The Sonate pour violon seul marks an important addition to Jean Barraqué’s small body of works. The piece, which dates from 1949, stands at an aesthetic as well as an ideological watershed in the French composer’s life. The sonata will be premiered by Carolin Widmann on 30 november in Paris.
For a long time, Jean Barraqué’s œuvre comprised only seven works including a Piano Sonata, an Etude for tape, Séquence for voice and instrumental ensemble and a Concerto for clarinet and vibraphone. But above all, Barraqué was the composer of Der Tod des Vergil to texts by Hermann Broch, an extensive cycle begun in March 1956, the completion of which was prevented by illness and his early death. “… the work will never be completed. And I want it to remain unfinished, that only death completes it – or, more precisely, leaves it incomplete – that after it, other parallel works, marginal, circular, will result from this creative process.” Based on “Feuer – Der Abstieg”, the second section of Broch’s novel, in which the dying author of The Aeneid resists the temptation to burn his work, the stylistically austere and lavish works ... au-delà du hasard, Chant après chant and Le Temps restitué were created. There, in the face of death, the strange concord between the work and its destruction, between sound and total silence, unfolds. To approach this moment and to attempt to describe it is the task of a creation which is destined to decay or ashes.
Barraqué read Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard and Jean Genet, but also Nietzsche, whose works he had become acquainted with in the 1950s through Michel Foucault. And in Hermann Broch’s works he recognised most of his own themes: love, genius, revenge, rebellion, incest, friendship, homosexuality, sadism, talent, creative and moral rigour, solitude, vigil, sleep, saintliness, mortal illness, madness … They all find their expression in L’Homme couché, an operatic project which didn’t get any further than a vague outline, based on the third act of Tristan und Isolde.
Striving to achieve the absolute, Barraqué defined music in the following terms: “It is drama, it is upheaval, it is death. It is an out-and-out game, the trembling to suicide. If the music is not that, if it is not an excess to the limits, then it is nothing.” All work is tragic which must invent its own destiny, and where the form, open, does not rely upon a pre-established model. Two alternatives therefore become apparent: either Beethoven or Debussy. Either the development by means of exclusion in the 5th Symphony when the motif at the centre of the first movement, stripped bare and reduced to almost nothing, expresses the fear of being divided up; or indeed La Mer, its phases of oblivion, its moments of coagulation, its static circling all blurring the form a priori.
A composer of serial music, uncompromising, of quick-tempered intensity, working towards heights, unreceptive to comfort and to consolation, Barraqué in his deductive art is seeking a lyrical self-interpretation, an ethic and an aesthetic of existence, an illumination of life which synthesises the sound texture, his destiny and the necessity for a moral which articulates this: “I believe that music ... finally I’m going to use a very harsh term – prevents one from becoming a swine.” Barraqué’s tonal language, in other words, indeed follows the rules, the values and principles of serial music, but also stands for asceticism, testing, work for its own sake, for the ways reached through his authority and, even more, determined through the freedom of the modern human condition.
The edition of the Sonate pour violon seul, which has lain unpublished for a long time, now reveals the premises of an art of this kind. Composed in April 1949, when Barraqué was a student in Messiaen’s class at the Paris Conservatoire, this Sonata was his first serial work. At the Lycée Condorcet, where he completed his general education, Barraqué, adopting the faith of his mother and attracted by an inclination towards mysticism, decided to become a priest. In March 1949 he also composed an Ecce videmus Eum for unaccompanied choir, a sacred anthem in a classical tonal language. But just a month later, in the Sonate pour violon seul, in its reflections in the three movements and in its final note which is identical to the beginning, reflection of the unity, a gesture at the same time marking a turning away from tonality and its themes, harmonies and expressions, and a change of direction towards atheism. The conversion from a divine absolute to a musical absolute, serialism, leads to priestly conduct by the composer, expressed in a letter to Pierre Boulez in 1952: “At the end of the day, we know-it-alls! with our creation, are we not the people of the deepest faith, why not say the great mystics of our time? If I answer ‘yes’, I know then that we have not advanced one step further.”
Laurent Feneyrou
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson)
from [t]akte 2/2009
A mystic of our time. Jean Barraqué’s Sonate pour violon seul
Jean Barraqué
Sonate pour violon seul (1949)
First performance: 30.11.2009 Paris (Festival d’Automne), Carolin Widmann (violin)
First edition: Bärenreiter-Verlag. Edited by Laurent Feneyrou. To be published in November 2009.