Soloists of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA
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Lucerne, Switzerland
Wednesday, 15 August 2012 - 7:30 PM
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The end of time: It happened on 15 January 1941 in the unheated washhouse of the prisoner-of-war camp at Görlitz—the icy outside temperature was below zero—with the first performance of Olivier Messiaens “Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps” (“Quartet for the End of Time”). “Never before had people listened with so much attention and understanding,” recalled Messiaen, who refers in the work to the Book of Revelation: that is, to the end of the world. Or is it to the beginning of eternity? Dmitri Shostakovich also commemorated an apocalyptic experience in his Eighth String Quartet. He composed the piece in 1960 while visiting Dresden to collaborate on a film about the devastating bombing of the city in February 1945, for which he was providing the score. He dedicated the Quartet No. 8, which represents an instrumental Requiem, to “the victims of fascism and war.” But the program will begin with a work explicitly understood to embody a “musical offering” of the secret contrapuntal wisdom Johann Sebastian Bach had accrued by his final years.
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