Les 100 Facettes de Mr. Diamonds - Volume 1 : Lumineux (French Edition)

It is my genuine hope that something of her passion for knowledge and academic enquiry has rubbed off on me during our work on this project. My heartfelt thanks go out also to the other committee members: Richard Kurth and Dr. Their perspicacity, both in regards to this project and in their own work, sets a high standard that I have tried to emulate to the best of my ability. Their intellectual fingerprints are discernable on virtually every page of this work.

A sincere word of gratitude must also go to Dr. Sima Godfrey and Dr. John Roeder, whose thoughtful reading of the dissertation provided fresh insights. James McCalla's probing questions helped me to clarify much that was once fuzzy, and have opened up to me new horizons for continued work on Debussy's relationship with nineteenth-century French literature. Finally, I must thank my family, especially my wife Emily, who was patient, loving and supportive in difficult times and who celebrated with me in times of joy. To my children Megan and Hayden, this project has often been a greedy third sibling that took more than its fair share of my time.

Their innocence and laughter helped me to put some of the more frustrating days of research into perspective. As for the rest of my family, they have supported me emotionally and financially for many years. Without their enduring patience, this project would have been unthinkable. It is one that is especially surprising from the pen of Claude Debussy , a composer whose debt to the poetry of the Symbolist movement has been so firmly ensconced in conventional wisdom that it hardly receives any critical reflection these days.

A more typical epigraph would have been Walter Pater's dictum that "all art aspires to the condition of music" or Paul Verlaine's "de la musique avant toute chose," or even an appeal to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk; something that really plays up the happy concordance of the arts in the French fin-de-siecle. Yet I begin here because I think that Debussy has hit upon something important about the relationship between music and poetry, something that has gone largely overlooked both in Debussy's case in particular, and in music-and-text relationships in general.

This is the tension between music and language, a tension that gets progressively more intense as the two arts are brought into closer contact. Yet, at the same time, there is the fear that, if pushed too far, this resonance becomes mere imitation; that the music loses itself in the process. It is this mutual attraction and its concomitant anxiety, more than a happy 1 Debussy, Correspondence, ed.

Francois Lesure and Denis Herlin Paris: Editions Gallimard, , See Music and Poetry: University of California Press, By , when Debussy wrote the letter quoted above, he had already composed well over 60 songs more than two-thirds of his total output and substantial portions of two operas, the abandoned Rodrigue et Chimene and Pelleas et Melisande, as well as the prize cantatas written for the Prix de Rome competitions. He had set a considerable number of poems by some of the most important French poets of the recent past, including Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Theodore de Banville, a prominent Parnassian poet.

The vast majority of his instrumental music, including the most important pieces save the Prelude a Vapres-midi d'un faune was yet to be written. The remaining years of Debussy's life would see an increasing inability to complete vocal works, an affliction from which his instrumental works seem relatively immune. Among the projects contemplated but abandoned, notable examples include dramatic projects on texts by various prominent writers: The two major opera projects on Poe texts, Le diable dans le beffroi and La chute de la maison Usher both remained unfinished at Debussy's death.

His inability to complete these works in particular, which he had contemplated for at least 25 years, speaks to an increasing difficulty he had in finding a suitable music to set alongside these texts. Why would a composer who had been writing music in response to poetic texts for the bulk of his early career hold such a dim view of the possibility that music and text could or even should be in mutual accord? And why would his output, which until that point had consisted almost entirely of vocal music, shift to include an increasing number of instrumental 3 works that refer to text only obliquely, if at all?

The answer, I think, involves Debussy's growing awareness of the complexities of music and text relationships, and the increasing pressure he put on himself to make his musical responses reflect this situation. Tensions between music and poetry characterize Debussy's later writings. His choice of blank verse or a kind of rhythmical prose in his own texts for Proses lyriques was motivated by a belief that prose was more suitable than verse for settings as song. Debussy held this view, more or less intact, for the rest of his life.

Fifteen years later, responding to an enquete by Ferdinand Divoire, he lays out his ideas on the subject: They can only spoil it Truly beautiful poems, we must not exaggerate, there are not many of these. Who writes them these days? But when one does find them, it is better not to meddle with them. Henri de Regnier, who writes full, classic poetry, may not be set to music. And can you envison music setting the verse of Racine or Corneille? Real poetry has its own rhythm, which is rather difficult for us [to set musically]. It is very difficult to follow well, to "veneer" the rhythms while still preserving one's inspiration.

If one fabricates, if one is content with a work of juxtaposition [of the two arts], evidently this is not difficult, but then it is not worth the trouble. The first is that a composer must understand the poetry that he intends to set. In support of this point, Debussy singles out Schumann's settings of Heine that, in his opinion, fail to capture the inherent irony of the texts, a quality related mostly to the semantic dimension of the poems.

The second and possibly more important point to emerge from the passage deals with the sonorous elements of poetry. For Debussy, it is the rhythm of the poetry—the materiality of its words, the way that they sound—rather than 3 Debussy, Corn, Letter to Louys, 10 April Gallimard, , Les vrais beaux vers, il ne faut pas exagerer, il n'y en a pas tant que 9a. Qui en fait aujourd'hui? Mais quand il s'en trouve, il vaut mieux ne pas y toucher.

