ABSTRACT
The Quatuor pour la fin du Temps by Olivier Messiaen and Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot are two significant works of art that were both published in their final form during the Second World War. This chapter sketches the composition and publication of both works and analyses certain primary themes that concern the nature of the human experience of music as a means of expression and as a means of negotiating time. Rebecca Rischin has put the Quatuor in historical context and there are essays by, among others, Iain Matheson and Robert Sherlaw Johnson that take up some of the extra-musical themes in the work. For Messiaen, calling his piece a quartet is one of simplicity and convention – any piece for four instruments can be called a quartet and, by the start of the twentieth century, the form of the piece can be anything from one to many movements.
