Quartet for the End of Time

On Music, Grief and Birdsong

De: Michael Symmons Roberts

Narrado por: Michael Symmons Roberts

Brought to you by Penguin.

A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist.

The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps.

Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision.

Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find.

'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS

'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss

© Michael Symmons Roberts 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Reseñas de la Crítica

A remarkable book

This wonderful book should help to win the strange, bird-fixated composer new admirers.

In this remarkable book, Symmons Roberts explores his complex ongoing relationship with Messiaen's visionary work , alongside reflections on grief, faith and the creative process… Symmons Roberts writes with wit, beauty and piercing insight... In responding to Messiaen's radiant masterpiece, Symmons Roberts has created a masterpiece of his own

Symmons Roberts’ prose…is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten our understanding of what precedes it

This is a rich, lively, profound book (Rowan Williams)

Every sentence is beautifully assembled and polished... A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human (Sarah Tarlow)

I love Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry. He is a religious poet in a secular age. His work is about connection between the things of the spirit and the things of the world. And his work is about transcendence (Jeanette Winterson)

He displays an amazing talent for intimacy on paper – sometimes, it almost takes your breath away

An outstanding writer

Symmons Roberts is no professional musician. It makes this book all the more valuable and, when combined with his considerable lyric gifts as a poet, makes him a superb guide to the music, which lingers. It is a lonely book, sometimes painful to read