This is a remarkable book. Where most studies of a single musical work will consider their subjects as things out there in the world, Michael Symmons Roberts writes from inside the composition that seized him as a student and has never let him go. He does not inspect Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time so much as have it always in his mind, embedded for decades, at once lens and compass, directing and conditioning a meditation that ranges widely, from Julian of Norwich to Marianne Moore, Polaroid shots to Celtic Christianity, Julia Margaret Cameron to John Cage, Auden to autobiography.
“This is not”, Symmons Roberts reveals early on, “the book I set out to write”, and he goes on to say how it became what it is through his loss of both parents, one soon after the other. Those orphanings, as it seems just to call them given the sense of loneliness that pervades the book, are treated with precision and restraint. As is his way with other topics, the author returns to his parents’ deaths at intervals throughout his text, whether in prose or in the poems with which each of them is commemorated. In all of these passages, the presence of the Messiaen work silently withdraws. Symmons Roberts does not look to it for comfort or context. Its absence, though, is strong. Since Messiaen’s music, written in a PoW camp in 1940–1, is about the end of time, death is its great adversary – death that brings the end of time not as cosmic shock, but as the mundane human lot, stopping the clock not for a universal entry into eternity, as prophesied in the last book of the Christian Bible, but for nothingness. Messiaen found a place for death in the Quartet only in the image of the abyss, whose contrary he finds in birdsong as the image of timelessness, showering this planet with sound from long before our ancestors added the noise of language. The encounter between the two comes in the third movement, a solo for clarinet: “Abyss of the Birds”.
This movement enthrals Symmons Roberts to the extent that he once, from what he confesses to be a position of almost total musical ignorance, contemplated taking up the clarinet to play it. (The Quartet is written for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the instruments available in the camp.) Better what he makes of it here in his true métier. The word “abyss”, he discovers in his Compact OED, has its antonym in “byss”, meaning bottom or ground, the “abyss” having no such limit. As for the birds, they sing in some of the book’s most beautiful pages. Sitting in a café garden in Berlin, Symmons Roberts hears the song of a “blackbird-mezzo … heavier than the air, that floated down and filled the space around me”. He pays homage to the birdsong recordings of Ludwig Koch and goes to the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris to study the notebooks Messiaen filled with transcriptions. He also has an “Abyss of Birds” of his own, a fifteen-line, single-sentence poem in which the songs of all the birds that have ever been plunge spiralling down “in one tremendous rinse and swoon of multiples” into a single note in the throat of a thrush.
Occasionally, another of Messiaen’s compositions will be mentioned, but Symmons Roberts is a one-work man. His devotion, though, is not unmitigated. The composer’s programme notes he finds “baffling, infuriating and gorgeous”, “as unhelpful as they are (sometimes) beautiful”. Words cannot touch, still less command, the musical experience. Words are fallen, this music not. The commentary, he writes, sometimes “leaves me completely cold. But his music never does.”
It may, nevertheless, get on his nerves. “I have to switch off ‘Liturgie de cristal’”, he says near the end of the first of his eight chapters, which spring off in order from Messiaen’s eight movements. “It’s too frenetic.” There are other places, too, where he demurs. He wonders how the end of time can be hailed only with excited fear and exultation, and not at all with regret at the passing of the world we know. His love for the work, he concludes, is complex, as love so often is. What we adore can irritate.
Symmons Roberts’s difficulties with the Quartet may be difficulties he has with the concept it illustrates spectacularly, that of the unmaking of time. The Apocalypse is not his season, but rather Ash Wednesday, “a counterweight to extremes of belief and unbelief, a counterweight to violence and hubris”. He quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s baptismal letter to his godson, looking forward to “a new language, perhaps quite non-religious”, in which the divine message will be delivered again with the vivacity it had from the lips of Jesus. What, Symmons Roberts wonders, will this new language be like? “A cross of ashes”, he decides, “is a place to start.” And maybe Quartet for the End of Time means so much to him because the fluting of a blackbird in Berlin could be another, because it speaks, wordless, with the angelic voice.
He hears that voice also in Bonhoeffer and even more so in Simone Weil, born just two months after Messiaen and bound to him in many ways, the two of them “both expansive and voracious in their range of interests and influences, both bold and experimental in the way they make their work”. If they are also acutely dissimilar, apostles of faith and doubt, they serve thereby as patron saints for this poet, who has “always thought that the space between faith and doubt … is where poems can be made.”
Michael Symmons Roberts has travelled widely as a radio broadcaster, and here describes places that reverberate with the sounds of the Messiaen work: Görlitz, in Silesia, where it was made and first performed; the site outside Waco, Texas, where a rehearsal for the Apocalypse was grimly enacted in 1993; the holy islands of Iona and Lindisfarne, where time, he says, is “thick”; the Benedictine abbey of Pluscarden, in northern Scotland, where he goes on retreat. The place where he begins, though, lies “about ten paces from my front door”. He used to take his sons sledging there, but has not been for years, keeping it as “a presence only known by sound and distant sight”. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is another such presence, but wholly aural, “a goad, guide, punchbag and provocation for a lifetime”.
Paul Griffiths’s books include Mr. Beethoven, 2020, The Tomb Guardians, 2021, and Let Me Go On, 2023
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