History, many thought and hoped after World War II, could start afresh. Jean Barraqué knew it could not. With his deep sense that so much malignity could not be simply disavowed, and with his equally thorough awareness that the greatest masters (Bach, Beethoven and Debussy in the past) could comprehensively remake not only music but humanity's inner life, he knew what he had to do: discover, in and through the void, grandiloquence.

It was a creative task he could not accomplish without the self-destructiveness that alienated all but a handful of close friends, and that led him to his death at the age of forty-five. Six scores, only, remained, together with a fragment of electronic music. But those scores do, indeed, remain. As time proceeds they gather more and more weight into themselves. Or they go on, slowly and steadily, revealing what they are.

That they do so is due in large measure to the patience, care and resolve of Rose-Marie Janzen, who was one of those few who stood by the composer, who safeguarded his musical materials after his death, and who formed the Association Jean Barraqué to protect those materials and his music's interests. To her is owed far more than the dedication of this book. She provid ed access to the Association's archives, use of interviews she had recorded in shorthand with many people who knew the composer, contacts with others, permission to consult reserved documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France—even accommodation, in a garret at the top of her apartment building, overlooking the rooftops of the Latin Quarter.