Princeton University Concerts

3 concerts: $30, add this to the Concert Classics Series and the price is $24.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Formed in 1994-95, this ensemble comprises musicians who teach instrumental music and voice at Princeton University, distinguished guest artists, and supremely talented students. A highlight of their three concerts will be Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written in 1940 while the composer was in captivity in a stalag in Silesia. “It was dreadfully cold – the stalag was buried under snow,” he later recalled. The 30,000 prisoners, mostly French, were starving. The quartet was given its world premiere before an audience of 5,000 in January 1941 under less than ideal conditions. “The four musicians played on broken instruments. [The] cello had only three strings, and the keys on my upright would stick and not rebound… I had been rigged out with a green jacket in utter tatters and was wearing wooden clogs.” In a triumph of the human sprit, the composer survived, as did his composition. Overcoming the worst degradation human beings can devise to create everlasting beauty? Priceless.