STRIVING FOR ETERNITY: UNSYNCHRONIZED OSTINATI IN OLIVIER MESSIAEN’s “LITURGIE DE CRISTAL”

Jared Judge

Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is widely regarded as an extremely

important work in his career as well as the piece from which all his later pieces drew. It is

remarkable that such an inspired piece was in fact mostly composed during Messiaen’s captivity

in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VIII A located in Silesia, Poland. It was his captivity

that guided his thoughts toward the Book of Revelation:

Curiously, as I had nothing to eat, I would have dreams with colored visions… And because I was having all these colored visions … I reread the Apocalypse … Finally, there was an extraordinary being, and angel crowned with a rainbow–the symbol of all colors–and this tremendous angel, … immense, greater than our planet… lifted his hand toward the heavens and said: “There will be no more time.”1

This was the genesis of the work’s title and the generative source of much of its musical content:

But the choice of “the Angel who announces the end of Time” is based on much more serious factors. As a musician, I focused on rhythm. Rhythm is, in essence, alteration and division. To study alteration and division is to study Time. Time–measured, relative, physiological, psychological–is divided in a thousand ways, of which the most immediate for us is a perceptual conversion of the future into the past. In Eternity, these things no longer exist.2

The Quartet is remarkable from a rhythmic point of view. It combines several of

Messiaen’s rhythmic techniques in one all-encompassing package. In the first movement,

“Liturgie de cristal,” pitch and rhythmic cycles operate independently within the cello and piano

lines. To Messiaen, the desynchronization of pitch and rhythm in the piano line represents

Eternity. This is decorated by the cello line’s unsynchronized pitch and rhythm which acts as a

1Rebecca Rischin, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 51.

2Ibid, 52.

sort of halo to everything else happening in the movement. When considered in the context of the

entire composition and the circumstances surrounding its completion, these aspects give listeners

a glimpse of Eternity.

“Liturgie de cristal” begins the Quartet, utilizing all four instruments working

independently. Messiaen’s preface to the Quartet describes this movement as such:

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.3

This movement utilizes the time signature 3/4, which is significant because not all movements in

Quartet actually use a time signature. However, the time signature seems to have no bearing on

the actual musical content and may have been added for convenience of ensemble playing being

that none of the cycles align with the bar-lines.4 The presence of superfluous bar-lines

exemplifies Messiaen’s definition of rhythmic music: “music which eschews repetition, bar lines,

and equal divisions, which ultimately takes its inspiration from the movements of nature,

movements which are free and unequal in length.”5 This approach to rhythm can seen be on a

micro scale in each instrument in “Liturgie de cristal.”

The cellist is asked to play a cycle of five pitches repeated twenty-one times as artificial

harmonics. These pitches (C, E, D, F#, Bb) are drawn from the whole-tone collection

(Messiaen’s first mode of limited transposition). These pitches are sounded within a fifteen

duration cycle arranged as it first appears in the movement:

2

3Olivier Messiaen, Preface to the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Paris: Durand, 1942), I; trans. Rischin, 59.

4Carla Huston Bell, Olivier Messiaen (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.), 71.

5Roger Nichols, Messiaen (London: Oxford University Press, 1975.), 21.

This cycle consists of two non-retrogradable (palindromic) rhythms, the durational axes of

symmetry are labeled with asterisks in Fig. 1.6 It is possible that these cells are derived from

Indian deçi-tâlas, i.e. Indian rhythms that Messiaen frequently included in his compositions. The

first cell appears to be derived from the deçi-tâla vijaya, with each duration augmented by an

eight note.7 The second cell appears to be derived from the second form of mantha, with the first

duration augmented by a quarter note, and then repeated in retrograde.

Anthony Pople, a Messaien scholar, discovered that if this pattern is shifted to start six

durations from the end, then it forms one fifteen-duration non-retrogradable rhythm divisible into

three separate non-retrogradable rhythms:8

In my reading, this larger non-retrogradable rhythm seems the more likely candidate to be the

“prime” form of the rhythm. This arrangement would further emphasize that the listener is only

getting a glimpse of Eternity because the movement begins in the middle (seventh member) of

this particular cycle and ends with the tenth member of this cycle. This implies that the music has

been playing before the movement started, and continues even after the movement ends.

