The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music? What sort of a history of twentieth-century music might that be? The word ‘Cambridge’ is something more than a publisher’s imprint, for it locates this volume in a century-long tradition of Cambridge Histories and so emphasizes that this first large-scale, retrospective view of the twentieth century in music is a view from somewhere. As the title would lead you to expect, it is history written from a distinct and relatively homogeneous geographical, social, and cultural perspective: predominantly Anglo-American (though there are two authors from Germany and one each from South Africa and Australia), more male than female (gender representation in musicology, at least in the UK, remains far from equal), and white. That does not, of course, mean that our authors simply accept the traditional geographical, ethnic, and gender hierarchies of music history, for there is a strong revisionist strain in the book, one that attempts to contextualize and critique familiar narratives by juxtaposing them with alternative constructions of twentieth-century music. Like all historical writing, this Cambridge History is best understood as in essence a status report, a series of position statements in an ongoing dialogue, for no history can be more than a temporary stopping-point in a never-ending process of interpretation – which means that history is less a reflection of the facts than a construction of historians. What follows, then, is one particular set of constructions, the record of what a particular group of authors thought at a particular point in time.

When one examines the earliest works of a great composer, it is almost Inevitably with hindsight that one does so. Hearing the earlier works through the portal that the later, more well-known works supply can be a strange experience, through which hindsight often hardens into self-reassurance. Does one hear a familiar foretaste of this here, a pre-echo of that there? Is there a discernible quality to the early works that is evident to us today, but which contemporary listeners seem to have overlooked? Such questions are easy to ask and carry a hint of smugness, but, conversely, is anything to be gained by turning the presumptions around – by dwelling, for example, on the ordinariness that allowed the composer's contemporaries to remain unaware of the genius in their midst? Surely not: for such inversion merely preserves the same impoverished agenda in negative.

Questions of style impinge on the assessment of ‘early’ works in ways that demand examination in the present context. Consider the early works of Mozart as an alternative case to those of Stravinsky: as Charles Rosen has famously argued, the received idea of the ‘classical style’ is defined for us today by the mature works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, rather than by the music of their many accomplished contemporaries. It is not that Mozart's music is recognised as similar to that of, say, J. C. Bach, Kozeluch and Kraus, and can be measured against it, revealing Mozart's ‘superiority’.

The title of this chapter implies not only a concern with musical style and musical language, but also that a distinction may be drawn between the two. In the paragraphs that follow I shall take this distinction to be roughly equivalent to the point at which the style of a musical passage, work or repertory can be said to be more than simply a matter of how a composer’s musical mannerisms, habits or inclinations are identifiable as an emergent property of the music he or she produces. At this point, ‘style’ – as an attribute of a passage, piece or repertory – becomes something that can be manipulated along with the musical elements that express that style. Such manipulation allows musical language to be deployed as a means to a variety of ends: to express emotion, for example, or to articulate a drama, or to engage in cultural politics.

All of this presupposes that differences of style are actually recognisable as such across the field of contemporaneous musical composition, and indeed by the middle of the nineteenth century this had clearly been the case for some time. What is more, one of the century’s most notable attempts to deploy musical language for culture-political ends dates from this time, with the declaration of the New German School. But the most remarkable flowering of this kind of project was to come a little later, in and around the two decades that straddle the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A music-lover of catholic tastes who had the time and resources to travel around Europe and North America taking in premiéres during this period could have heard the first performances of works as diverse as Don Juan(1889), Pagliacci(1892), the Variations on America (1892), En Saga(1893), the Prélude à l’Aprè-midi d’un faune (1894), the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony (1895), Verklärte Nacht(1902), Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), Jenůfa (1904), Salome (1905), the Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and The Firebird (1910) – to name a mere dozen.

