – decorated with crisp packets, spent lighters, crushed cans and disposable BBQ trays. Does anyone go up there now?
The one path through the north side of the field to the foot of the hill has been seized by bramble and belthigh grasses. Parts of it, always liable to floods from rainwater run-off, have become a perma-swamp. Somewhere under the swamp there used to be a metal grid. The kids would stand on it after rain (which was often, this being the north-west of England) and listen to the hollow rush of it echoing under their feet. Last time I tried to walk there, the grid itself had been swallowed by the mud. There have been makeshift efforts to restore the path, including
someone dropping old wooden pallets, so with luck and good balance you could tightrope your way through. But the mud and water seized the pallets too, turned them into soggy wafers breaking with a snap when you put your weight on them. My son was one of the first to experience this, leading to a tetanus shot for a rusty nail in his foot. The climbing ropes and home-made swings of decades now hang from ash trees like swags of Spanish Moss.
As a window into a composer’s imagination, Messiaen’s short glosses on his music are fascinating. They are also wildly eccentric. He was synaesthetic, able to see sounds as colours and shapes, so his notes include phrases like ‘confetti, light gemstones and colliding reflections’. As a guide to the world of the music, I find some of these descriptions oddly obstructive. One of his most beautiful pieces is a piano suite written during the Second World War called Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, or twenty ways of looking at (more like gazing in love at) the Christ child. One of its most radiant ‘regards ’, number eighteen, translates as something like ‘Gaze of the Awesome Unction’ (now there’s a title) and the composer writes that he was inspired by an old tapestry, from which he conjures an image of Christ on horseback, wielding a gigantic sword, charging through a cloud of lightning bolts.
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Hall Hill has been on hold forever. It is privately owned, but has been open, in theory, to everyone in the town. There have been attempts to fence off the ways in, but the fences were broken down or left incomplete. There have been planning applications, but nothing has changed to date. For the time being, it’s a wild place in the middle of a town. Foxes and badgers creep out at night, make a racket in the bins, then lope back through a gap in the hedge. All this in the middle of an old mill-town but these visitors are undisturbed save by each other and the odd dog-walker. Not by us these days. There are rumours that building on the site is edging closer in spite of a campaign to stop it. The local story is that Hall Hill was the site of a dye works nearly a century back, that the soil is steeped in colours, is poisoned by them, so the cost of cleaning the ground to make it safe to build would be prohibitive. A place despoiled but protected by its own industrial past. Until recently, dyeing was one of the main trades here. You would see vans drive past with ‘WE LIVE TO DYE’ painted on them.
I have a friend down the road who is photographing Hall Hill in forensic detail at different times of year, collaging huge framed landscapes from multiple hyper-detailed images, every leaf, every fly on a leaf, is pin sharp if you look close enough. He has seen the field sidle into some of my poems, so he keeps asking if I want to go with him on one of his shoots. So far, there’s always been a reason why I can’t make the times he suggests. The truth is I won’t set foot in there now. I like it kept as an imaginarium, some kind of auditory Xanadu. I’ll let my friend the photographer do the forensic mapping of its ideas and projections.
Trees have fallen on windy nights on Hall Hill. I thought I heard them crash, but perhaps I was only imagining what that would sound like. What I could do, inspired by the bird calls on my app, is to set up a recorder at the edge of the field and leave it switched on all night to see what it might catch.
He says there’s a dust storm, sonic dust, I think of woodsmoke rising through the highest trees to breach the canopy. Frozen honey. Liturgy of crystal. These words are no help to me.
The intense, super-heated imagery of Messiaen’s notes on music made more sense to me when I read his mother’s work. Cécile Sauvage was a poet, and many of the words she recited to her unborn first son were from poems she wrote for him. When the composer’s mother was carrying him, she would sing to him, speak to him, as many mothers do. But she also wrote a whole book of poems addressed to the soul of her unborn child. Barely any of her poems are published in English translations, but its field of imagery – the soul, the high trees, birdsong, ecstatic visions – and intensity feel rooted in the same ground as the composer’s notes. Sauvage died of TB aged forty-four, cutting short a
Quartet for the e nd of t ime poetic career that was gaining critical acclaim and interest in her final years.
There was a lot of poetry in the Messiaen house, much of it in English. Messiaen’s father, Pierre, was an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare, Blake, Milton. Cécile herself was a lover of Keats’s poetry. I’ve had in my head for a long time a claim by Messiaen that his mother consciously ‘commissioned’ him before birth to become a composer, with poems written and spoken to him for that purpose. But I may have made that up. Or maybe he did. There’s some myth-making in the lives of most artists, and a fair bit of it around the making of Quartet. Cécile and her poetry were clearly an inspiration to Olivier. However, it’s Messiaen’s faith, even more than his musicianship, which he claimed was gifted at birth.
