God’s Time

On a frozen evening in Silesia in January 1941, a young French composer, along with three other prisoners of war, performed an hour-long, eight-movement work for piano, cello, violin and clarinet to a rapt audience. “From the moment I read the back-of-an-album summary…the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music,” Michael Symmons Roberts writes in his new book Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief & Birdsong. The mystique around the premiere of Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” transformed it into a modernist shibboleth, “a potent symbol of human strength in the face of evil, of the power of art to inspire those qualities.”