The time to start our return to the ship was drawing nigh and, for me, the prospect of “dinner and a show” was welcome on this dismal and somber day. Sometimes, though, a somber mood can be broken by something unexpected and incongruous and this is precisely what happened to me.
I made two stops before boarding the bus. At the first, I took a long look down a path to the beach.
The second was a stop at ‘la toilette’ before boarding the bus. As I walked across the Visitor’s Center parking lot, I noticed someone holding a banner with a large M of such a distinct shape and color that I immediately recognized it as belonging to the University of Michigan. If you’re thinking, “Huh?” So was I.
Passing some of the young men in sweat suits with the same logo I immediately realized – and confirmed by asking one of them – that I’d happened upon the University of Michigan football team. I was still puzzled but I had business to tend to and a bus to catch as did they. Although in their case it was, by my count, four buses.
Unable to satisfy my curiosity at the time, when I returned home I reached out to David Ablauf at the University and asked about it. His response came quickly. He confirmed that the team had visited France that week and had spent a day in Normandy and five days in Paris. He noted that the trip was “something that Coach Jim Harbaugh has done with our football team and staff the past two years to provide an education to our players. As he says, ‘All learning doesn’t happen in a classroom.'” In addition to visiting sites in and around Paris, he wrote that the team and staff had “put on a football clinic for 300 coaches at the French Olympic Training Center.” La vie peut être étrange, n’est-ce pas?
Back to Bach after dinner
Any well-organized tour of Paris and part of Normandy will include many of the same sights our trip offered. The differentiating factor, the element that attracted me to this tour when I first heard Fred describe it on his show was the Performance Today aspect that included onshore concerts and regular Perf Chats. This was the value-added segment distinguishing our time in France. After our visit to the D-Day beaches, the evening’s performance schedule included compositions by J. S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen. Both of them continued the rather somber mood of the day and, once we learned the story behind Messiaen’s piece, it became particularly poignant and appropriate.
Jie and Tim chose to play the second movement (Largo) from Bach’s Trio Sonata in C Major (BWV 529). This sonata is one of a collection of six trio sonatas that are believed to have been assembled between 1727 and 1730.
(A trio sonata is typically written for two or three solo melodic instruments and basso continuo [or steady bass line], making three parts in all. Hence, the description trio sonata. Bach’s great innovation with these trio sonatas was combining their traditional three voices into an arrangement for a single keyboard. However, the trio sonata structure allows them to be arranged for and played on a variety of instruments.)
The largo (slow movement) of BWV 529 is quite likely as florid a movement as one would hear in any of the six sonatas. A pair of highly ornamented upper voices weave in and around each other over the basso continuo. Tim and Jie didn’t play the brighter allegro first movement written in C major and because the largo was composed in the key of A minor it intensified the almost pervasive air of melancholy. (We generally hear music composed in minor keys as sadder than music written in a major key. In this instance, A minor is the relative minor key to C major and the absence of hearing that relationship might have intensified my impression of the somber tone.)
I wasn’t able to find a performance using piano and cello which is what we heard that night but, to give you a sense of the flexibility of this particular type of composition, I’m providing two interpretations. The first is for violin and harpsichord
and the second is a transcription for piano and viola.
Followed by some Messiaen around
Olivier Messiaen is considered by many to be one of the great composers of the 20th century but prior to the trip I wasn’t particularly familiar with him or his work likely because of his openly religious themes inspired by Roman Catholic theology. The conversation Fred had with Jie and Tim that night and the music they played inspired me to do some further reading about him and I’ll share a summary of my newfound knowledge with you.
Messiaen was born in 1908 in Avignon. His mother, Cecile Sauvage, was a poet and his father Pierre was an English teacher who translated Shakespeare’s plays into French. Olivier was a precocious musician who wrote his first compositions at age nine or ten and was admitted to the Paris Conservatory of Music when he was only 11 years old.
His early reputation as a composer of note developed with the performance of his Offrandes oubliées (“Forgotten Offertories”) in 1931 and his Nativité du Seigneur (The Birth of the Lord) in 1938. Together with fellow composers André Jolivet, Daniel Lesur, and Yves Baudrier, he founded the group La Jeune France (“Young France”) in 1936 to promote new French music.
Messiaen was drafted at the outbreak of World War II in 1937 but because of his relatively poor eyesight was assigned duty in the military auxiliary. However, he was soon captured and taken to Görlitz in Silesia. He was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A where he remained from 1940 to 1942.
Even before the war, much of Messiaen’s music, although inspired by Roman Catholic theology, was a quasi-mystical interpretation, notably in Apparition de l’église éternelle (Vision of the Eternal Church) for organ written in 1932. Catholic theology continued to provide him inspiration after the war as seen in works such as Visions de l’amen for two pianos (1943) and Vingt regards sur l’Enfant Jésus (Twenty Looks at the Infant Jesus) in 1944.
But it was his time as a prisoner of war that we felt that Sunday night. Because his captors found musical scores in his pockets and perhaps because he was not part of any infantry unit, he was afforded a set of privileges in the Stalag that included permission to play the camp organ, access to writing materials, and a private space that allowed him to compose. It was in the prison camp, where he met three other musicians, that he composed the eight movement Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time).
The website holocaustmusic.ort.org provided this recounting of the 15 January 1941 world premiere as recalled by Messiaen:
The Stalag was buried in snow. We were 30,000 prisoners (French for the most part, with a few Poles and Belgians). The four musicians played on broken instruments … the keys on my upright piano remained lowered when depressed … it’s on this piano, with my three fellow musicians, dressed in the oddest way … completely tattered, and wooden clogs large enough for the blood to circulate despite the snow underfoot … that I played my quartet … the most diverse classes of society were mingled: farmers, factory workers, intellectuals, professional servicemen, doctors and priests.
The site goes on to note that,
Messiaen’s recollection of this concert has been challenged by many, including the other members of the quartet: while he remembers thousands in the audience, the camp hall could hold only a few hundred; his piano was not as imperfect as he describes; and his insistence that the cellist only performed with three strings has been repeatedly denied by the cellist himself.
Messiaen noted that the inspiration for the music came from a passage in the Book of Revelation that read, in part, “And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and swear by him that liveth for ever and ever … that there should be time no longer.” Thus, the end of time referred to in the title is not the apocalypse but rather the end of earthly time that will follow on the return of the Savior.
Tim and Jie played the fifth movement for piano and cello titled, Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus (Praise to the Eternity of Jesus). The greatest challenge here for the musicians is likely finding the tempo that conveys the emotion of the movement. Messiaen’s tempo marking is, “infiniment lent, extatique” (“infinitely slow, ecstatic”).
As usual, no one recorded the performances on the ship but this is the piece they played for us.
And with that, I bid you goodnight.