Je suis né croyant – I was born believing – is a claim the composer made without caveat. I was born doubting so I find Messiaen’s claim both enviable and deathly in its certainty. His family was not particularly devout, but he was. In fact, he was so devout that the words he spoke and wrote about his work never, at least in my reading of them, betray a shadow of doubt about the doctrines and texts that inspired it. He may have, must have, suffered self- doubt at points in his development as an artist, because every great artist does and Messiaen’s visionary musical gifts were abundant. ‘Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize’, as Robert Hughes pithily put it. Many artists concerned with the metaphysical in their work find it fuelled by a dialogue – at times a blazing row – between faith and doubt. Messiaen seems closer to
T. S. Eliot’s favoured approach – set out in his essay on Blake – that truly innovative work comes most forcefully from an artist grounded in a theological or philosophical tradition, so they don’t have to spend the work’s imaginative resources constructing their own set of beliefs. The way Messiaen wrote and talked about the doctrines behind his music with absolute certainty can be a barrier to some listeners. So it was, and sometimes still is, for me. At times, what he says about his work reads like an intense kind of poetry. Sometimes it leaves me completely cold. But his music never does.
This smoke, this dust, this cloud above the trees will – when it clears – reveal a harmonious silence. This, says Messiaen, is heaven.
Quartet for the End of Time comes in eight movements. Seven is the perfect number, says the composer, so for that reason, you need eight. If you are making a work to call for the end of time, you need a final movement to enter a realm beyond the constraints of chronology into Paradise. Messiaen’s fellow modernist, the British poet and artist David Jones, explained the impulse behind his own work as ‘trying to make a shape out of the very things of which
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one is oneself made’. In Jones’s case the iconography and language of the Christian faith was at the heart of it, but so was his Anglo-Welsh ancestry, the mythic matter of Britain, Roman history, shipbuilding on the River Thames and his experiences as a private soldier on the Somme. For Messiaen, alongside his faith, the things of which he was made included his mother’s poetry, his deep reading of Thomas Aquinas, his fascination with the theory and instrumentation of ancient Indian music, Greek music, Japanese music and theatre, plainchant, and his obsession with birdsong. All of these play a role in his Quartet, but the direct source was the composer’s meditation on the Book of Revelation.
It’s the last book in the Bible, after the Old Testament, then the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the various epistles to the nascent churches, then . . . boom. Apocalypse. The Book of Revelation – or in full, The Revelation of St John the Divine – is based on a series of visions by an early Christian in exile on the island of Patmos for preaching his faith. It is also part of a literary tradition of apocalyptic writing which acts as a conduit between divine truths and human understanding. But crucially it offers an account to believers of the end times for those who have faith in a new heaven and a new earth. Some of its apocalyptic visions, not least the four horsemen, have cut loose from the book to become ubiquitous symbols of the end of the world. But
the visionary fire at its heart has been divisive too. It was a latecomer to the biblical canon and some churches – parts of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, for example – left it out of their liturgies. Some Reformation leaders – including Martin Luther and John Calvin – expressed misgivings about the book, and it is still rare in most mainstream western churches to hear sermons on its prophecies.
For some fundamentalist believers, the visions of Revelation’s author are not just accounts of totalitarian worldly powers (written under Rome’s imperial rule) and God’s ultimate justice. Instead, they’re a coded route map to the end of the world. If you can crack the code, you can start reading international news bulletins to see how close we’re getting, ticking off the signs where you spot them coming to fruition. This was not Messiaen’s reading of Revelation. For him, it was not a field guide to global conflicts, but a work of beauty, a promise of a glorious world of love beyond this world, beyond the end of time.
The story of Messiaen’s composition of Quatuor pour la fin du temps at the height of the Second World War and its dramatic premiere in a labour camp washroom has become a twentieth-century touchstone, a potent symbol of human strength and defiance in the face of evil, of the power of art to inspire those qualities. Musicians, Messiaen scholars and musicologists like Peter Hill, Nigel Simeone, Paul Griffiths, Christopher Dingle and Anthony Pople have
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opened up the making of the Quartet. Rebecca Rischin’s work in particular – built on interviews with performers and audience members from that ice- clenched Silesian night in January 1941 – has rebalanced that story, but far from diminished it in my eyes. Understanding more about Messiaen’s process of composition has deepened my admiration for the Quartet by making its creation believable.
From the moment I read the back- of- an- album summary when I first saw the title Quartet for the End of Time in a record shop, the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music. I loved the idea that a composer could be so inflamed with longing, with righteous anger and furious hope that he sat down with a blank page and a pencil to change the path of twentieth- century music. The essence of the famous story is this. A brilliant young French composer is captured during the Second World War and sent to a Nazi labour camp on the other side of Europe. Among his fellow prisoners he finds three talented musicians – a cellist called Étienne Pasquier, a clarinettist called Henri Akoka and a violinist called Jean Le Boulaire. He persuades a sympathetic guard to give him pencils and paper to write his music, so in the bitter, bleak freeze of a Silesian winter, he writes a piece for himself as pianist plus the three players he has befriended. It is a new piece in eight movements that captures their longing for liberation. Instruments were found for the players, but the cello had only three strings and the piano was a bar-room upright with some keys that stayed down when you pressed them. The only place they could perform the piece was in an unheated washroom barrack. So it was that Quatuor
pour la fin du temps was premiered on 15 January 1941 in a camp deep in snow, to a packed audience of prisoners from many countries and professions, with their sick and injured comrades on stretchers at the front. The Quatuor took about an hour to perform, and though many of the prisoners had never attended a concert before, let alone one playing experimental modernist music, it was later described by the composer as the most attentive audience he had ever known.