Henri de Regnier, qui fait des vers pleins, classiques, ne peut pas etre mis en musique. Et voyez-vous de la musique sur des vers de Racine ou de Corneille? Les vrais vers ont un rythme propre qui est plutot genant pour nous Si on fait de la fabrication, si on se contente d'un travail de juxtaposition, evidemment ce n'est pas difficile, mais alors ce n'est pas la peine. By rhythm, of course, Debussy means much more than just the poem's meter, but also the rhythm created by rhyme that operates inside the verses themselves.

The difficulty comes in creating a counterpoint of music and poetry that both allows the original sonorous material of the poem to speak and preserves the inspiration of the composer. This suggests that in song, for Debussy at least, the music should not follow the poem too closely for fear of becoming its mimetic echo, a "bad pun" of the poetic text. Likewise, the music cannot simply be unrelated to the poem, a "juxtaposition" of the two arts.

Instead, Debussy seems to argue for an interactive model of music and text relationships in which the music and the poem read across one another, configure and reconfigure their shared space. This model maintains a certain level of independence for both art forms and, in the process, creates a "polyphonic" set of meanings for the work: The relationship that Debussy advocates between music and poetry in this and other late essays shows a different side of his aesthetic than the image of the composer as erstwhile symbolist poet that some studies have tried to put forward.

It seems no coincidence that the increase in instrumental music and Debussy's struggle to complete various texted works later in his career both follow a period of relatively close personal contact with many members of the Parisian literary milieu, and with the poetry and aesthetic of Stephane Mallarme — in particular. Certainly, the 5 difficulties he experienced during the composition of Pelleas et Melisande played a role in this, as did the surprising popularity of the Prelude a L'apres-midi d'un faune, the premiere of which in December opened up both new compositional possibilities and new sources of income for Debussy.

His close personal association with figures of Parisian literary scene also cooled noticeably during this time, with the exception of his good friend Pierre Louys. He stopped attending the mardi gatherings of Mallarme, where he had been an occasional guest since Mallarme was one of the first to suggest that Wagner's genius was not an example that French artists ought to follow.

Debussy, whose enthusiasm for Wagner in the late s is well-known, seems to have heeded this call in the early s. The culmination of this may well be the Prelude, which can bee seen as a re-writing of Tristan that recasts both its emotional power from emphatic desire to limpid sensuality and its harmonic language. It is no coincidence that Debussy's increasing difficulty with texts occurs after his closest personal and artistic contact with Mallarme. Mallarme was, with the possible exception of Verlaine, the most important French poet of his generation, rising to prominence first as the head of the Decadents in the wake of Joris Karl Huysmans' novel A rebours, and as a major figure in the Symbolist movement.

His passion for the supremacy of verse and the stubborn complexity of his poetry and critical writings drew young writers and artists to his humble home on the Rue de Rome, where Mallarme held forth on a wide range of topics. Central among these was the relationship 5 Rosemary Lloyd has summarized the main points of Debussy's personal contact with Mallarme.

Princeton University Press, , This is detailed by Guy Michaud, Mallarme, trans. New York University Press, , He advocated a return to a pure language, one set apart from the common speech and writing of the world. In response to the Gesamtkunsrwerk, Mallarme offered Le Livre, his unfinished Great Work, which would complete the synthesis of the arts begun by Wagner.

Le Livre was to be a work that would supplant music, theater and dance, and distill their essences into verse. If Debussy was initially drawn into Mallarme's sphere in search of an alternative to the conservative aesthetic of the Conservatoire and the Academie, he would have found it there in spades.

In both Mallarme's poetry and critical writings, Debussy would have heard a unique perspective, one whose deep respect for the traditions of French verse was tempered with a quiet contempt for anything derivative or commercial. Debussy had access to these views in the numerous essays that Mallarme published in Parisian journals from through , the substance of which was often incorporated into the mardi speeches. Debussy also had a personal friendship with the poet beyond the mardi gatherings, and one can only imagine the substance of their conversations.

Debussy, Mallarme and Pierre Louys were frequently found together at various artistic events: Gervais, performances at the Concerts Lamoureux, even the premiere of Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande. Debussy and Mallarme even collaborated on a proposed theatrical production of "L'apres-midi d'un faune" in late or early that was the genesis of Debussy's Prelude J It would seem, in light of this, that Debussy had ample opportunity to absorb Mallarme's aesthetic, to become another acolyte in Mallarme's circle like Paul Valery whose 7 Mallarme was planning a theatrical performance of "L'apres-midi d'un faune" at the Theatre d'Art in Paris.

Impressed by a recent performance of Debussy's Cinq poemes de Charles Baudelaire, Mallarme arranged to meet Debussy and engage him to write the necessary incidental music. The collaboration was short-lived, but the Prelude was certainly conceived during this meeting in some form. Klincksieck, , Yet this did not happen. Despite their close contact, Debussy made no settings of Mallarme texts at this time the unpublished setting of Apparition in significantly predates Debussy's personal contact with the poet. This is particularly surprising in light of the regularity with which Debussy set prominent poets like Verlaine, Banville and Baudelaire.

