It’s the night of January 15, 1941, and at Stalag VIII – a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz in Silesia – a few hundred prisoners and a small number of guards are gathering in Barrack 27. It’s freezing cold. There is no heating.

Among the prisoners is a famous composer; also a French soldier. One of the guards, Karl-Albert Brüll, loved music and knew who he was. Brüll was a German patriot with anti-Nazi sympathies and he provided music paper, pencils and solitude for the composer to work. Now they were going to hear what he’d written.

The composer, the 31-year old Olivier Messiaen, prefaced his score with an image from the New Testament’s Book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer’”. This haunting expression gives to Messiaen’s work its haunting title: Quartet for the End of Time.

Scored for violin, clarinet, cello and piano, Messiaen’s quartet is in eight movements, each bearing apocalyptic, timeless messages for the players and audience. For prisoners hearing a work reflecting on eternity beyond time, men who didn’t know what time they had or what their life would be like in whatever time they had left, it spoke volumes. As Messiaen himself later reflected, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension”.

A number of myths have arisen about this premiere in the prisoner-of-war camp, some of which originated from Messiaen himself. You will often read the original audience was made up of some 5,000 prisoners. Subsequent research has shown that it was more like three or four hundred. It was also claimed that the instruments used included a beaten-up piano and a cello with only three strings, but they were perhaps not as bad as that.

What is undeniable is Messiaen’s determination to help his audience look beyond the present, and even the future, to some sort of eternal realm. 

The clarinettist at the first performance was Henri Akoka, an Algerian-born Jew, later described by Alex Ross as “vibrant and unpredictable”. He tried to escape from the camp several times, and succeeded in April 1941. While being transferred from one camp to another by train, he jumped from the top of a fast-moving cattle car, his clarinet under his arm.

The cellist who played in the premiere was Étienne Pasquier. Pasquier is described as a gentle character who, had he sought it, could have had a major international career as a solo cellist. 

The violinist was Jean Le Boulaire. He is described as being moody and withdrawn, and perhaps it is his character which, in part, informs the mood of the music given to him in the final movement. He later abandoned the violin, and made a successful career as an actor under the name of Jean Lanier.

When she wrote her book on Messiaen’s quartet, the clarinettist Rebecca Rischin managed to interview the elderly Jean Le Boulaire. She sensed him to be a bitter and unhappy man, but when Messiaen’s quartet was mentioned his eyes lit up. Of this he said: “It’s a jewel that’s mine and that will never belong to anyone else.”

In the spring of 1941, Messiaen was released from Stalag VIII-A. He returned to Paris, now occupied by the Nazis, and was appointed to teach harmony at the Conservatoire. He didn’t compose anything for another two years, a silence which was broken in 1943 by the first of a series of works expressing his love for Yvonne Loriod, the Visions of Amen.

Decades after the war, the music-loving prison guard Karl-Albert Brüll went to Paris and rang Messiaen’s doorbell. For reasons which are now obscure, Messiaen refused to see him. Did he not remember the name? Or did he not want to revisit a painful chapter in his past?