Herbert Henck JEAN BARRAQUÉ Sonate pour piano

"Whole slabs of sound crumble and vanish between the all-engulfing ocean of silence, until only the twelve notes of the row remain, and even those are plucked off, one by one." André Hodeir's poetic characterization of Barraqué's Sonate as a work in which music finally loses an heroic battle against encroaching silence is better-known, perhaps, than the piece itself. Barraqué's Sonata has remained one of the toughest pianistic challenges in modern composition, a much-discussed and seldom played piece. With its oblique trajectory and staggered dying fall, its asymmetric and sometimes apparently irrational rhythms, and its buried or "negative" tone-rows, it remains a veritable Matterhorn of abstraction. Only a handful of pianists have faced up to it, among them Yvonne Loriod, Claude Helffer and Roger Woodward – whose 1972 recording of the sonata was considered, for a very long time, to be as far as any interpreter could get with this intentionally recalcitrant, secretive material. Musicologist Richard Toop has drawn attention to Barraqué's sympathy for Debussy's standpoint on the question of musical accessibility: "Music should really have been a hermetic science, hedged around by texts whose interpretation would be so long and difficult as to surely discourage that troop of people who make use of music as nonchalantly as one uses a pocket handkerchief."

"The Sonata defies real analysis,”  Hodeir had insisted in 1961, "It is unclassifiable, incomparable and, to some degree, still incommunicable." And yet even then, a handful of players had a sense of its worth. Composer Bill Hopkins was smitten by the Sonata, and listened to it "repeatedly, intently, with an overwhelming apprehension of living greatness. If music meant anything today, only here was that meaning fully grasped..." Barraqué himself was prepared to wait for these sentiments to be expressed more universally, estimating, in Propos Impromptu, that "it will take fifty years to establish if I am the musician others – including myself – think I am." His early death in 1973, at the age of 45, left his most ambitious undertaking, the sprawling cycle La Mort de Virgile, uncompleted, and deprived him of the opportunity to witness the beginnings of a revival of interest in his work, when the Piano Sonata would repeatedly be compared with the Boulez sonatas and with Beethoven's "Hammerklavier"  sonata op. 106.