Even the Prelude a I'apres-midi d'un faune does not engage a Mallarme text directly, but stands in opposition to it. Although several scholars have attempted to line up particular passages of the poem with particular measures of the music, there is no general agreement on how, or even if, the Prelude responds to the text of Mallarme's poem rather than its meaning or idea. If Debussy considered writing songs on any other Mallarme text, no evidence of these compositions has survived. It would seem then that Debussy's increased interest in instrumental music, and his growing difficultly in producing texted work, results in part at least from a desire to interrogate the nature of music itself, to purify it from derivative elements of various kinds.

This also throws into sharp relief Debussy's decision, some twenty years later, to return to Mallarme's poetry. Perhaps his musical language had progressed to the point where he felt ready to take on the challenge posed by Mallarme, that he had achieved a purity of expression that measured up to Mallarme's similar effort in verse.

These songs are the only Mallarme settings published during the composer's lifetime. They also mark a final break with text: Mallarme is only rarely mentioned by Debussy, and the few instances where the poet's name does emerge 8 are ambiguous. The first significant mention of Mallarme in Debussy's correspondence comes from a letter to Ernest Chausson.

Here, Debussy offers a criticism of Chausson's Le roi Arlhus: One thing that I would like to see you lose is your preoccupation with the "underpinnings"; let me explain: I think that we have been led in this, as always, by the same R. Wagner, and that too often we dream of the frame before having the painting, and sometimes the richness of this frame makes us overlook the mediocrity of the ideal I'm not talking about cases where magnificent inner parts dress up ideas, like cheap dolls!

The images he invokes to support his point—the ornate frame that distracts from the poor quality of the painting, the cheap doll gussied up in fancy clothing, and the wooden idol decorated with jewels—all point to a lack in the quality of the main thing that cannot be recompensed by clever marketing. When Debussy invokes Mallarme and Bach in support of his point, the situation becomes much more complicated. Bach is clearly praised here as an example of a composer whose "frame" never conceals a second-rate idea. Rather, it is the inherent quality of the musical idea the "picture" that the "underpinnings" work to display clearly.

The treatment of Mallarme is less certain. The way that the sentence is constructed seems to set up a parallel between Bach and Mallarme as two examples of artists who always have, the "picture" 8 Debussy, Corr. Wagner, et que trop souvent nous songeons au cadre avant d'avoir le tableau, et quelquefois la richesse de celui-ci nous fait passer sur I'indigence de I'idee!

Je ne parle pas du cas, ou des dessous magnifiques habillent des idees, comparables a des poupees de treize sous! But what Debussy actually says about Mallarme works against this: Some, like Rosemary Lloyd, contend that the letter shows Debussy's detailed understanding of and sympathy for Mallarme's aesthetic. Others, like Jean-Michel Nectoux, see the letter as a rejection of Mallarme's late style in favor of his earlier poetry.

I cannot get past the phrase "poverty of symbol" which, to my mind, can not be a term of praise. Mallarme's earlier works, which include all the poems for which Debussy crafted a musical response, are not at issue here, and nowhere does Debussy speak ill of the early works. At issue here, I think, are the divergent notions of the word "idea" in Debussy's and Mallarme's thinking. For Debussy, the idea of a composition is reducible to an actual musical line, which ought to be expressed according to its own inherent qualities, and not subjected to an external rigorous technique, no matter how beautiful the result.

Elsewhere, Debussy writes, "A musical idea contains its own harmony or at least that's my opinion ; without this, y "Derniers sonnets" is the subtitle of the ninth book of Mallarme's Poesies It contains the sonnets "Le vierge, le vivace et Ie bel aujourd'hui," "Quand l'ombre menca," "Victorieusement fui le suicide beau," the Sonnet enyx, "Mes bousquins refermes sur le nom de Paphos," "Quelle soie aux baumes de temps," "Tout orgueil fume-t-il du soir," "Surgi de la croupe et du bond," "Une dentelle s'abolit," "M'introduire dans ton histoire" and the Hommages to Poe and Wagner.

You know how little I like that parasitic development, which has for too long served the glory of Masters. We need to replace this development with a more rigorous selection of ideas, a line more conscious of the value of those ideas on the orchestral and ornamental front, and a line above all that allows the ideas to breathe, as they are overwhelmed so often under the richness or the banality of the r 14 frame.

Here, as before, the contrast of the idea and its expression "the frame" is drawn. Debussy's aversion to the German symphonic tradition as an example for French composers to follow is largely rooted in that tradition's predilection for developmental procedures that are applied indiscriminately to a diverse group of musical themes, rather than bom of an inner necessity. Debussy seems to locate this same fault in Mallarme's late sonnets. For Mallarme, the idea is not immediately readable in the work itself, but located beyond the work, in the realization that the work is ultimately about nothing other than its own processes, revealing the essential nothingness of the universe.

The "principal piece or nothing" at the center of Mallarme's late poems is therefore, for the poet, precisely the point. So for Mallarme, the distinction that Debussy makes between the frame and the idea is irrelevant, since the poem's meaning cannot be abstracted from the particular circumstances of 1 2 Debussy, Corr, In other words, it is not simply what the poem means, but how the poem means that is crucial. For if the poem springs forth sui generis from the relationships inherent in language itself, then there should be no distinction possible.