3

6Anthony Pople, Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1998.), 21.

7Robert Sherlaw Johnson, Messiaen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 194-98.

8Pople, 21.

* *

Fig. 1. Rhythmic cycle in cello

Fig. 2. Rhythmic cycle rearranged

This also appears to be true of the pitches of the cello line. The pitches seem to be

ascending in a never-ending staircase fashion, implying either the Ascension of Christ, or a more

general ascension to Heaven. The glissando from the F# seems to continue the pattern upwards

to the next Bb; therefore it would then seem that the pattern starts on Bb. The fact that the

movement ends on F# does not seem to imply finality as the pattern could continue after the

movement ends; the pitches just have a higher likelihood of lining up with the end of the

movement due to the fact that there are only five elements in the pattern.

The proportion of fifteen durations to five pitches in the cello part simplifies to three-to-

one which for Messiaen, a devout Catholic who frequently encoded religious symbols in his

music, most likely represented the Holy Trinity. Additionally, the use of five pitches most likely

represented the Five Holy Wounds suffered by Christ during the Crucifixion.

The pianist is asked to play a cycle of twenty-nine chords six times in its entirety and

twenty-six chords into the seventh cycle. Analysis of the specific chordal content can be found in

Johnson’s Messiaen. The chords are operating within a seventeen duration cycle that consists of

three deçi-tâlas confirmed by Messiaen:

The first deçi-tâla is an augmented retrograde of râgavardhana with the last duration divided

into three equal parts. The second is a diminution candrakalâ, and the third is an augmentation

lacksmîça.9 The piano’s duration cycle rewritten using the original forms of the deçi-tâlas is as

follows:

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9Johnson, 194-98.

Fig. 3. Rhythmic cycle in piano part of “Liturgie de cristal”

1 2 3

These three deçi-tâlas are used consistently in Messiaen’s works, particularly ones whose

subjects contain Eternity. Using them as an ostinato in “Liturgie de cristal” further emphasizes

that the listener is getting a glimpse of Eternity. This cycle is repeated nine full times

independent from its chordal content as seen in the following example in the movement:

The cycle continues fourteen durations into its tenth cycle which along with the chords, just as

the cello line, implies that the cycles continues beyond the end of the movement.

Operating quite independently from these nondependent cycles are the violin and clarinet.

According to Messiaen, their content is stylized transcriptions of either a nightingale or a

blackbird. This is one of the first consequential appearances of birdsong in Messiaen’s works.

The statement of these songs seem to have no pattern governing their entrances, but do have

patterns in their content as discussed in Bell’s Olivier Messiaen.10 This lack of rhythmic pattern

plays into the idea of the end of Time, thus Eternity, because the entrances are not regularly

divided in time. In the “transposed” scheme of this movement as stated by Messiaen in the

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10Bell, 72-73.

Fig. 4. Rhythmic cycle’s original deçi-tâlas

1 2 3

Fig. 5. Mm. 38-40, piano part, ‘a’ marks the beginning of the seventh chord cycle and ‘b’ marks the beginning of the tenth duration cycle

a) b)

preface, the violin and clarinet represent angels singing surrounded by the halo of sound created

by the cello and piano.

It is the combination of all these elements that contribute to “Liturgie de cristal” being a

glimpse of Eternity. When the movement begins, it seems as though the listener has stumbled

upon a scene which has been unfolding since well before they started listening. When the

movement ends, it seems as though the listener has suddenly lost the privilege to listen to this

Eternity. This effect is achieved by the unsynchronized ostinati that do not end when the double

bar-line is reached. The cello’s pitch and rhythmic content are not synchronized with each other,

nor are they synchronized with those of the piano. In essence, those elements create four

independent musical clocks all running simultaneously, each containing their own hint of

Eternity. These elements create the backdrop for Messiaen’s vision of Eternity: angels singing in

Heaven.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Carla Huston. Olivier Messiaen. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Dingle, Christopher, and Nigel Simeone. Olivier Messiaen: Music, Art and Literature.

Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007.

Griffiths, Paul. Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1985.

Johnson, Robert Sherlaw. Messiaen. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1975.

Messiaen, Olivier. Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Paris: Durand, 1942.

Nichols, Roger. Messiaen. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Pople, Anthony. Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press: 1998.

Rischin, Rebecca. For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2003.

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