Quartet for the End of Time

Cherry Ge piano
Elfida Su Turan violin
Stefan Bulyha clarinet
Tianao Pan cello

MESSIAEN Quartet for the End of Time

The 2026 Summer Piano Festival concludes with a performance of Messiaen’s most visionary and universal work, Quartet for the End of Time.

Captured in May 1940, Messiaen was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp at Görlitz in Silesia and in the dead of winter wrote the quartet for the instruments on hand among the camp’s inmates: violin, cello, clarinet, and - himself playing - piano. The first performance took place before a large audience of prisoners. A sequence of eight movements that respond to a Biblical passage from Revelations, Messiaen’s beautiful, volcanic music paints the end of Time as the end of past and future, and the beginning of eternity.