Jean Barraqué was born 17 January 1928 in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine, France), the only son of two shopkeepers, Grat Barraqué (1898-1975) and Germaine Barraqué, née Millet (1903-1987). In 1940, he enrolled in La Maîtrise de Notre-Dame, part of Paris’ diocesan school system. There, he discovered Schubert’s Symphony No. 8, the Unfinished Symphony. Its emotional impact on him was such that he decided to become a composer. As a student at the Lycée Condorcet, where he remained until 1947, he intended to join the priesthood, found a second family with Maurice Beerblock and his entourage, and fell in love with Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. In 1947, however, he experienced a nervous breakdown and was sent to Solesmes Abbey to recover, preventing him from sitting for his baccalaureate.

He studied piano using the Jaëll Method, and then went on to study harmony, counterpoint, and fugue with Jean Langlais, who introduced him to the treatises of Théodore Dubois, Marcel Dupré, and Vincent d’Indy. In the autumn of 1948, Barraqué audited a class with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris. There, he developed friendships with Michel Fano, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Sylvio Lacharité, among others – and would go on to meet Pierre Boulez and John Cage, who presented Sonatas and interludes at the Conservatoire in 1949. In 1952-1953, he participated in a course with the Groupe de recherches de musique concrète, during which he composed an Étude for magnetic tape.

In the 1950s, Barraqué taught for the Jeunesses musicales de France, took part in a monthly broadcast titled “Jeune Musique”, for which André Hodeir was the editor in chief, and wrote a “Musical Analysis Guide and various analyses of major works in the repertory for Le Guide du concert while teaching private classes, which, from 1956 to 1960, became group courses in musical analysis.

In 1952, he completed Sonate, which Yvonne Loriod recorded in 1959, but which would not premiere in concert until 1967, in Copenhagen. Meeting Michel Foucault opened new horizons for him, including the poetry of Nietzsche, which he set to music in Séquence, along with Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, with commentary written in that same period by Maurice Blanchot. After Séquence, which premiered as part of a concert series at the Domaine musical in 1956 (the work was revisited in Hamburg in 1957, conducted by Bruno Maderna), and in the wake of his dramatic break with Foucault, Barraqué drew up an outline of The Death of Virgil, a vast cycle of pieces based on Broch’s novel, to which he intended to devote the rest of his life, and from which emerged such works as Le Temps restitué, …au-delà du hasard, Chant après chant, as well as several drafts, Discours, Lysanias, Portiques du feu, Hymnes à Plotia, and Arraché de… commentaire en forme de lecture du “Temps restitué,” which he often abandoned after a few measures.

Between 1957 and 1959, Barraqué worked on two dramatic composition projects with Jean Thibaudeau and Jacques Polieri, with whom he studied Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound. After another breakdown in September 1958, he was hospitalized on many occasions throughout the 1960s. In 1961, with support from Olivier Messiaen, Barraqué was appointed a philosophy post with the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) under the direction of Étienne Souriau (a post he held until 1970). He published Debussy the following year, which was translated into several languages and which Varèse praised as “a work written with love.”

Concerto, also unfinished, premiered in London in 1968, conducted by Gilbert Amy. Following an explosion and a fire in his apartment that required him to move several times, spending months with friends or in hotels, Barraqué lost what he had composed for Portiques du feu. In 1969, he began work on a lyrical drama modelled on Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, titled L’Homme couché, which was also based on The Death of Virgil, writing out its literary themes. Illness and the “moral damages” he was ordered to pay by the High Court of Paris to the estate of Erik Satie because of what he had written about the composer in Debussy, and his failure to secure a position as professor of analysis at the Conservatoire national de musique de Paris made 1971 a particularly difficult year for Barraqué. In 1973, he was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre national du mérite. He died of hemiplegia on 17 August 1973 at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris.