Converse College to Present Landmark Work
On January 17th at 4:00 pm, the Converse Trio (Douglas Weeks, piano, Sarah Johnson, violin, and Kenneth Law, cello) and clarinetist Karen Hill will perform Olivier Messiaen’s masterpiece “Quartet for the End of Time” in Daniel Recital Hall on the Converse College campus. Converse Dean Miles Hoffman calls the rarely-performed piece “one of the landmark works of the 20th Century.” This multi-media event will include several elements designed to enhance the listening experience: brief lectures by Dr. Scott Robbins, Professor of Musicology and Composition, and Dr. Jeffrey Barker, Professor of Religion and Philosophy and Dean of the College, on the structure of the work and imagining the unimaginable; dramatic readings by Assistant Professor of Theatre Brent Glenn; and a visual presentation by Professor of Studio Art Teresa Prater. The admission-free concert is open to the public.
The circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of this work are unique. Messiaen wrote the piece while imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A in Germany during World War II; it was premiered in the unheated Barrack 27 on a freezing January night in the year 1941 as prisoners and German officers huddled together to hear the completed work. The score was inscribed with a passage from the biblical account of the end of time in the New Testament Book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer’” (Revelation 10:6).
Music critic and historian Alex Ross wrote, “Messiaen’s quiet answer to the ultimate questions of fear and faith stayed with me the longest, not because he was a greater composer than Bach or Beethoven but because his reply came out of an all-too-modern landscape of legislated inhumanity. In the face of hate, this honestly Christian man did not ask, ‘Why, O Lord?’ He said, ‘I love you.’ Listeners cannot fail to be touched by this work, which is essentially music fulfilling its most vital purpose.”