This is the movement everyone waits for, because this finale is where the handkerchiefs come out. For once we have a time signature, 4/4, combined with a key signature, four sharps, which in this case is E Major. It’s for violin and piano alone, and it’s marked “extremely slow and tender, ecstatic”.
The piano plays groups of thirty-second notes into double-dotted eighth notes for the whole of the movement. It’s Messiaen’s way of portraying heartbeats musically. The violin soars over it, and at the end, the soul ascends into heaven. It disappears into silence.
Messiaen: “Quartet for the End of Time”, (“Praise for the Immortality of Jesus”)