I

Presenting a musical analysis of Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli (1953), or of any other work for that matter, brings a number of discernible objects into juxtaposition. In particular, one musician's conception of the piece is set alongside its written score: the analyst's musical understanding is rationalised as explanations of how he or she comprehends certain passages, and these explanations are communicated through various verbal and graphical constructions around the score itself. In this process, the score is taken to represent a common ground between the author of the analysis and those who may read it; beyond this, further common ground is assumed in the shape of concepts from music theory which mediate (explicitly or otherwise) the analyst's introspections–whether these introspections be about the experience of reading the score, or about the experience of listening to a performance, or about the imaginary listening experience that often accompanies score-reading. The rather obvious objections that such experiences cannot literally have been shared, and that the concepts of music theory may not carry the same nuances of meaning for all parties involved, seem in general to be overridden by a belief that in practice there is a tangible communality that permits musicians to accomplish something in this way.

The composer, too, is generally drawn into this network. Indeed, listeners may readily feel that they understand a musical work through some kind of empathy with the composer, a process of imagination to which explicit analysis is hardly essential.

The Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is among Messiaen's best known compositions, and has been recorded many times. Possibly out of respect for the extraordinary circumstances surrounding its composition, it seems to have been more or less immune to the harsh criticism that from time to time beset the composer and his works. Another protective factor may have been its unusual format: as a piece of chamber music it is not quite unique in Messiaen's output, but it remains the case that works for orchestra, piano, organ or voices comprise over five-sixths of what he wrote, and those who sought to make critical arguments for or against the composer's highly individual and characteristic style were perhaps unlikely to direct their attentions to a work that might have seemed peripheral by comparison with, say, the Turangalîla Symphony (1946–8) or the vast piano cycle Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–8).

Public trajectories

In the period following the composition of the Quatuor and his repatriation to occupied France in the spring of 1941, Messiaen set about his work with remarkable vigour. Later the same year he took up an appointment at the Conservatoire as professor of harmony, and in the following year he set about writing Technique de mon langage musical. He also returned to composition, although the works he wrote initially were either brief or unfinished, namely the Chœurs pour une Jeanne d'Arc (1941, unaccompanied voices), the Musique de scène pour un Œdipe (1942, ondes Martenot), and the Rondeau (1943, piano).

Messiaen's description of the opening movement presents a conjunction of Heaven and the natural world that was to become central to the expression of his musical theology. This movement, ‘Liturgie de cristal”, shows us as it were in embryo something that would come into larger existence with Des canyons aux étoiles … and Saint François d'Assise. But it is an embryo that is already fully formed, not least because its anatomy is on one level quite straightforward.

Interpretations

Messiaen's audacity lies in the very simplicity of his means, but these are employed in the service of the profound. In ‘Liturgie de cristal’, fragmentary imitations of birdsong, played by the clarinet and violin, are heard alongside unchanging and continuous material played by the cello and piano. It is easy enough to arrive at a provisional interpretation of these musical facts: clearly, one might say, the two latter instruments in some way represent Heaven; and given the work's title we might assume our focus is on Heaven's eternity. Indeed, as we shall see, the music of the cello and piano is constructed so that in concept it is perpetual – without beginning or end.

Messiaen's interpretation of the scriptures here is illuminating, insofar as it can be reconstructed from these brief remarks. Ian Matheson has suggested that the ‘abyss’ refers to a passage in Revelation 11:7, in which ‘the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against [the two prophets], and shall overcome them, and kill them’. This vision is treated more fully in Revelation 9:1–6, where the abyss (or ‘bottomless pit’ in the King James version) is opened by the fifth Angel of the apocalypse:

A number of commentators have expressed misgivings about the implications of Messiaen's transcription of this movement, along with the final movement of the Quatuor, from earlier compositions in which the music does not have the same verbal connotations. Paul Griffiths, for example, observes that

Be that as it may, a closer look at Messiaen's description of Fête des belles eaux suggests that the two conceptions were not so very different. The work was composed as one of twenty commissioned by the City of Paris at the time of the great international Exhibition of 1937:

It would surely have been unthinkable for Messiaen to have omitted from the Quatuor this unpretentious little movement, which was composed initially as a free-standing piece for his three fellow prisoners (see pp. 7–8). Nonetheless, both its title and the composer's programme note confirm, by their failure to make any mention of the apocalypse, that the ‘Intermède’ stands outside the orbit of what was to become the work's greater inspiration.

