Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong

'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS 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. 'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss

About the Author :
Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1963. He has published eight collections of poetry and received a number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. As a librettist, his work has been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, and he is an award-winning broadcaster and dramatist. He is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, his Quartet for the End of Time: On Music, Grief and Birdsong was published in 2025.

Review :
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 Every sentence is beautifully assembled and polished... A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human 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 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