The only difference is that where Debussy locates the idea as a physical and acoustical reality, Mallarme's idea is a metaphysical absence that is expressed through verse. It is not surprising that Debussy does not see this aspect of Mallarme, for it was given formal expression mainly in the critical work of the twentieth century. For Debussy, in the poems of Mallarme's mature style, the means of expression do not find resonance with the subject matter of the poem itself: What Debussy did not see, or did not value in Mallarme, was the poet's increasing abstraction from reality in the later works, his firm belief that the idea of a poem could in fact be a significant nothing rather than a significant something.

Vocabulaire anglais-français à l'intention des apprenants avancés

Shortly after Debussy had set the Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme, he discovered that the copyright for these texts rested with Edmond Bonniot, Mallarme's son in law. Writing to obtain permission to publish these settings, Debussy writes: I have piously conserved the most fervent admiration for the one who was "our master" He was, — without knowing it perhaps, —a considerable influence on the very quiet musician that I was in the era when he did me the honor of receiving me into his home.

And this fervor grows as I recall in my memory 1 6 For instance, take the poem "Brise marine" page 60 of the present study. The total significance of the poem is neither the failure of the poet to write poetry that the semantic dimension of the poem describes, nor the potential mastery of language that the play of letters and phonemes enacts, but a combination of these two elements that oscillate in the mind and ear of the reader.

See "The Double Session," These memories, among many others, will entitle me, I hope, to ask you to facilitate the publication of these three songs? Letters to Jacques Durand suggest that he was not amused by the situation, and may have been slightly offended at having to ask permission to publish these settings: Bonniot before receiving your letter, — which is not important, and will never change my position vis-a-vis the solitary Mallarme!

If Mallarme was an enduring influence on Debussy after the composition of the Prelude, he seems to have kept this fact to himself. This view is supported by the recollections of Robert Godet, a close friend and confidant of Debussy. Did he [Debussy] spend much time with the Symbolists? Was he enthusiastic about Impressionism? The Debussy we knew never mentioned a word about such things, any more than he did about his visits to Mallarme's salon, which were perhaps not as frequent or as fruitful as is generally made out.

One remembers only the respectful but amused look in his eye when he used to see the poet concentrating on the exploits of the Lamoureux Orchestra, and noting them down instantly in a little book whose pages were black with penciled jottings. His remarks here do not imply any disdain on Debussy's part for Mallarme's poetry, but merely that his attendance at Mallarme's salon and its influence on his musical style needs careful 1 8 Debussy, Corr.

Letter to Edmond Bonnoit, 7 August II eut, — sans le savoir peut-etre, — une considerable influence sur le tres silencieux musicien que j'etais a l'epoque ou il me faisait 1'honneur de me recevoir chez lui. Et cette ferveur s'augmente de reconnaissance au souvenir de son bienveillant accueil a la musique pour L 'apres-midi d'un faune. Ces souvenirs, parmi tant d'autres, m'autoriseront je Pespere a vous demander de me faciliter 1'edition de ces trois melodies? Letter to Durand, 8 August Faber and Faber, The absence of Mallarme from Debussy's critical writings supports Godet's point about the composer's tight-lipped stance on these issues.

In light of this, it is likely that Mallarme's influence on Debussy has been overstated by those who, desperate to locate Debussy's break with musical convention, have sought to make him a "figure" of Mallarme: This is the position taken by Laurence Berman, who argues that Debussy, unable to deal adequately with Mallarme's poetry during the composition of the Prelude a L 'apres-midi d'un faune, was finally able to match the poet's complexity in Jeux. The desire to see Debussy through a Mallarmean lens has thus coloured the critical appreciation of his music from its beginnings.

D E B U S S Y Many critics have tried to show that Debussy's aesthetic was either molded in imitation of Mallarme, or at least shares an exceptionally close similarity to his works. Paul Dukas was one of the earliest critics to make this connection when he claimed that it "was the writers, and not the musicians, who exerted the strongest influence on Debussy. Nevertheless, his assertion and many others like it have found their way into the musicological consciousness regarding Debussy.

This sentiment is continued in the work of Stefan Jarocinski, who claims that Debussy's attendance at Mallarme's mardis was particularly important to the development of his aesthetic. He sees Debussy's contact with Mallarme and with the Symbolists in general as positive in the sense that Debussy's musical language was derived from "an absolute submission of music to a text.

He argues that Debussy found musical correspondences for these categories, with the precepts of traditional harmony being equated with semantic meaning and the use of sound for its own sake as a symbol evoking a hidden idea. Instead, he sees merely a juxtaposition of elements, an alternation between passages driven by semantics and those driven by sound itself, rather than a consistent counterpoint of those two elements.

In this, Jarocinsky does not always fully appreciate the intimate relationship between the sound of words and their meaning that is critical to understanding Mallarme's poetry. So when he sets up a similar duality in Debussy's style—where passages of traditional harmony semantic alternate with those conceived as pure sound—he bases his comparison on an incomplete understanding of Mallarme. If Jarocinsky's ideas about the juxtaposition of these elements in 2 4 Quoted in Edward Lockspeiser, Debussy: His Life and Mind, 2 vols.

