Paul Griffiths' book on Jean Barraqué reviewed

Key facts

• Jean Barraqué was a 20th-century composer whose work remains largely unknown.
• He lost his Catholic faith, which he described as a catastrophe.
• He declared his art would be realized in 'the isolated fullness of rigorous despair without compromise, without redemption, without happiness (but in hell).'
• His atheism isolated him, including a failed relationship with Michel Foucault.
• Foucault introduced him to Nietzsche's poems and Hermann Broch's 'The Death of Virgil.'
• Barraqué studied under Olivier Messiaen and was briefly friends with Pierre Boulez.
• He chose dodecaphonic technique for its complexity serving sensitivity.
• His Piano Sonata (1952) rivaled Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' Sonata op. 106.
• He was the first to use silence as an essential element of musical composition.
• Later works introduced 'proliferating series' like cancer, symbolizing mortal risk.
• He said in 1969, 'To be a composer is to be a creator; and creation is death.'
• Pierre Souvtchinsky wrote that 'disease executed what Barraqué perhaps did not dare: stop his life.'
• Olivier Messiaen said Barraqué 'deserves the most total attention.'
• His writings on Debussy and Beethoven remain exemplary.