Approaching Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’

By Laurence Vittes | From the May/June 2026 issue of Strings

Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) for piano, clarinet, violin, and cello gives performers an instruction unique within the context of other major chamber works: Make time stop. It was written in a prisoner-of-war camp deep in the German interior after Messiaen was captured in 1940 and premiered by the composer and fellow prisoners in the freezing January that followed—the four instruments determined by who happened to be behind the same barbed wire. A 50-minute meditation in eight movements on eternity—time observed, suspended, shattered, and finally transcended—it has become one of the most performed and discussed chamber works of our century, built on a micrometric internal click track that keeps time so the music can abolish it.

Since 2020, at least ten new recordings have appeared, two already in 2026—an ATMA Classique release featuring Canadian musicians pianist Louise Bessette, cellist Cameron Crozman, clarinetist Dominic Desautels, and violinist Mark Lee, and a Cantaloupe recording from the New York–based Anzû Quartet: cellist Ashley Bathgate, violinist Olivia De Prato, clarinetist Ken Thomson, and pianist Karl Larson.

The Anzû were formed in 2020 specifically to perform and reimagine Messiaen’s quartet,and approach it, as Bathgate puts it, “with the same curiosity and openness we would bring to a new composition”—which is, when one thinks about it, exactly how one ought to approach a piece about the end of time.

The opening Liturgie de cristal sets all four instruments in motion simultaneously but independently, as if arriving from different universes. The Vocalise, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps pairs violin, cello, and clarinet in long intertwined lines punctuated by fearsome fortississimo piano chords. The Abîme des oiseaux, a meditation on the abyss for solo clarinet with birds, is a test of the player’s virtuosity and humility; it is one of the great test pieces in the clarinetist’s literature. The piano sits it out in the Intermède, short and fiercely playful, with a catchy fiddle tune, before the cello and piano contemplate the eternity of Jesus in the first of two Louanges—songs of praise—this one marked “infinitely slow, ecstatic.” The Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes locks all four instruments together in savage unison, the quartet then clearing the air with a Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, pour l’ange qui annonce la fin du temps full of shimmering rainbows. The stage is then set for the concluding Louange, in which violin and piano celebrate immortality against a background of pulsing silence, marked “extremely slow and tender, ecstatic.” As disparate as its parts are, the piece was written by a composer who knew exactly what he was doing, allowing its performers to find their way inside it.

That sense of the piece as inhabited rather than conquered is one the Salzburg-based Amatis Piano Trio share—though that ensemble’s relationship to it is distinct from a purpose-built quartet like Anzû. The Amatis performs the work with clarinetist Ib Hausmann; it is a family affair that runs deeper than the music: Hausmann’s daughter, Lea, is the Trio’s violinist. That accumulated trust, Lea writes, whenever it exists, is a key to what is possible: “In movements like Danse de la fureur, the quartet must transform from four individual voices into a single, inexorable organism. The clarinet is not an addition here, but an integral part of a living ensemble, fully interwoven with the piano, violin, and cello.”

The two Louange movements have long confronted string players with the same questions: How slow are “infinitely” and “extremely” slow—a spiritual instruction, an extremely optimistic bowing suggestion, or both? Cellist Gary Hoffman, who recently gave a class in the quartet at the Colburn School followed by a performance with young professionals from the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo, Belgium, approaches them without mysticism. “Tempo relates to an atmosphere and a character. This piece has to give the impression that time has stopped—there’s some type of inner pulse, but it’s a very slow pulse, played in a way that time is suspended.” The danger is not slowness but rigidity. “I’ve heard performances where there was such an obsession with changing the bow as little as possible that the sound was difficult to listen to. The fact is, it can’t be played with original bowings.”

Nobody received a more direct answer about observing markings in the score than Raphaël Pidoux, cellist of the Trio Wanderer, who was 18 when he played the quartet for Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire. During a rehearsal of the Danse de la fureur, Messiaen was asked whether a passage should be played legato or détaché—the score wasn’t clear. Messiaen consulted his wife, pianist Yvonne Loriod. The eventual answer: Do what you want. “Since that moment,” Pidoux says, “I don’t trust markings anywhere, even in Beethoven or Mozart. Composers have to trust the musicians—the good ones.”

Pidoux is similarly pragmatic concerning tempos. “The metronome tempo is less important than what you can do onstage. When it’s too slow, it’s too slow. You have to think about life, about the melody, and then you find the right tempo.” Life, as a tempo consideration, rarely appears in the printed edition (Durand), but perhaps it should. What makes the piece endure, Pidoux believes, is simply recognition. “Two chords and you know it’s Messiaen.” The Quatuor pour la fin du temps, in his telling,is not a summit to be climbed but a landscape to be walked in early, before one has decided to be impressed by it.

Concerning the fifth movement, an arrangement of an earlier composition for six ondes Martenots, which he called “the first electronic vibrato machine,” Pidoux says that cellists should be inspired by the instrument’s “extraterrestrial sound. But the cello is a big powerful instrument, and you have to get the best sound you can. You have to express it in a singing way, in the style of the period when Messiaen arrived at the camp—when everything was played with vibrato, in a romantic way.”

Crozman agrees: “There’s nothing else quite like it in the repertoire.” Replicating that quality on cello, Crozman notes, is “hard—maybe impossible.” The score, in other words, asks for the impossible and declines to explain how the thing might be achieved.

The Danse de la fureur tests how Messiaen’s sense of architecture—the trust, the pulse, the surrender to the music’s own logic—holds up under the pressure of a live performance. When the balance holds, the unison writing can feel inevitable. When it doesn’t, the movement sounds assembled from parts. The Anzû’s De Prato identifies it as the central string challenge: “Mastering the unison and octave passages requires a lot of thought into vibrato, tone color, bow distribution, and balance.” Bathgate’s preparation for the quartet overall is correspondingly deliberate. “It’s not the kind of piece you can casually pull off the shelf. Even the Louange—I am inclined to practice with a metronome at first so I can internalize that eternally slow pace.”

Hoffman made this audible in the harmonics of the opening movement, which he played not as fixed pitches but as continuous glissando, turning discrete notation into something that sounded like pure, suspended vibration. That vibration, though it felt like freedom, was precisely calculated: the micro-metronomic click track that keeps time so the music can abolish it is made of very small and very exact metrical units extended, truncated, inverted, repeated. Bathgate’s metronome and Messiaen’s click track, it turns out, are the same instinct. While the performers manage discrete units of time, the listener hears infinity.

Time, it turns out, does not end. It is structured.

Lea Hausmann invokes research suggesting that people who know each other well can find their heartbeats literally beginning to align during a shared experience. “That idea feels very close to what happens when we perform this piece. Trust, pulse, and responsiveness are absolutely essential—our shared history allows us to focus entirely on creating something alive in the moment.” She describes the piece itself as less like a concert work and more like an act of witness, rooted in the feeling that this music once offered “hope, transcendence, and stillness in the bleakest of situations.”

After performing it, the Amatis sometimes return to the hall 30 minutes later to collect their scores, only to find audience members still sitting silently in their seats. “They often feel completely emptied,” Hausmann writes. It is the kind of reaction the Quatuor pour la fin du temps often seems to produce.