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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1978
It was through Schubert and Beethoven that Jean Barraqué came to his vocation as a composer. He himself indicated 1940 as the date when his ‘conversion’ began; he was twelve years old, and his practical experience of playing the piano and the violin as well as daily singing classes at school had done nothing to deflect him from his childhood ambition to enter the priesthood. Then one of his teachers played him records of the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, and he was immediately fired with an obsessive enthusiasm for music. He refers to three other works which he went on to discover for himself: the Arpeggione Sonata, the Pastoral Symphony and the Missa Solemnis. He had at that time a burning desire to emulate the great masters, and he would copy out major orchestral scores and compose his own imitations of them. At fifteen, he says, his idea of a composer was of someone who wrote the Missa Solemnis. The work was to remain his constant touchstone, just as Schubert was always, for him, ‘that purest of musicians’. No doubt, too, there was something about the nature of the particular works to which he was first drawn that determined the scale on which he later customarily worked. He could not conceivably have composed Bagatelles or Moments Musicaux; these would have seemed to him too self-contained, too ‘finished’. In fact, he was deeply committed to what he called ‘l'inachèvement sans cesse’; if creative thought was a continuum, then no creative act could properly be regarded as ‘finished’.
1 Jean Barraqué, ‘Propos impromptu’, Le courrier musical de France, xxvi (1969), 75–80, from which the following details of the composer's early development are drawn.Google Scholar
2 Radio interview with Florence Mothe (ORTF recording, 30 April 1969). Except where stated, all translations are the author's.Google Scholar
3 Jean Barraqué, op. cit., 79; see also Le temps restitué, section iv.Google Scholar
4 Jean Barraqué, ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’ (six broadcast talks, 1953; MS (no. V missing) in the possession of Mme Germaine Barraqué), I.Google Scholar
5 MS and various notes (undated) in the possession of Mme Germaine Barraqué. The material on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (214 pp. + notes) will hereafter be referred to as ‘Beethoven’; that on Debussy's La Mer (37 pp., apparently based on lecture transcripts made by André Riotte (31 pp.), + various notes) as ‘La Mer’.Google Scholar
6 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar
7 Revue musicale, xxv (1952), 117–48; reprinted in Relevés d'apprenti (Paris, 1966), 147–82.Google Scholar
8 Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud Jean-Louis Barrault, iii (1954), 32–45.Google Scholar
9 Cf. ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar
10 Polyphonie, ix-x (1954), 47–73.Google Scholar
11 ‘Rythme et développement’, 73.Google Scholar
12 ‘Beethoven’, 84.Google Scholar
13 Igor Stravinsky, ‘Geleitwort’, Die Reihe, ii (1955), 7.Google Scholar
14 ‘Beethoven’, 205.Google Scholar
15 Walther Kolneder (in Anton Webern: Genesis und Metamorphose eines Stils, Vienna, 1974, p. 187) makes a spurious bibliographical reference to a published article entitled ‘Essays fiber Weberns Klaviervariationen’ in Melos (1961).Google Scholar
16 See, for example, ‘Demarches musicales du demi-siècle’, I and III.Google Scholar
17 ‘La Mer’, 8–9.Google Scholar
18 By Barraqué himself in ‘Beethoven’, 83.Google Scholar
19 ‘Beethoven’, 83–4.Google Scholar
20 Ibid.Google Scholar
21 Jean Barraqué, ‘Debussy, ou l'approche d'une organisation autogène de la composition’, Debussy et l'évolution de la musique au XXe siècle, ed. E. Weber (Paris, 1965), 83–95.Google Scholar
22 ‘Beethoven’, 84.Google Scholar
23 Jean Barraqué, Debussy (Paris, 1962), 150.Google Scholar
24 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar
25 ‘Beethoven’, 84.Google Scholar
26 See bars 8–9, etc., of the work's second movement, and cf. Boulez's strictures in Penser la musique aujourd'hui (Paris, 1963), 52.Google Scholar
27 ‘Rythme et développement’, 47–8.Google Scholar
28 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, I.Google Scholar
29 ‘Démarches musicales du demi-siècle’, VI.Google Scholar
30 MS notes and diagrams in the possession of Mme Germaine Barraqué.Google Scholar
31 ‘Beethoven’, 178–9.Google Scholar
32 ‘Rythme et développement’, 70.Google Scholar
33 Composition plans and sketches for … au delà du hasard, in the possession of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (uncatalogued); for an explanation of the mathematical basis of this procedure, see André Riotte, ‘Jean Barraqué ou le dépassement du combinatoire’, in Dossier Jean Barraqué (Paris, 1974).Google Scholar
34 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar
35 Cited in G. W. Hopkins, ‘Jean Barraqué’, Musical Times, cvii (1966), 952: ‘une musique parfaitement incompréhensible’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
36 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar
37 Ibid.Google Scholar
38 Cf. G. W. Hopkins, op. cit.Google Scholar
39 See, for example, the series of musical analyses Barraqué published between 1952 and 1957 in Le guide du concert et du disque.Google Scholar
40 ‘Beethoven’, 303–4.Google Scholar
41 Apart from the unpublished Webern analysis already referred to and some partial analyses, I have traced only two other examples – the analytical notes on Berg's Violin Concerto appearing in Le guide du concert et du disque (7 January 1955, p. 495), and the Encyclopédie Larousse de la musique (Paris, 1957), i, 604.Google Scholar
42 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar
43 Cf. ‘Beethoven’, 203–4; also ‘Rythme et développement’, 63–4.Google Scholar
44 Author's notes from the composer's dictation (1965).Google Scholar
45 Composition plans and sketches for Sonate, in the possession of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (uncatalogued).Google Scholar
46 From the final bar on p. 25 to the first bar on p. 28 in the Bruzzichelli edition (Florence, 1965).Google Scholar
47 Radio interview with Florence Mothe.Google Scholar
48 Composition plans and sketches for Sonate.Google Scholar
49 Ibid.Google Scholar
50 Ibid.Google Scholar
51 Ibid.Google Scholar
52 Ibid.Google Scholar
53 By Yvonne Loriod on Vega C 30 A 180.Google Scholar
54 In the possession of Aldo Bruzzichelli – Editore, Florence.Google Scholar
55 Jean Barraqué, Sonate (Florence, 1965).Google Scholar
56 By Claude Helffer on Valois MB 952 and by Roger Woodward on EMI EMD 5511, the latter now available separately on Unicorn UNS 263.Google Scholar
57 In the possession of Mr Roger Woodward.Google Scholar