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Quartet for the End of Time by Michael Symmons Roberts (Hardback)
£20.00
Available
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781787331853
Published:
17 Apr 2025
Format:
Hardback
Number of pages:
288 pages
Dimensions:
222x138x25mm
Weight:
0.400kgs
Author:
Here is 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. '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.
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 Quatuor - 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 Messiaen'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.
About the Author: Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. His books of poetry have won many awards including the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Award for Drysalter (2013) and the Whitbread Poetry Prize for Corpus (2004). His Selected Poems was published by Cape in 2016. As a librettist, his work with composers has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. The Sacrifice (for Welsh National Opera) with composer James MacMillan, won an RPS Award, and choral works Elliptics (for BBC Philharmonic) and The Anvil (for Manchester International Festival) with composer Emily Howard, were both nominated for Ivor Novello Awards. His non-fiction book Edgelands (with Paul Farley, 2011) won the Foyles Book of Ideas Award and the Jerwood Prize. He is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
| Number of pages | 288 |
|---|
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