Messiaen passes through the conflict hearing sounds beyond all earthly politics. He lives out his life writing music of spectral harmonies and birdlike rhythms. But no piece will reach more listeners than the Quartet. He sees Pasquier and Akoka now and then. Captain Brüll tries to visit him in Paris, decades later, but the concierge turns him back, saying Messiaen does not want to see him. Brüll goes away devastated. Later still, Messiaen tries to contact the German who gave him paper and pencils, the man who, at great risk to himself, faked the composer’s exit papers. But by then Brüll is beyond the reach of time.
If I composed this quartet for anything, Messiaen will write, it was to escape from the snow, the war, captivity, to escape from myself. What I gained most of all from it was that, among three hundred thousand prisoners, I was perhaps the only one who wasn’t a prisoner.
And of that night in January 1941: Never was I listened to with such attention.
The best music says: you’re immortal. But immortal means today, maybe tomorrow. A year from now, with crazy luck.
Eight days after that winter Stalag concert, Peter Els is born. Over the course of seventy years, he hears the piece a hundred times. He ages with it, and the notes change each time he listens. The piece, forever a week and a day older than he is, grows from an elusive puzzle to a venerated classic. In an undergraduate lecture, his professor calls it one of the three seminal works of the war. In graduate school, his circle of friends take it for granted, a thing that has always existed and needs to be escaped from, like the pitches of the major scale — music lost forever in lore and reverence, too classic to trouble anyone.
Cage: “Nothing is accomplished by writing, playing, or listening to music.” Hear that or miss everything — even what’s within earshot.
That was the story Els told his eleventh-hour pupils, from memory, with his notes sealed up in a Ziploc bag on their way to a government crime lab in Philly. He heard himself talk, weirdly calm despite the morning, like one of those cool criminals who duck into matinees five minutes after the murder, drawn in by the promise of air-conditioning and popcorn. The lede of his arrest would write itself: terrorist caught while giving lifelong learning class on dead music to dying people.
He warned the group that the work would last fifty minutes.
Klaudia Kohlmann blew a raspberry. At this age? It takes me fifty minutes to tie my shoes.
I have one word for you, Will Bock told her. Velcro.
Els didn’t mention that federal agents might come and arrest him midway through the piece. He pressed the play button on the phone’s screen and settled in to his last chance to listen at liberty.
The crystal liturgy spread through the group like flu moving through a day-care center. Chris Shields, a pizza parlor owner who liked to play “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” and “Somebody Loves Me” on the Shade’s upright piano, shooting the last notes with the gun barrel of his index finger, grappled the conference table and Fletcherized the tangle of notes in his clenched jaw.
Prisms of sun slid across the almond ceiling. The swish of nylon and muffled complaints passed down the hall. A gray head poked through the common room’s double doors, listened for a moment, then withdrew in giggles.
Fred Baroni, financial planner forced into unwilling retirement, using the course to try to hold dementia at bay for another week, shot Els a scared look at the sound of the pulsing lines: Go on without me. Leave me here, by the side of the road, in the falling snow.
By the Intermède, Paulette Hewerdine was cradling her face in her hands. The year before, her eldest son had been killed when an oncoming truck shot across the highway median. A month later her husband sat up in bed, complained of a headache, and died. She listened now, face covered, as if the sinuous music announced the long-expected trifecta.
Sounds filled the room, none of them reaclass="underline" Rain spattering a tenement roof. A girl on a wobbly swing set. The rustle of cotton dresses in a dance hall in wartime. The wind over a Nebraska wheat field. A stone dropped down a well with a long-forgotten wish tied to it. Crickets in a November cupboard.
Lisa Keane, who took notes throughout Els’s impromptu lecture, kept taking them during the music. The week they did Ravel, the apostate nun turned junior high science teacher confessed to the group that music was her North Korea — an unfathomable country that refused her a visa. She heard no more in the average masterpiece than a person might see in a pile of soggy cardboard. She didn’t want to face oblivion deaf to something that made life bearable for so many people.
Hearing the ex-nun’s confession, Els had wanted to tell her: Don’t start here, at the story’s end. Start back where the harmonies are fresh and clear all the way to the horizon. But Keane was stuck with Els and the music of her own failed century. And so she sat pushing her pen across the page like a pilgrim slogging to Compostela.
A burst of color stopped her hand. She lifted her head. Yes, Els willed her. This is it: nothing else to hear but these blocks of purple rage, this icy drunkenness. But a moment more, and Keane’s pen began again.
William Bock gazed out the plate-glass window, where a gray squirrel corkscrewed up the trunk of a white pine. The battle for the soul of twentieth century music struck the former ceramic engineer as an amusing shaggy dog story. He cocked his head at the Messiaen as if it came from an outpost colony on a remote but hospitable planet in a backwater star system on the edge of a galaxy straight out of the pages of Astounding Stories, the pulp bible of his childhood.
Klaudia Kohlmann huddled against the music, a hand like an ice tong on her temple. She kept a violin in a battered case under the dresser in her Shade apartment, although rheumatoid arthritis made playing it impossible. She’d held that instrument on her lap in the backseat of her father’s Opel Kapitän P1 as her family sped west through the junction of the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse and the Sebastianstrasse in Berlin, three days before the Wall went up.
Retirement had shrunk her, and she looked now like an apprentice pixie. Once she’d been Els’s therapist — until a mad mistake made that impossible. Their fling was brief and their joint repentance long. Neither could remember whose fault the autumnal wrong turn had been. Later, they sometimes ran into each other at concerts on campus, two cultural recidivists. He stood with her once in the concert hall lobby as she smoked three cigarettes during a ten-minute intermission, trying to fill her veins with enough nicotine to tide her through the all-Rachmaninoff second half. Doesn’t it bother you? she’d asked. Eight-tenths of every piece performed in a major venue, written by one of twenty-five composers?
I’d be fine with it, if it were the right twenty-five.
She sucked in burning air and shook her head at his stupidity. But she, too, was a late-life backslider. The music she loved should have died at that Berlin Philharmonic concert in 1945: Beethoven, Bruckner, and Brünnhilde’s immolation, while bombs rained down and Hitler Youth passed out cyanide. On that afternoon, five-year-old Klaudia was two neighborhoods away, under the family piano, her customary bomb shelter, listening to her father play Hummel’s opus 18 Fantasy. Now she listened to the Quartet, fingers pressed to the side of her skull, with the look of someone who’d just discovered that she still had work to do but not enough remaining time to do it.
In fifty minutes, the sun shed enough energy to power civilization for a year. Six thousand people died; thirteen thousand were born. One hundred days of video were uploaded to the Web, along with ten million photos. Twelve billion emails went out, eight-tenths of them spam. A dozen of them involved terror plans, real or fantastic. The angel came and passed over again — eternity in an hour.