Mikekan wrote:
Its the end of the world as we know it!
OR .........................
I prefer the Quartet for the End of Time, a piece of chamber music by the French composer Olivier Messiaen.
It was premiered in 1941. The piece is scored for clarinet (in B-flat), violin, cello, and piano; a typical performance of the complete work lasts about fifty minutes.
Messiaen was captured by the German army during World War II and was being held as a prisoner of war. While in transit to the prisoner of war camp, Messiaen showed the clarinetist Henri Akoka, also a prisoner, the sketches for what would become Abîme des oiseaux. Two other professional musicians were also among his fellow prisoners (violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier), and Messiaen wrote a short trio for them; this piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio with himself at the piano. The combination of instruments is unusual, but not without precedent: Walter Rabl had composed for it in 1896, as had Paul Hindemith in 1938.
The quartet was premiered in Stalag VIII-A in Görlitz, Germany (currently Zgorzelec, Poland) on January 15, 1941, to an audience of about four hundred fellow prisoners of war and prison guards (Rischin, 2003: 62). Messiaen later recalled of the occasion, "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension." (Stevenson 2005: 843)
[edit] Inspiration
Messiaen wrote in the Preface to the score that the work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1-2, 5-7, KJV):
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 set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth .... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever ... that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished ....
It is ironic that Messiaen's whole conception of this work is based on a mistranslation, because most subsequent translations render the phrase "there should be time no longer" as "there should be no more delay" or something similar. It doesn't appear that the writer was thinking of eternity, but of events about to take place without interruption.