Mood

If ‘Abîme des oiseaux’ presents a meditation on freedom and hope through an escape from ‘the equal and measured time of classical music’ and an invocation of birdsong, the ‘Intermède’ is escapist in a contrasting way: it evades through its musical lightheartedness the sombre if uplifting reflections that occupy the remainder of the Quatuor. It does this in an exactly contrasting way, through its conspicuous use of regular rhythms and phrasing; and also – whilst it makes considerable use of Messiaen's modes – through its clear tonal orientation and formal layout.

Although Messiaen generally and most typically tackled lofty themes in his music, this is by no means the only piece he wrote that is lightweight in tone. (He would doubtless have recognised as a young man that his much admired teacher Paul Dukas, though a serious and self-critical composer, was nonetheless famously capable of humour in music.)

A vocalise – Rachmaninov's for soprano and piano (1912) is a famous example – is essentially a song without words. It is not an instrumental composition, however, as are Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, but a wordless song for a singer. So, as in the case of the contact between nature and Heaven effected in ‘Liturgie de cristal’, Messiaen's use of the term vocalise here seeks to perform an act of identification. The song in this second movement ‘is’ a song for the Angel, though what we hear are the instruments of the Quatuor.

Form

As Messiaen's prefatory remarks explain, the movement falls into three main sections. This large-scale articulation, which immediately distinguishes the ‘Vocalise …’ from the manner of the first movement, is made crystal clear by the tempo markings in the score.

The first part begins in the modéré tempo of the previous movement, but is here additionally marked robuste in reflection of the musical character; after two bars comes a virtual doubling of the notated tempo (presque vif, joyeuxy = c. 104), and these two tempi continue to alternate, ending with the presque vif at ii/C.1–2 and the modéré at C:3–7.

In May and June 1940 the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler conducted a remarkable campaign of war which culminated in an Armistice treaty signed with the French government of Marshal Pétain in a railway carriage north-east of Paris on 22 June. The military thrust which led to this notorious but pragmatic political settlement had begun at dawn on 10 May with an invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium. By the end of the month both countries had fallen; British troops had fled to the coast in their thousands and were being evacuated from Dunkirk by a vast flotilla of boats large and small. At the same time, several hundred miles to the east, many French troops were taken prisoner as the German armies moved relentlessly onward from the Belgian border.

One of these was the young composer and organist Olivier Messiaen. He was thirty-one years of age, round-faced and bespectacled, and was serving in a menial capacity for the medical corps. Messiaen and three companions were captured in a forest by German troops as they reached the end of a journey by foot from Verdun to Nancy. Together with countless others he was held in an open-air camp pending transit from the war zone to the heart of Hitler's empire, and after a long and arduous journey by rail arrived at a prisoner-of-war camp known as Stalag VIIIA, at Görlitz, a small town in Silesia about 55 miles east of Dresden.

In this ‘dance of frenzy’, there is no harmony to soften the impact of the vigorous melody: all four instruments play the same line throughout – the piano in bare octaves and the others doubling as best they can. Only in the climactic passage near the end (vi/O:1 ff.) is this limitation briefly transcended as the full range of the piano is brought into play. Although Messiaen likens the extraordinary sonority of the four instruments in unison to the sound of gongs and the seven biblical trumpets, he perhaps wisely does not attempt to provide musical parallels to the ‘various catastrophes’ they announce. Instead, the powerful tension of the instrumental unison is presented as an analogue of these almost inconceivable events of judgement.

There is a residual parallel nonetheless between the musical form and those passages of Revelation in which the sound of the trumpets is described.