Cassell, , I, As an interesting aside, Henri Gauthiers-Villars, who wrote under the pseudonym "Wil ly" made essentially the opposite claim: Impressionism and Symbolism, tr. Eulenberg, , Impressionism and Symbolism, Mallarme's entire work is fundamentally concerned with the total integration of everything in poetry, and he accepts no less from himself or others. Francois Lesure has definitively established Debussy's biographical connections with 28 the major figures of literary symbolism in Debussy avant Pelleas, ou les annees symbolistes.

His work completes and corrects many of Jarocinsky's observations, bringing them in line with the existing documentary evidence. Although he offers little in the way of musical analysis, his observations on Debussy's activities during these years give a more balanced picture of Debussy's relationship with Mallarme, one that posits the poet as one potential influence among many. More recently, Mallarme scholar Rosemary Lloyd has pointed out aesthetic similarities in Mallarme and Debussy's thinking that she implicitly attributes to the composer's attendance at Mallarme's mardis.

She goes so far as to write that "the lack of dissonance in the thinking of these two major figures of the late nineteenth century is exceptionally striking. She also notes their respective mistrust of dogmatic theoretical explanations of their respective arts. However, much of her essay is devoted to brief biographical summaries of people whom both Mallarme and Debussy counted as friends or influences, including Pierre Louys, Andre Poniatowski, Verlaine, Henri de Regnier, Baudelaire and Poe.

These vignettes may point future studies in interesting directions, but they add relatively little to understanding how Debussy's music relates to Mallarme's poetry, either in the specific settings of Mallarme texts or more generally. Arthur Wenk's Claude Debussy and the Poets, which includes significant chapters on both Prelude a I 'apres-midi d'un faune and the Trois poemes de Stephane Mallarme , places heavy emphasis on Debussy's formal responses to Mallarme's unusual syntax and grammar. They do not consider the phonetic qualities of Mallarme's poems, the relationship between these phonetic qualities and their "meaning," nor how Debussy's musical setting responds to these elements in particular.

For him, it seems that the function of a song is to frame an enunciation of the poem, and that the semantic and syntactic dimensions of the poem are of primary importance. For example, in his analysis of the song Soupir, Wenk shows all of the digressive clauses in the Mallarme poem and how Debussy's setting performs a "reading" of the syntax of the poem, clarifying the main clauses from those that are parenthetical. He demonstrates Debussy's sensitive reading of Mallarme's grammar, but does not consider Mallarme's prosody, or the ways that Mallarme's poem seems to exist independently inside Debussy's setting.

In order to understand whether there is, indeed, a distinction to be drawn between Debussy's treatment of a poem by Mallarme and one by another poet, we must begin with the fullest understanding of that text and its place in the poet's osuvre. Only then can we be reasonably accurate in describing the various ways that Debussy's music interacts with its text. This level of detail is beyond the scope of Wenk's project, and indeed also beyond the scope of the current one.

Verlaine's poetry, for example, is phonetically dense, and musical, in a way that is appreciably different from Mallarme, and Debussy's settings of Verlaine should probably be re-examined in that light also. Marianne Wheeldon has taken steps toward the approach that I am advocating here.

She calls this analysis "permutational," and attributes her method to Boulez, who in turn took it from Mallarme. Many aspects of Wheeldon's arguments are compelling, especially the sensitive way in which she describes the interaction of the actual musical narrative and the virtual pathways that both poem and music suggest. Her treatment of Mallarme's syntax and the way that it forces the reader to cast forwards and backwards across the text builds on similar ideas in Wenk, and I offer further comments on the poem later on. In the process, she gives the reader real insight into how reading a Mallarme poem is potentially different from one by another poet, and her work shows that Debussy seems aware of this particularly Mallarmean feature.

However, she characterizes Soupir as built from sections that are "musically autonomous and nonteleological, so that the sections do not contribute to an overall contour or dynamic shape. Code examines the relationship between Mallarme and Debussy through "L'apres-midi d'un faune. He then argues that Debussy's Prelude "reads" this virtual book by making corresponding shifts in orchestration in structural places that match, with unusual numerical precision, the "virtual book" that he has uncovered in the poem.

His analysis of Debussy draws several exact parallels between individual measures in the Prelude and specific lines of text in Mallarme's original. By expressly lining up particular measures in the Prelude with passages in the poem, Code's analysis is a more elegant version of the mimetic model that has been used by other writers to align music and verse lines in the Prelude. Although he does not explicitly state it, his idea of a virtual book in the Faun poem seems designed to evoke Le Livre, Mallarme's unfinished "Great Work.

Instead, if Un coup de des is an accurate example of the kind of writing that Le Livre would contain, the actual spacing of the text and its actual pagination would become significant elements, and the virtual elements they imply would not be structures inside the book—these would be explicit—but things external to it, particularly theatre and drama, which Le Livre was intended to replace. Of all of Mallarme's works, "L'apres-midi" stands somewhat apart from Le Livre.

