Jean Barraqué

Jean-Henri-Alphonse Barraqué (January 17, 1928 – August 17, 1973) was a French composer and writer on music who developed an individual form of serialism which is displayed in a small output.

Barraqué was born in Puteaux, Hauts-de-Seine. The family moved to Paris in 1931. He studied in Paris with Jean Langlais and Olivier Messiaen and, through Messiaen, became interested in serialism. After completing his Piano Sonata in 1952, he suppressed or destroyed his earlier works. A book published by the French music critic André Hodeir, titled Since Debussy, created controversy around Barraqué by claiming this work as perhaps the finest piano sonata since Beethoven. As the work had still not been publicly performed, and only two other works by him had at this time, the extravagant claims made for Barraqué in this book were received with some scepticism. Whilst with hindsight it is clear that Hodeir had accurately perceived the exceptional features of Barraqué's music—notably its searing Romantic intensity, which distinguishes it from the contemporaneous works of Boulez or .

As Paul Griffiths' biography clarified, Boulez had in fact attempted to get the Barraqué Piano Sonata performed for some years after it was finished. Barraqué's music was published starting in 1963 by the Florentine businessman Aldo Bruzzichelli, who provided much-needed material assistance for the composer, but whose promotion could not perhaps compete with that of the better known Universal Edition in Vienna who published Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen. In any event, Barraqué did not obtain ready access to the better-known new music festivals and concert series until much later than they.

Barraqué was involved in a car accident in 1964, and his apartment was destroyed by fire in November 1968. He suffered from bad health for much of his life. Nevertheless, his death in Paris in August 1973, at the age of 45, was sudden and unexpected, and he appeared to have resumed serious work on a number of larger compositions from the Death of Virgil cycle.

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