This is not the book I set out to write. That other book knew its job. As books go, it was born believing. It was to be a book that mapped some territories where poetry and metaphysics cross, where the howl and the still small voice can be heard in solo and in unison. Because it would have been a kind of map, it would know where it was going when it set off towards an end as sure as Eliot’s in Four Quartets when we will, he says, ‘arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’. But then I started writing and the words kept looping back to the loss of my dad just before before the pandemic, then my mum during. When the world contracted – for most of us – to the measure of our walls I tried to work my way back into the right book. But the words began to form into poems instead. I returned to my original maps for this book (disguised as book proposals) and they no longer made sense to me. It put me in mind of Philip Larkin’s lament that ‘you
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don’t write the poems you really want to write’ because ‘the words somehow refuse to come’.
What I did have was a title. It was Messiaen’s title, translated into English. Quartet for the End of Time still made sense to me. I saw a way in through the idea of ends, of apocalypse in its sense as a place, a time or an idea in which a revelation or encounter with God might take place. Maybe. That took me back to Messiaen’s starting point for his Quartet – the Book of Revelation, Chapter 10. The first time I ever heard or read that passage was on the sleeve of that Messiaen LP. I remember the angel more than anything, the sheer scale of it:
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.
Saturday morning in early autumn. For the first time in months there is a bite to the air. As ever when we pull up
outside, my parents have been watching for us. I’ve got the boot open and I’m lifting out Mum’s birthday present for next week – I forget what we gave her now – and a bag of small gifts and cards from their grandsons. My dad walks up next to me and offers to help take the stuff in. It’s fine, no, don’t worry. He kisses me on the top of my head as he has at every arrival or departure scene for as long as I can remember. I reach into the bag, murmuring something about the rude jokes on the cards from the boys, and I take out a copy of a book of poems called Mancunia. It was newly published and they were going to buy some copies but I said I’d bring them some instead. He looks at the cover and I tell him there’s a poem in it with a title that might give him a start, but it’s just a dream I had, don’t worry. He looks quizzical. You’ll find it, don’t worry. I just thought I ought to say something before you come across it. It was just a dream I had. A nightmare. There you go.
Truth is I had been dreading this for weeks, whether to mention the poem or not say anything and hope he doesn’t read it. They never talk about my poems, so it will pass unnoticed. Even this time, when I felt I had to flag up one title, I know he will never mention it. And I will never ask. He tucks the book under his arm and we walk in, he says we should go to the pub for lunch, a drink. That’s great. Let’s do it. Truth is that it wasn’t just a single dream, but loops and loops of it for weeks. Always the same.
M y f A the R’ s de A th
I don’t believe in omens, but that wedding bowl in smithereens, then the starling in our hallway whose fear sent the dog into a fury, then those cast-in-blue recurrent dreams in which he visits me and seems aware of some unspoken threat from which I wake in dread, and yet, and yet he is still here, thank God. Am I dry-running for that day, as if to preview loss might stem its force, and so he goes, and goes, and goes?
I need to break its hold.
I set a trap, an apple iced with mould, heavy with its sick perfume: open window, north-facing room.
I sit in wait and watch it land: my father’s death, close up, new-spawned or rather, hatched, so purposeful in dreams, now, watched, can barely hold its line in air, I speak out loud an ancient prayer I only half-believe and on the s of save
it flutters to my hand and look, its iridescent jet, its wings of black lacework, the hidden kernel of a rose, a gothic wind-up toy. I close my fist on it, too slow, it’s gone. You parasite, you origami con, you blow-in, mayfly, duff lit spill, now go, and never come again. I know you will.
Visionary or nonsense. All the noise surrounding the Quartet makes it inconceivable as a soundtrack to stick on in the background while you’re queueing for a drive-thru or worrying about your overdraft. You won’t be whistling it in the street, unless you’re a bird. Part of that surrounding noise is the composer’s account of its inspiration, themes and scriptural sources, its reputation as a work of mystical power. The noise also includes the story of the premiere with its message of resilience and hope at one of the twentieth century’s bleakest moments. Visionary is a word to be wary of, especially when applied to an artist, but in this case it’s hard to avoid. Quartet evokes a vision of the future, but it’s a future that lies beyond death, beyond time, beyond any aspect of this world.
Messiaen was literally visionary too. His synaesthesia meant seeing sounds not just as static colours, but a