University of California Berkeley A similar argument is presented in an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. See Code, "Hearing Debussy reading Mallarme: In her book Mallarme and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text, Elizabeth McCombie has called for an approach to music and text relationships in Mallarme and Debussy that abandons the notion of imitation.

In its place, she argues for a more flexible approach that is neither properly literary criticism nor musicology, but a "mobile textual approach that is able to reconstruct the particular force of the intermediate ground [between music and literature] and its underlying dialogue of slippages and collusions, while at the same time insisting on the independence of the arts. Mallarme and Debussy are test cases for this language, which is drawn in part from Mallarme's own critical writings and from other sources only tangentially related to the subject, like the works of Boulez, whose debt to both Mallarme and Debussy does not necessarily make his aesthetic relevant to a study of the two.

McCombie's work is strongly influenced by Roger Pearson's homophonic approach to Mallarme's poetry. For this reason, she is sensitive to the phonetic aspects of Mallarme's verse, and particularly to moments where common phonemes unite various key words in some of Mallarme's poems. Unheard Music, Unseen Text Oxford: Clarendon Press, , xvi. In other places, McCombie's observations seem forced, as when she analyses an excerpt from "Herodiade. In the 'Ouverture' d'Herodiade the simultaneous presentation and cancellation of an image and the multiplication of interpretative possibilities surrounding certain words creates an overdetermination of signification: Abolie, et son aile affreuse dans les larmes Du bassin, aboli, qui mire les alarmes, De l'or nu fustigeant l'espace cramoisi, Une Aurore a, plumage heraldique, choisi Notre tour cineraire et sacrificatrice This passage creates points of immobility through magnetic pulls of attraction and repulsion.

The semantic space opened up by the initial act of repression or abolishing 'Abolie' is drowned again by its pursuit of a partner. The feminine 'Abolie' finds its mirroring reflection in the masculine version in line 2. The repetition both fills the emptiness created by the opening, in a matching sonority that has the effect of a double negative, and reiterates the sense of emptiness in a string of negative statements. Finding a masculine equivalent amounts to a reciprocal cancelling-out, yet the partnership gives birth to an overload of reflections in the line-final rhymes 'cramoisi', 'choisi'.

Sound patterns offer the promise of possible thematic centres, refuges from the pull between volume and emptiness. Yet to follow the path suggested by the phonetic patterning is to be misled. They are loci of stabilizing and destabilizing reflection, pools of verbal heterogeneity. The abolished pool is and is not reflecting 'les a' of'aboli e ' 'dans les larmes', mire les a-larmes'. Here, the masculine-feminine pairing of aboli e is certainly relevant to Mallarme's prosody and the excerpt's negative semantic message. The passage can also and more simply be interpreted thus: The gold and crimson of dawn disappear 'abolie' as the sun rises, in a common Mallarmean theme of self-consumption.

Its wing-like streaks are reflected in the pool, where they are also disappearing. This disappearance reflects our own fears about the impermanence of physical reality life, death, etc. This phonetic game is not all-encompassing, nor is it meant to be. When it comes to the actual relationship between Debussy's music and Mallarme's poetry, there are some gaps in McCombie's work. Of the four Debussy songs that set Mallarme poems, she examines only Soupir and Eventail in detail. Instead, when she treats Debussy's music, she prefers to deal with other works not specifically related to Mallarme: La mer, Jeux, and some of the piano Preludes.

Rather than looking for the actual intermediate ground between Debussy and Mallarme, these studies are more concerned with the interaction of music and poetry in general. Yet again there is no particular reason to suggest that the composition of Jeux owes any particular debt biographical, technical or otherwise to Mallarme's poem. It is possible to cite numerous examples of discontinuous musical textures in twentieth-century music that would match up equally well, by McCombie's own criteria, with Un coup de des.

The only possible reason for the comparison of these two works must then rest on the tacit assumption that Berman also makes: In order to find an alternative to the various, essentially mimetic approaches described above, we must strike a balance between understanding what Debussy's setting of a Mallarme poem attempts to do, and how this reads through and across what the original poem attempts to And unless Debussy had seen the original edition of Un coup de des in the journal Cosmopolis—which differs significantly in graphic appearance from Mallarme's intentions—he likely would not have known the poem until at least , when Mallarme's collected works were published.

This requires a detailed understanding of Mallarme's poetry, particularly the ways that it differs from his contemporaries. For this reason, I now turn to Mallarme's works. The breadth and depth of this critical tradition far exceeds the space available in this forum to treat them fully. For this reason, I will only mention those works most relevant to my project.

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Several exegetical studies have shed much light on the question of meaning in Mallarme's oeuvre. Nizet, ; Austin and Mondor, eds. A l l subsequent references to Mallarme's correspondence shall use the abbreviation Corr. An exegesis New Haven: Scriverny Press, ; Mallarme's Prose Poems: He deduces the signification of letters from their use in Mallarme's oeuvre as a whole, with pride of place given to Un coup de des. He then shows how, in various poems, Mallarme reinforces the semantic message of the poems by expressing them through words that contain a conspicuous number of a particular letter or phoneme.

