Before "Le Marteau", Boulez had established a reputation as the composer of modernist and serialist works such as "Structures I", "Polyphonie X", as well as his infamously "unplayable" Second Piano Sonata . "Le Marteau" was first written as a six-movement composition between 1953 and 1954, and was published in that form in the latter year, "imprimée pour le festival de musique, 1954, Donaueschingen" (though in the end it was not performed there) in a photographic reproduction of the composer's manuscript by Universal Edition, given the catalog number UE 12362.