Portraits of a Sonata

Abstract

Travelling to Paris in September 1964, the French Government having enabled me to present myself at the Conservatoire as a prospective pupil of Messiaen, I brought with me the ambition to meet Jean Barraque. He was, above all else, the composer of a Sonata, to a recording of which I had listened repeatedly, intently, and with an overwhelming apprehension of living greatness. If music meant anything today, only here was that meaning fully grasped, and it was to a like ideal that my own work falteringly aspired.