Messiaen's Beauty and Terror - Meanderings (VIII)

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
 
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
 
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

(Louis MacNeice, ‘Snow’) 

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If you had not been primed by the title of the movement - ‘The Abyss of Birds’ - the long, lugubrious notes expressed by the clarinet, escaping the stage and then slithering and shifting around the auditorium, might well have conjured up a snake. Michael Symmons Roberts, who has written a book that centres on Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, certainly thinks that there is a danger in the mysterious and leading titles that the composer has given to each movement of his masterpiece. And even with my half-baked ability to recognise a particular birdsong - I still struggle to discern a Great Tit from a Chiffchaff - it was only on much later listens to the sudden and staccato burst of clarinet notes in the third movement, that I was able to make out the Blackbird’s alarm call.

Olivier Messiaen

My one live experience of listening to the Quartet had held the audience rapt at the end of the world. Curious, too, that the author himself put off experiencing a live performance until only a few years ago, stating that he didn’t want his deeply personal relationship with the piece to be compromised by listening along with strangers. To be fair, after suddenly becoming visually conscious of the efforts of the musicians and the way that they rendered the music, he acknowledged the perversity in his reticence. 

The book is superb. Building on a very personal analysis of each of the eight movements of Messiaen’s chamber piece, composed while imprisoned in a German POW camp in World War II, and then performed in freezing cold barracks on imperfect instruments - a clarinet, violin, cello and piano - it is a meditation on the end of time as imagined in ‘The Book of Revelation’. However, more personal aspects are flagged up in the book’s full title: Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong. It is thus also a coming to terms with the death of his ageing parents, and an investigation into birdsong, one of Messiaen’s core interests and musical inspirations.

It is a book that veers off on many an abrupt tangent. One of these, and this is no surprise as the Quartet contains a few of them, concerns angels. His chapter on the discordantly thrilling second movement - ‘Sing for the Angel who Announces the End of Time’ - finds Roberts musing on one of my favourite films, Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke: 

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“I never had much time for angels. Or at least, I couldn't get past the kitsch, the Christmas cards and saccharine songs. Then along came Wim Wenders. Well, it wasn't only Wim Wenders, but the release of the German director's fantasy Wings of Desire in the late 1980s certainly helped to shift my perspective. I was first drawn to the film because I'd read it was influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry, and in particular his mysterious, terrifying angels in the Duino Elegies. These were more like Messiaen's mighty angels, the terror they inspire born out of their unimaginable beauty.

“Since I was already fascinated by Rilke, I decided to give the film a go. I was in my early twenties at the time, still nominally an atheist, and l was not 'in a good place', as they say. I was stuck in the wrong job, in the wrong city, in a rented box room in a shared house. I couldn't afford to go out, and knew no one there to go out with. I'd had episodes of depression since childhood - like my mum and her dad - but this was a particularly bad one. It's not an unfamiliar story, and I knew I was more fortunate than many. But it put me in a state of uncertainty and questioning. So one night, finding it by chance while flicking through channels, I watched Wings of Desire through the blizzard on the screen of my black and white portable TV. It's a classic now, and led to many imitations. But at the time it seemed new. What it depicts is an angel, wonderfully played by Bruno Ganz, who chooses to make a slow and painful descent into becoming earthly, becoming mortal. He falls in love with one of us mortals, a trapeze artist no less, and sacrifices the Safe world of the immortals to step into ours, from eternity to our broken, beautiful mortality. The angel wants to be fully alive, and to be fully alive means risk, woundedness, pain and loss, but he knows this is the price of love, of self-giving, of beauty.

“Something about that film got to me. Wim Wenders's angels were a nod to the angels of Rilke, and sent me back to them. Rilke was no conventional religious believer, but his poems - like Messiaen's music - are mystical and radical and so intense they should probably require a prescription to read them. His ten Duino Elegies, written in fits and starts between 1912 and 1923, open with a cry that translates to something like: Who, if I cry out, will hear me among the ranks of angels?' The film - and my return to Rilke's poems - didn't amount to a Damascene moment, but they were important steps, struggling as l was towards a different kind of faith, no longer able to muster belief in my atheism.”

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"I can't see you, but I know that you're here." 

I cannot enter any large library without thinking of the deep melancholy and warmth that Wim Wenders conjures up in the scene set in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the one with the two angels wandering quietly around, listening to the inner-chatter of the living, revealing themselves and smiling at children, and comforting the dying. It is astonishing and is one of the reasons that I always have a strange sense of safety in a library. 