Occasionally, Cohn argues that the letter content of a passage modifies, or even contradicts, its semantic meaning. Cohn's theory of letters is laid out most clearly in Un coup de des: An exegesis, which is an enlargement of his doctoral thesis, but the strategy informs virtually all of his subsequent work on Mallarme. Guy Michaud's Mallarme is organized as a biography but its true value lies in his thoughtful and detailed explications of Mallarme's poems.

More recently, Bertrand Marchal published Lecture de Mallarme, an exegetical study of the major poems, in which he summarizes' much of the work of previous critics like Emile Noulet and A. Marchal's approach is mainly semantic, and he does not generally treat the prosodic elements of the poems as particularly significant. Jean-Pierre Richard's L'univers imaginaire de Mallarme is an intellectual topography of Mallarme's poetry. Reacting against Richard, Jacques Derrida has called into question the very notion of thematic criticism in Mallarme, suggesting instead in "The Double Session" that Mallarme's writing is essentially a-referential; that it sets up a series of intra- and inter-textual networks that constantly refer to other writings Bertrand Marchal, Lecture de Mallarme: Poesies, Igitur, Un coup de des Paris: Edition du Seuil, Robert Greer Cohn has also written extensively on Mallarme's thought.

For him, Mallarme's essential innovation was to modify the Hegelian dialectic to include a fourth pole, which he calls "antisynthesis. Although he believes that there is still a singular absolute meaning in a Mallarme poem as does Richard , Cohn's own tetrapolar schematic comes very close to Derrida's notion of "undecidability" in Mallarme. Although Mallarme's critical essays are usually cited in support of a particular exegetical point in a poem, there are also important studies dedicated to the essays themselves.

A Guide and Commentary explicates the essays collected in Divagations Cohn's work is nearly as difficult to navigate as the original Mallarme essays, but offers a way through the texts that is indispensable for anyone encountering these works for the first time. A Guide and Commentary New York: A new translation of Divagations by Barbara Johnson was published too late to be incorporated into this study, but should be consulted by those interested in these works.

See Mallarme, Divigations, trans. Finally, Mallarme's unique use of the French language is explored by Gerard Genette in his brilliant book Mimologics. He locates Mallarme's particular brand of Cratylism in the context of numerous theories of the French language that engage this particular type of mimology. Ultimately, Genette argues that Mallarme sees the French language as derived from an original language that was essentially mimetic. This original language has been lost through the passage of time, through the grafting of one language into another, to the point that contemporary language no longer functions mimetically.

Further, this language—or fragments of it—can be discovered in contemporary language. Genette claims that Mallarme's Cratylism is essentially worked out at the level of the verse line in his poetry, where various rhyme and rhythmic gestures compensate for the mimetic defects of contemporary French. The verse line is very important for Mallarme, but Genette's dismissal of the word as an important element in this regard seems unnecessary.

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On one hand, he is a word-smith, and his poems have an acoustic reality that cannot be denied. Even a silent reading of Mallarme's poetry calls forth the sonorous nature of his words, words that have a particularly poignant sound. On the other hand, Mallarme works with meanings.

The Evolution of a Literary Language Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Voyages in Cratylusland, trans. University of Nebraska Press, , What separates Mallarme from the other poets of his generation is not the complexity of his poetry: Indeed, Mallarme always maintained that his poems were clear not easy to anyone who knew how to read. The particular quality that distinguishes Mallarme from his contemporaries is the exceptional care with which he employs the sounds of words so that they have a significant relationship to the semantic meaning that the poem carries, and by extension with its analogical meanings as well.

Throughout his correspondence and critical writings, Mallarme constantly equates this aspect of his poetic practice with music, using musical metaphors and imagery to describe the phonetic relationship between words and referring to his poems as "musical. Robert Greer Cohn argues that Mallarme gives a particular semantic meaning to individual letters, a meaning that adheres not only to their sound but also their graphic shape as well. Roger Pearson's interest in phonemes is directed mainly towards homophony, which Pearson posits as essential to Mallarme's pursuit of linguistic mastery in his poems.

The Development oja Poetic Art Oxford: By homophony, Pearson refers to homonyms - words that sound the same or nearly so but have different meanings. There are moments in Pearson's work, however, where he sees the formal manipulations of individual phonemes for their own sake, rather than in the service of an alternate semantic reading. Graham Robb sees Mallarme's use of phonemes through the lens of French prosody. These echoes, drawn from key words or images in the poem, bind the work together and are responsible for the unique and often bizarre sonic landscapes of Mallarme's poems.

Isolated references to music can be found in all three approaches, but none of them demonstrate how Mallarme describes the phonetic relationships of language as music in a systematic way. For Mallarme, aural similarity between words including rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and other resemblances indicates a hidden connection between them.

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Mallarme sees in these various forms of rhyme an outline of the essential unity of language in its original state. He imagines a single generative language that is the unique source of contemporary dialects, a language in which there was no distinction between poetry and language since poetry was language and language was poetry.

At some point in the distant past, this original language was broken apart, scattered across and inside the world's languages through evolution, war, cross-cultural influence, and similar factors. Modern languages are therefore broken: This defect of language creates the need for the poet, whose purpose is to reconstruct this generative language through an exploration of 5 2 Robb uses the term "prosody" to refer to the conventional codes of French poetry that Mallarme both knew and exploited in his poems.

