Quartet for the End of Time 

NOVEMBER 12, 2023

Stewart Goodyear, piano

Christopher Pell, clarinet

Stefani Matsuo, violin

Gabriel Napoli, viola

Ilya Finkelshteyn, cello

Renowned pianist and composer Stewart Goodyear performs alongside musicians of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in this program featuring Messiaen’s ethereal masterpiece. The work stands as a towering reminder of music’s power to inspire the human spirit toward transcendence, even in the bleakest of circumstances.

Program Notes

Stewart Goodyear (b. 1978) | Piano Quartet
My piano quartet was commissioned by the Kingston Chamber Music Festival and was performed by the Clarosa Piano Quartet in the summer of 2016. The compact, one-movement work is divided by four sections, each section performed without break. The first section is relentless in its drive, the strings at first accompanying the piano’s dissonant, syncopated theme before exploding in their own energy.

The second section is a calmer dance in ternary form, hypnotic in its 5/8 rhythm. The following slow section is lyrical and somber, the tension building with chromatic harmony, and finally relaxing in the key of D major. The finale is a toccata, a medley of the themes in the preceding movements. The piece closes with all the instruments quoting the theme of the first section.

—© Stewart Goodyear

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) | Clarinet Trio, Op. 11
By October 1797, a 26-year-old Beethoven was steadily gaining a reputation around Vienna as a fiercely talented pianist, based largely on performances of his own piano concerti. He had begun his career as a composer only three years earlier but had already published three bold piano trios that served to expand the scope of the genre. At that time, it was relatively rare to feature the clarinet as a solo chamber instrument, but Beethoven, who had begun performing with Austrian clarinetist Franz Josef Bähr, was so impressed with the clarinetist’s tone that he was inspired to write today’s Trio.

While the piano, unsurprisingly, commands the most virtuosity, the Trio is finely balanced across all three instruments in a true chamber texture. The first movement is a sparkling sonata form built on catchy tunes, bold key changes, and an adventurous development leading to a recapitulation that adjusts the scoring for a fresh, final take.

The middle slow movement may well be the most surprising for its serene composure and the uncomplicated lyricism exchanged lovingly between cello and clarinet. The finale concludes with the famous theme and variations in which Beethoven subjects an easy, popular tune to nine variations of astonishing range and ingenuity—including what might be considered a few “false” endings leading to yet more departures.

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) | Quartet for the End of Time
The peculiar instrumentation of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is the direct product of its origin. The idea for the work came to Messiaen in 1940, when he was imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany during his service with the French army in World War II. There, he grew close with other professional musicians among his fellow prisoners—clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier. With Messiaen on piano, the four musicians premiered the Quartet inside the camp on January 15, 1941 in front of about 400 prisoners. Messiaen wrote in the preface to the score that the work was inspired by text from the Book of Revelation (Rev 10:1–2, 5–7, King James Version):

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire…and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth…. And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever…that there should be time
no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…

Messiaen also wrote his own notes on each movement, outlining the structure of individual sections and his inspirations:

Crystal liturgy
Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven.

Vocalise, for the Angel who announces the end of Time
The first and third parts (very short) evoke the power of this mighty angel, a rainbow upon his head and clothed with a cloud, who sets one foot on the sea and one foot on the earth. In the middle section are the impalpable harmonies of heaven. In the piano, sweet cascades of blue-orange chords, enclosing in their distant chimes the almost plainchant song of the violin and cello.

Abyss of birds
The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant songs.

Interlude
Scherzo, of a more individual character than the other movements, but linked to them nevertheless by certain melodic recollections.

Praise to the eternity of Jesus
Jesus is considered here as one with the Word. A broad phrase, “infinitely slow,” on the cello, magnifies with love and reverence the eternity of the Word, powerful and gentle, “whose time never runs out.” The melody stretches majestically into a kind of gentle, regal distance. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1 [King James version])

Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets
Rhythmically, the most characteristic piece of the series. The four instruments in unison imitate gongs and trumpets (the first six trumpets of the Apocalypse followed by various disasters, the trumpet of the seventh angel announcing consummation of the mystery of God). Use of added values, of augmented or diminished rhythms, of non-retrogradable rhythms. Music of stone, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness. Listen especially to all the terrifying fortissimo of the augmentation of the theme and changes of register of its different notes, toward the end of the piece.

Tangle of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of Time
Recurring here are certain passages from the second movement. The angel appears
in full force, especially the rainbow that covers him (the rainbow, symbol of peace, wisdom, and all luminescent and sonorous vibration). In my dreams, I hear and see ordered chords and melodies, known colors and shapes; then, after this transitional stage, I pass through the unreal and suffer, with ecstasy, a vortex, a dizzying co-penetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, this blue-orange lava, these sudden stars: there is the tangle, there are the rainbows!

Praise to the immortality of Jesus
Large violin solo, counterpart to the violoncello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second eulogy? It is especially aimed at the second aspect of Jesus, Jesus the Man, the Word made flesh, immortally risen for our communication of his life. It is all love. Its slow ascent to the acutely extreme is the ascent of man to his god, the child of God to his Father, the being made divine toward Paradise.