Orfeo (14 page)

“Yes, yes, you will,” Messiaen tells him. “You’ll see.”

FRANCE FALLS WHILE they rehearse. Giant swastikas drape from the Arc de Triomphe. Hitler hops out of a Mercedes and trots up the great stairway of the Palais Garnier, the first stop on his private Paris tour.

THE MUSICIANS LIVE for three weeks under the stars in the enclosed field. After the disgrace of the armistice, they’re shipped to Stalag VIII-A—a camp on a five-hectare lot outside the town of Görlitz-Moys, in Silesia. There, the trio is stripped and processed, along with thirty thousand other prisoners. A soldier with a submachine gun tries to confiscate the composer’s satchel. The naked Messiaen fights him off.

The speed of France’s defeat surprises the Germans. Stalag VIII-A can hold only a fraction of the tens of thousands who pour in. Most live in tents; the lucky trio find space in the barracks, which at least have toilets and earthen stoves. Food is scarce: ersatz coffee for breakfast, a bowl of watery soup for lunch, and for dinner a slice of black bread with a lump of grease. The cellist Pasquier gets a job in the kitchen, where he takes to stealing scraps to share with his comrades. The man who works next to him is killed for stealing three potatoes.

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.

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.