THE MIRACLE OF STALAG 8A

The Miracle of Stalag 8A is the fascinating story of Olivier Messiaen's composition of his Quartet for the End of Time in Stalag 8A in Gorlitz, Germany, during the Second World War. Four French prisoners of war collaborate to create musical history in the most unlikely of places: a German Prison camp. The enigmatic Messiaen, an avant-garde composer-pianist and also a devout Catholic, along with Etienne Pasquier, an agnostic cellist, Henri Akoka, a Jewish Trotskyite Clarinetist, and Jean le Boulaire, an atheistic violinist, become the famous quartet of Stalag 8A. The first performance of the Quartet for the End of Time at Stalag 8A in January 1941 has become, in the words of Paul Griffiths, "one of the great stories of twentieth-century music". - From the Publisher