Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Messiaen goes to bed at night faint and famished. Starvation brings rainbow visions filled with pulsing colors: great bursts of blue-orange lava, flares from another planet. He wakes to the gray of meaningless work, hunger, and monotony.

Another prisoner lands in Akoka’s bunk: a grim pacifist named Jean Le Boulaire. He was on the front in May when the French Army panicked and dissolved. He made his way to Dunkirk, where a fishing boat evacuated him to England. From there, Le Boulaire returned to Paris, just in time to suffer another, final rout. Akoka instructs his new bunkmate in camp life and introduces the violinist to his friends. Le Boulaire remembers Messiaen from his days in the Paris Conservatory. And so the trio becomes a quartet.

The tens of thousands of prisoners in Stalag VIII-A pool their books into a small library. They form a jazz band and a tiny orchestra. They start a newspaper called Le Lumignon — The Candle . Every story is censored to shreds, but writing holds at bay the crushing boredom of days.

The musicians lose weight and hair and teeth. Messiaen’s fingers swell with chilblains. Fed up, Akoka decides to escape. He devises a way to slip past the guards. He stockpiles provisions and acquires a compass. He tells the composer that everything is set for a break-out the next day.

No , Messiaen says. I’m staying. God wants me here . Demoralized, Akoka abandons the plan.

The Germans send Pasquier to work in the Strzegom quarries. But a camp administrator recognizes the cellist from the famous Trio Pasquier and commutes his assignment. The other musicians, too, get a little more food, a little lighter work. War is war, but for Germans, music is music.

One of the camp captains, Karl-Albert Brüll, now and then smuggles Messiaen extra bread. Hauptmann Brüll hunts down fresh music paper: pages lined with pristine staves, rescued from the war’s bedlam. He gives Messiaen the sheets, along with pencils and erasers. Who knows his reasons? Guilt, compassion, curiosity. He wants to hear the unborn music of his enemy. He wants to know what kind of sounds a man like Messiaen might bring into so damned a place.

Brüll takes Messiaen off of all duties and places him in solitary. He posts a guard at the barrack entrance to prevent disturbance. And Messiaen, who thought he’d never compose again in this life, slips back into the spell of patterned sounds. He needs nothing else — only notes, added pitch by pitch toward some obscure whole. As summer dies and fall follows it into extinction, something begins to fill the empty pages: a quartet from beyond all seasons.

Sounds swirl from out of Messiaen’s malnourished dreams. He works through the fall of France, the Nazi triumph, the horror of camp existence. An eight-part vision takes shape — a glimpse of the Apocalypse for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano, freed of imprisoning meter and full of rainbows.

Messiaen reworks from memory two pieces that he wrote in another life, before the war. To these he adds sounds from a remembered future. Here in this camp, in the middle of a wasted Europe, the notes come out of him like the creature of light revealed to John:

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 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, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer. .

Akoka’s clarinet is the one decent instrument in the camp. The commandants scrounge up a cheap violin and a collapsing upright piano whose keys go down but don’t always rise again. Hundreds of prisoners pass the hat and collect sixty-five marks for Pasquier to buy a cello. Two armed guards take him to a shop in the center of Görlitz, where he finds a battered cello and bow. When Pasquier brings it back to camp that evening, the prisoners assail him. He plays them solo Bach, the “Swan” from Carnival of the Animals, Les mignons d’Arlequin —everything he can remember. Prisoners who care nothing about music make him play all night.

The quartet rehearses in the camp lavatories. Every evening at six, they leave their jobs and huddle together for four hours. Winter sets in, animal and effective; temperatures plummet to minus twenty-five Celsius. Prisoners die of exhaustion, malnutrition, and cold. But the Germans give the quartet wood to make a fire and warm their fingers.

Messiaen coaches the others through the world he has made. The piece is too hard for them; even the virtuoso Pasquier struggles. Messiaen demonstrates from the piano, but the players fall into a thicket of rhythms. The music is Messiaen’s escape from the grip of meter, from the plodding thump of heartbeats and the ticking of clocks. His jagged lines struggle to defeat the present and put an end to time.

The tools for this escape come from everywhere: Greek metrical feet— amphimacer and antibacchius . North Indian . Rhythmic palindromes that read the same forward and backward. The jerky syncopations of Stravinsky. Medieval isorhythms — huge metrical cycles within cycles. At times, meter drops away altogether and demands the freedom of birds.

But flight eludes the players. Raised on their tame regular beats, they stumble in the chaos of liberty. The rapid unisons, those wild swells, trip them up. Hold the note until you can’t blow anymore , Messiaen says. Enlarge the sound . He demands absurdly high pitches and brutal, scattering runs. He marks the score with commands like infiniment lent, extatique —infinitely slow, ecstatic. He wants a sound softer than a bow can make. He wants every color that can be teased out of the wood, from chill shouts to fierce silence, and he insists that every manic rhythm be perfect. The shabby violin, the sixty-five-mark cello, the out-of-tune piano with the sticky keys, the clarinet melted by resting against a hot stove: together, they must produce the angel and all the shimmer of the Celestial City.

The players rehearse with frost-crippled fingers. For two months, they work the same impossible passages again and again. Thrown together for so long at this fevered music, while winter comes down on Silesia and their camp blankets them in death, the four of them alter. Their technique pushes into a new place. Even-tempered agnostic, gloomy atheist, messianic Catholic, and Trotskyite Jew crouch over the parts of the recalcitrant piece by dim light, in a prison bathroom, and locate, in their shared focus, birdsong’s answer to the war.

THE CAMP PRINTS programs for the premiere:

Stalag VIII A-Görlitz

PREMIÈRE AUDITION DU

QUATOUR POUR LA FIN DU TEMPS

D’OLIVIER MESSIAEN

15 Janvier 41

Against regulations, the commandant authorizes even the quarantined prisoners to attend. Something is happening in this corner of confinement, far away from the annihilating front, the wolf pack strikes, the desert pendulum offenses, the fire raids on London, the steady gearing up of machinic carnage on scales no human can comprehend. The next world’s debut.

The day opens like hundreds before it. Ersatz at dawn. A morning of mind-fogging work at the assigned duties. A lunch of cabbage soup, and more forced labor all afternoon. For dinner, another cup of ersatz, a slice of bread, a little fromage blanc . No messenger comes to break open the eternal tomb.

The concert starts at six, in Barrack 27, the camp’s crude theater. Half a meter of snow carpets the ground and buries the roof. Snow gusts through the barrack doorway. The dim house is packed, a few hundred prisoners of several nationalities, from every class and profession — doctors, priests, businessmen, laborers, farmers. . Some have never heard chamber music before.