It’s the ranginess that I love about this book. And the above passage is typical, those terrifying angels signifying his and Messiaen’s preoccupation with the mysterious and the sublime. But he can also dip playfully and bathetically towards the ridiculous. In a later chapter, and whilst considering Messiaen’s sometimes vague instructions to the musicians for playing the ‘Furious Dance for the Seven Trumpets - “A wild flailing, trumpets, stone music, great granite sheets sounding, hurtling steel, a fury of purple, a drunkenness of ice” - all his mind can conjure up is the kitsch, bugling statuary outside of the Trafford Centre in the north of England.

 

The Trafford Centre - bring on the Apocalypse

 

Roberts also causes me to remember moments in films that I’d completely forgot about, moments that I’d barely - and unfathomably - not noticed. Remarking on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, he points out that you can pause the film at almost any point and get frames that resemble Renaissance portraits, Vermeer interiors, or Bruegel landscapes. He then draws you into a short scene of a man walking across a meadow; birds sing, and then a gust of wind blows from left to right; the man pauses as the trees and grass are shaken. The description of this sounds ordinary; captured on film it is anything but that.

Tarkovsky's Mirror

Roberts also does a little bit of myth-busting, learning that the first legendary performance of the Quartet in the Görlitz POW camp ‘wasn’t well attended, appreciated or as makeshift as is made out’. Which leads on to what is perhaps my favourite tangent in the book:

 

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The year after the Görlitz premiere, [Iris] Murdoch and [Mary] Midgley, newly graduated and travelling from Oxford to London for the first time since the Blitz, emerged from Marylebone Station's bomb-damaged exit to be 'greeted by an abundance of butterflies. So many of the city's birds had been driven away by the Blitz, joining the one million child evacuees in the surrounding countryside, that the capital now suffered plagues of caterpillars through the silent springs, followed by butterfly-filled summers.' 

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I adore this anecdote and will no longer be able to walk through Marylebone Station without thinking of it.

In fact, beware: this book takes a long time to read, not because of its length, but because of the desire to pursue the array of thinkers and situations that are covered. There are those I know well, or rather think I know well: Auden, William Eggleston, Louis MacNeice, Julia Margaret Cameron, Tarkovsky and Wenders. And those that I want to know better: John Cage, Julian of Norwich, and, most of all, Simone Weil. I also spent a whole afternoon trying to decide if I was, in Galen Strawson’s terms, an episodic person or diachronic person. The former see life as a series of largely unrelated episodes, whereas the latter see life in narrative terms. My conclusion, not a particularly welcome one: I’m an ‘episodic’ who longs to be a ‘diachronic’.

Or to invite you down another Tarkovsky wormhole - this one waylaid me for a few hours - have a look at some of the Polaroids that he would take whilst shooting his films.  

Tarkovsky, Instant Light 

I might note at this point, that Messiaen’s Quartet is not always an easy listen. It’s a work that demands full and rapt concentration. It contains extraordinarily beautiful passages. The fifth movement in particular - ‘Praise to the Eternity of Jesus’ - is calming and meditative. And yet you follow the mournful cello line as if your life depends on it, barely allowing yourself a breath. Whereas other movements are jarring and shocking. Right on the tail of the fifth movement comes the ‘Dance of Fury, for the Seven Trumpets’. It is edgy, it makes you anxious. But so it should. It’s not just a dance; it’s the end of the world. 

Messiaen in Görlitz

Returning to Roberts and his tendency towards the tangential, it strikes me that this is what his book is truly about. So much that we encounter in life comes with its own prescriptions, and the proper and correct way to deal with them. But those prescriptions are often inadequate, and we end up veering off on our own paths. So many books outline how we are to deal with grief, and invariably they are a hodgepodge of psychobabble and ‘be kind to yourself’ vacuity. Books about grief shouldn’t come with prescriptions, and Roberts, like Joan Didion before him with her incredible Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, doesn't even attempt to supply answers or remedies. Instead he maps his personal ordeal, the places that the body and the mind and the memory visit. Everyone’s grief is singular. If it wasn’t, then the relationship that you are mourning wouldn’t have been unique, wouldn’t have been yours.  

Indeed, halfway through his book, Roberts quotes Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow’, fastening onto the state of permanent contingency that dominates our lives: 

‘World is crazier and more of it than we think / Incorrigibly plural.’ 

This is one of my favourite lines in poetry. In those twelve words I find everything that I love about not just the Quartet but life itself: it is difficult, terrifying and glorious. Let us return to Rilke, then, and the lines that he wrote in the poem ‘Go To The Limits of Your Longing’:  

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”