Piano Sonata (Barraqué)

In performance, however, the overall impact is quite different from anything of Boulez, and has often been claimed (e.g. by Hodeir (1961)), to be akin in spirit to the late sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven.

Paul Griffiths has written of the music of the sonata: "contrasts of themes or keys are replaced by other polarities, in particular between perceptions of notes as sounds (acontextual, as if heard alone) and as tones (part of the unfolding of a serial form), between freedom and fixity in the registral placing of notes, between pulsed and pulseless rhythm and between sound and silence.

"[3] Herbert Henck [de] has also noted: "The overall structure was based on juxtaposing a fast movement with a slow one of equal weight.

The piece closed in unison in a mediating tempo with a twelve-tone row, whose basic form determined the pitch structure of the whole work.

It was not given its first performance in public until 24 April 1967, when the Danish pianist Elisabeth Klein played it in a recital in Copenhagen, seemingly unaware that she was in fact giving the world première.