Time shall be no more
It is with some nervousness that we dare to programme ‘The End of Time’ again. It was the final work in our 2019 Festival and it was 3 years before we could put on another concert. It is perhaps the most famous example of music in time of war as Messiaen composed it in a German prisoner of war camp using the four available instruments – violin, cello, piano and clarinet. The work’s theme was taken from the Book of Revelations when the mighty angel descended from the heavens and proclaimed that ‘Time shall be no more’. Some musical performances become legends and the mid-winter premiere of Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’ in Stalag VIIIA, a prisoner of war camp in Görlitz, Silesia, in January 1941 in front of 400 prisoners-of-war and their German guards is one of those legends. Afterwards Messiaen wrote: ‘And they listened with a religious silence. Never before had I been listened to like that…Even if these people knew nothing about music, they readily understood that this was something special.'
