Louange à l’Eternité de Jésus

Louange à l’Eternité de Jésus is the slow movement at the heart of one of the most ambitious of all chamber works. The Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (“Quartet for the End of Time”) had a modest beginning, however. When he was interned in Stalag VIII at Görlitz in Silesia in 1940, Messiaen wrote a short scherzo for three musicians among his fellow prisoners - a violinist, a clarinettist and a cellist who had recently acquired an instrument with one string missing. An attractive and comparatively simple little piece, it was so well received as to lead to the composition (for the same performers together with Messiaen himself) of the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, in which it is now incorp­orated as the fourth movement.

The Quatuor was an act of faith in more ways than one. On the practical level, although there was no piano in the camp at the time, Messiaen wrote a piano part for six of the eight movements. On the spiritual level, it was inspired by the passage in the Apocalypse which he quotes at the beginning of the score: I saw a mighty angel…who lifted up his hand to heaven and sware by him that liveth for ever…that there should be time no longer.

Louange à l’Eternité de Jésus (“Praise to the eternity of Jesus”), which has its origins in a piece for six ondes martenot written for the Paris Exhibition in 1937, comes immediately after Intermède, the original scherzo. An “infinitely slow celebration with love and reverence of Jesus as the Word” according to the composer, it is a sustained melody for the A-string of the cello constantly varying in metre but firmly centred on E major and accompanied in even semi-quavers on the piano.

Messiaen’s prayers for a piano were answered, incidentally, when an upright was delivered to Stalag VIII just as the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps was completed. It was out of tune and in ill repair but, with the composer at the keyboard, it was sufficient for a triumphant first performance of Quatuor pour la fin du Temps before an audience of 5,000 in a severely sub-zero temperature on 15 January 1941. “Never,” Messiaen later recalled, “have I been listened to with such attention and understanding.”