Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

I just read this great story about the French composer Olivier Messiaen and his famous piece Quartet for the End of Time. It was written in the winter of 1941. Messiaen was captured by the Nazis and put in Stalag 8-A, a concentration camp in Görlitz, Germany. While in prison, facing a brutally cruel lifestyle, he spent time reading the four gospels and Revelation. As a follower of Jesus, he was somehow filled with hope for the world, right in the middle of hell on Earth. When he realized there were three other famous musicians in the camp, he found four instruments — a cello with a missing string, a beat up violin, a well-worn clarinet, and a piano with keys that stuck together — and he composed an incredible piece of chamber music. The New Yorker later called it “the most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century.”16 They first played it in January, right in the middle of the concentration camp, to hundreds of prisoners and guards, in the freezing cold. Messiaen later said, “The cold was excruciating, the Stalag buried under snow, the four performers played on broken down instruments . . . but never have I had an audience who listened with such rapt attention.”