Powers, Richard - Orfeo

The audience crowds together on the benches, wrapped in gray-black coats. Clouds of frozen breath fill the room, whiffs of rotting gut exuded by malnourished men in oil-stained rags. What heat the barrack manages on this bone-numbing night comes only from these wasted bodies. Infirm men from the hospital block are borne in on stretchers. The music-loving German officers take their reserved seats in the front rows.

The quartet shuffles out onto the improvised stage in tattered jackets and bottle-green Czech uniforms. Wooden clogs are the only shoes in camp that can keep their feet thawed for fifty minutes. Messiaen steps forward, his suit bagging. He tells the audience what they’re about to hear. He explains the eight movements, one for each of the six days of creation, the day of rest, and the Last Day. He talks of color and form, of birds, of the Apocalypse, and of the secrets of his rhythmic language. He speaks of that moment when all past and future will end and endlessness will begin.

The prisoners cough and squirm on their benches. Hardened faces turn suspicious. No one knows what this scarecrow is raving about. Pasquier caresses his cello. Le Boulaire nurses his violin. Akoka, clarinet on his lap, looks out at his comrades and smiles a joker’s last smile.

The lecture ends, the musicians raise their instruments, and the crystal liturgy begins. Two birds start a predawn song they’ve sung since long before human time. The clarinet channels a blackbird; the violin, a nightingale. The cello skates about in a fifteen-note loop of ghostly harmonics, while the piano cycles through a rhythm of seventeen values, divided into a pattern of twenty-nine chords. This whirling solar system would take four hours to unfold its complete circuit of nested revolutions. But the movement lasts a mere two and a half minutes — a sliver between two infinities.

A shimmer of sound , according to Messiaen’s program notes. A halo of trills lost very high in the trees. .the harmonious silence of Heaven . But before the dazed prisoners can tell what they hear, morning is over.

Then the angel appears, one foot on land, one on the sea, to announce the end of time. Bright, crashing chords, a race of doubled strings. Violin and cello, in a unison chant, wander as far from this camp as imagination can reach. The piano descends in waterfalls of chords. Fanfare returns, jarring the audience. No one can say what on earth these four performers think they’re doing.

Music drifts past the bundled listeners, through the snow-buried barrack, beyond the last twist of barbed wire that seals this camp in. The movement ends, releasing a fit of coughs. Numb listeners shift on their benches, and the third movement starts. This one reworks that fantasia for solo clarinet that Akoka sight-read out in the empty field near Nancy, so long ago. The abyss of birds. The abyss is Time , Messiaen explains, with its weariness and gloom. The birds are the opposite of Time. They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs .

The clarinetist who once played in a wallpaper factory band now plays himself into the future. He chirps and trills. His crescendos swell from silent to shattering, like an air-raid siren issuing its final warning. The song demands staggering control. It asks even more of the audience, who begin to divide, in the gaslight, between those who hear escape and those who make out only tedium.

The fourth movement, a little music-box trio, lasts ninety seconds. It could be a trifle from before the war, a lark from back when the largest crisis facing civilization was still skirt length. Eternity, too, needs its interludes.

Bombs fall tonight in the south of England. A cordon tightens around Tobruk. The savage tank battles across North Africa pause for a few hours, delayed by darkness. In Berlin, a two-hour drive northwest, Hitler’s staff work late, firming up the invasions of Yugoslavia and Greece. But here in Barrack 27, Stalag VIII-A, halfway through Messiaen’s fever dream, the cello spins a melody out of itself. It rides on the waves of the piano, which wanders through endless, patient modulations. Each sprung chord pushes the duet into a new color.

Anywhere else, this movement would last eight minutes. But here in this barrack, with its drafty rafters and frosted windows, packed with men who’ll live here for years, who’ll die in this hole unable to recall the look of home, the beat between any two wandering chords gets lost for hours. For some, the pulsing phrase is a shade less deadly than the boredom of their captivity. For others, it’s a bliss they’ll never find again.

On the shoe-box stage, the quartet digs in, releasing the “Dance of Fury, for the Seven Trumpets.” All four instruments chase each other around in jolting cadences of jagged unison, a mounting game of crack-the-whip. Music of stone , says Messiaen, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness .

The angel returns, tangled in cloud and rainbow. There have been elations in the piece before now, but none to match these raptures. For Messiaen: I pass through the unreal and suffer, with ecstasy, a tournament; a roundabout compenetration of superhuman sounds and colors. These swords of fire, this blue-orange lava, these sudden stars. .!

The end of the End, when it arrives at last, comes as a solo violin above piano throb. Pared back to its essence, the melody abides, burnt pure in the crucible of the war. Out of a cloud of shimmering E major chords — the key of paradise — the violin hints at all a person might still have, after death takes everything. The violin rises; the piano climbs along toward some final immobility beyond human patience and hearing. The praise wanders higher, into C minor, through a frozen minefield of ambiguous diminished and augmented chords, rising again to another E major, then one more in the octave above. From out at the edge of the key- and fingerboards, the line glances back at a lost Earth on a cold night, when there is time no longer.

When the last notes die out in the frozen air, nothing happens. The captive audience sits in silence. And in silence, awe and anger, perplexity and joy, all sound the same. At last there’s applause. The prisoners in their clogs and bottle-green Czech uniforms fall back into the world and make an awkward bow. And then, Le Boulaire will recall decades later, lots of unresolved discussions, about this thing that no one had understood.

. . .

TWENTY DAYS AFTER the premiere, fifteen hundred Polish Jews in Stalag VIII-A are rounded up and sent to Lublin for destruction. Akoka is saved by his French uniform. Two weeks later, Messiaen, Pasquier, and Akoka try to board a convoy, with papers forged by the same Captain Brüll who made the quartet possible. A German officer stops Akoka: Jude. The clarinetist pulls down his pants, hoping his botched circumcision will look like gentile integrity. The officer arrests him and brings him back to camp.

In March, the Algerian-born Akoka passes for an Arab in a group being shipped out of the camps. He ends up in Dinan, Brittany. He’s put on another freight heading back east. He jumps from the moving train in the night, still cradling his clarinet. Somehow, he makes his way across the Demarcation Line to Marseilles, in Vichy. There, a note reaches him in his father’s hand, tossed from the window of another moving train: I’m leaving for an unknown destination .

Le Boulaire flees the camp late in 1941, with papers covered in official-looking stamps made with a carved potato. Soon after his escape, the violinist breaks down. He abandons his musical career and changes his name to Jean Lanier. He starts a whole new life, free from a past he doesn’t care to remember. He commences a distinguished acting career, including a role in the wartime classic Les Enfants du Paradis. The men with whom he played on that night of January 15, 1941, will become total strangers. A stroke in his eighties leaves him hallucinating, believing that the war is still going on, that he’s being chased by the Germans, that he’s hiding in a deep cellar, afraid to move. Jean Lanier, born Le Boulaire, dies a prisoner of war.