Listening to Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” at the Toledo Museum of Art by Leonard Kress8/6/2016 Listening to Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” at the Toledo Museum of Art The audience across from me comprised of Frans Hals burghers and their wives, ruffled collars and coarse snoods, who tip their stern heads in rapt appreciation, as they recognize bird songs from picnics and country outings within the music. They all seem ready to flash open their black gowns to reveal gleaming trumpets cinched to their black undergarments and blow furiously in this vast hall, so all four players might cast aside their sheet music and instruments and dance—with the rest of us, of course. Though afterwards they’d have to renounce this song and replace it with silent motionless rapture. And thus, Messiaen, burghers, all of us, wrapped and enfolded into eternal blackness beyond the reach of any song. For now, though, in this peopled hall, where measured time proceeds on course, we let it maneuver through us, this music composed in a Nazi prison camp, music that today keeps the museum guards in rapt forgetfulness of their duty, to kick out coarse sound and movement, to keep the black clad musicians undisturbed, to usher from the hall those mothers whose infants’ songs won’t be bottled-up. Messiaen’s song only partially pleases the burghers, for whom music is only good when it draws huge crowds into the halls of commerce, and goods can be sold and wrapped. They emerged after the catastrophe of the Black Plague and thrived, unmolested in their lucrative course until the early 20th century. Of course collapsing when fascist marching songs and swastikas and black armbands cuffed and plundered music. For now, there’s only this rapturous Requiem, unconstrained in this or any hall. Leonard Kress Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex, Thirteens, and Braids & Other Sestinas, and Walk Like Bo Diddley (to be released this fall.) He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio and edits creative non-fiction for Artful Dodge.
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