On a freezing January night in 1941, four prisoners in a German POW camp played a new piece on a piano with sticking keys, a cello missing a string, a clarinet, and a violin. That premiere of the Quartet for the End of Time was the birth of a new musical language, and this episode traces the life of the man who wrote it. Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon in 1908 to a Shakespeare-translating father and a poet mother, entered the Paris Conservatoire at 11, and went on to fuse Catholic theology, mathematics, synesthetic color, and the songs of birds into music the world had never heard.

We explore how Messiaen's chromesthesia led him to invent modes of limited transposition, how captivity at Görlitz pushed him toward non-retrogradable rhythms that abolish forward motion, and how the slow decline of his first wife Claire Delbos coexisted wit ...