Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus (“Praise to the Immortality of Jesus”), from Quartet for the End of Time
Composition and premiere: As related below, Messiaen composed the quartet while interned in a Silesian prison camp in 1940 and premiered it with fellow prisoners in January 1941. Messiaen’s only substantial work of ensemble chamber music, it was first played at Tanglewood during the composer’s residency here in 1949; the Boston Symphony Chamber Players performed the complete work in the Shed in 1975, its only performance in this venue.
The French composer, teacher, and organist Olivier Messiaen wrote his extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time under equally extraordinary circumstances. In June 1940, Messiaen was among a group of French soldiers captured by the Germans. Sent to Stalag VIII-A in Silesia, he there met a violinist, clarinetist, and cellist for whom he composed a piece that ultimately became the fourth-movement Interlude of the Quartet for the End of Time. Having finished the full quartet in January 1941, Messiaen joined his three captive-colleagues for the first performance that January 15, before an audience of prisoners from France, Belgium, Poland, and elsewhere.
Messiaen’s quartet was inspired by the Biblical vision of the Apocalypse in the tenth chapter of Revelation, wherein “an angel, full of strength, descending from the sky, clad with a cloud, covered with a rainbow...lifted his hand to the sky and swore by Him who lives in the centuries of centuries saying: There shall be no time.” The Biblically symbolic absence of time is also reflected in the music, which, by virtue of its slow tempos and irregular rhythms, lacks a regular pulse. Other hallmarks of Messiaen’s musical style and language also evident in the Quartet for the End of Time are his remarkable and evocative use of musical color, his lifelong fascination with birdsong, and his underlying Catholic faith (which Messiaen himself once called “the most important aspect” of his music).
Following the war, Messiaen applied his unique treatment of musical colors and rhythms, along with his continuing interest in birdsong, to several works concerned with the qualities of human (as opposed to purely Christian) love in all of its aspects. Noteworthy among these works was his massive Turangalîla-symphonie, an extended musical reflection on love inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde and aspects of Hindu mysticism. The work’s title derives from a compound Sanskrit word meaning many things at once: a song of love, a hymn to joy, and the play of the cosmos, encompassing time, movement, life, and death. Messiaen wrote Turangalîla in response to a commission from Serge Koussevitzky for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which gave the world premiere in 1949 under Leonard Bernstein’s direction. Decades later, all of the elements so important to Messiaen’s worldview would come together in the composition that marked the culmination of his life’s work, the six-hour opera St. Francis of Assisi, commissioned from Messiaen by the Paris Opera in 1975, composed to his own libretto, and premiered in November 1983 under the direction of Seiji Ozawa. Messiaen was also a visiting member of the Tanglewood Music Center faculty in 1949 and 1975.
The composer’s own words—excerpted from the preface to his score—are the best guide to the music of his Quartet for the End of Time. The following are his comments on the work’s final movement.
VIII. Praise to the Immortality of Jesus. A broad violin solo, counterpart to the fifth movement’s cello solo. Why this second praise? It is addressed more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus, to Jesus the Man, to the Word become flesh, the immortal reborn one who imparts us his life. This is the whole of love...the ascension of man before God, of the child of God before his Father, of the creature made divine before Paradise.
Marc Mandel
Marc Mandel, former Director of Program Publications for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the staff of the BSO in November 1978 and managed the orchestra’s program book from 1979 until his retirement in July 2020. He is co-editor of Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976, published in May 2026 by Oxford University Press.