Playing in the Worst of Times

I choked up when I heard this cellist playing a piece written by a prisoner in a Nazi stalag.Instead of succumbing to despair when he was tossed into this camp, French soldier Olivier Messiaen turned to what he knew: composing music. With the stub of a pencil and a bit of paper from a sympathetic guard, he wrote what became one of the Twentieth Century’s masterpieces, “Quartet for the End of Time” - after all, he feared his time was up.
Then three other imprisoned musicians joined...