I will use the term in the same sense throughout the present study. Yale University Press, , This, at its core, is Mallarme's notion of musical language, and the basis for virtually all of his later writings on music and poetry. If, as Robb asserts, Mallarme had a preference for words that rhyme with few or no others, this may have been because the essential unity of language could best be reconstructed through these words.

A word that rhymes with a few others, say a dozen or less, gives a relatively small group of semantic, etymological, orthographic and ideographic meanings from which to extract a unifying thread. The first four of these are used as rhymes in two of Mallarme's poems: Among these five words, various semantic connections can be drawn.

The intoxication of "ivre" is caused by the inner life of words "vivre" , which are immobilized "givre" in contemporary language until freed by poetry "delivre". The relation between the phonetic structure of words and their signification is the problem that Mallarme confronts in Les mots anglais, where he attempts to reconstruct, in the English language, the "relationships between the total signification and the letter" that point to 5 4 By ideographic, I refer to the meanings that could be adduced from the shapes of letters in these groups of words.

See Phillipe Martinon, Dictionnaire des rimes francaises, precede d'un traite de versification Paris: These words call out to one another in constellation, suggesting a common origin that is more than etymological, but points instead to an original language. Yet this reconstruction fails, by and large, to produce stable significance for practically any letter, precisely because the proliferation of rhyme gathers so many diverse meanings around each initial consonant position that the various constellations cannot all be reconciled.

The essential plurality of language casts a peculiar importance therefore on the isolated words, those for which Mallarme finds no significant constellation. Nevertheless, Mallarme believes that these isolated words include some of the most important ones in the language. Mallarme claims that it is the writer's duty to reconstruct these alliterative constellations, "to relate some terms whose unity contributes all the more to the charm and to 58 the music of language. However, by trying to force a stable signification retroactively on letters from Un coup de des backwards onto the larger oeuvre , his system becomes somewhat dogmatic, with the individual letters and phonemes speaking the same message in a dizzying variety of contexts.

Robb's approach is more flexible, and allows him to respond to the actual constellations that Mallarme's poems bring together without constantly relying on an a priori signification. In this way, Mallarme emerges from and participates in a long tradition of nineteenth-century French poetry that found inspiration in musical works, notably Baudelaire and Verlaine.

By the s, he argued that his poetry was more "musical" than sounding music itself, and the confrontational nature of his attitude toward music sets him somewhat apart from many of his contemporaries. Since it is my purpose to trace the interaction of Mallarme's poetic "music" with Debussy's settings of his poems, critical works that examine the role of music in Mallarme's oeuvre are particularly relevant to my thesis. Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of music in Mallarme to date is a dissertation by Suzanne Bernard, Mallarme et la musique! Bernard recounts Mallarme's attendance at the Concerts Lamoureux, which she argues permitted Mallarme to "refine his ideas on music and on the relationships existing between music and literature.

Some of her best insights relate to the essentially interconnected nature of all things in Mallarme's aesthetic, and the value that he assigns to music in this process. However, Bernard's treatment of Mallarme's "musicalization" of poetry is less successful. For her, Mallarme's poetic music is found primarily in the typographical 5 9 Suzanne Bernard, Mallarme et la musique Paris: Nizet, 6 0 Ibid. She calls this a formal architecture evident on the surface of the page and in the ordering of the book of verse, which she compares to the physical disposition of the orchestra on stage.

Yet Bernard constantly lapses into vague metaphor: If the sole requirement for the "musicality" of a poem is that it combines multiple themes, then virtually any poem would be musical. More interesting is Bernard's treatment of music in the then-recently published sketches for Le Livre, Mallarme's unfinished masterwork.

These are then varied and repeated, brought together to display the unity that underlies their apparent diversity.

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She asks "What does Mallarme do [in these "equations"] if not combine themes, forms, like a composer? Bernard concludes that Le Livre represents Mallarme's effort to fuse the mobility inherent in music with the permanence of literature. This mobility is enacted as a reading strategy in which "vertical" and "horizontal" readings of the text produce various nuances of meaning comparable to music. In this text, one can see the "poet's persistent desire to 'take back' from Music that which seems to be the very essence of this sonorous form, its movement and the perpetual transformation of its themes.

As we shall see, Mallarme's poetry does in fact require such a novel approach to reading, although it need not be restricted to Le Livre or Un coup de des, but usefully informs his entire oeuvre. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe also sees Mallarme through a Wagnerian lens. Reverie of a French Poet" [] and "Music and Letters" [], everything, or almost everything, was collected and comprehended in a project that seems to have found its origins in the 'singular challenge' launched by Wagner.

Lacoue-Labarthe recognizes that Mallarme's ultimate rejection of music in favour of poetry is based on the idea that actual concerted music 6 8 Bernard, Mallarme et la musique, Figures of Wagner, tr. Stanford University Press, , He concludes that, for Mallarme, "[v]ersification is thus the restitution of Literature as archi-music—this archi-music of which 73 music is itself only the imitation or the too sensual presentation. Mallarme does see his poetry replacing orchestral music with the silenced "music" of written verse. However, by setting aside issues of rhyme in its most expanded sense and valorizing rhythm, Lacoue-Labarthe does not consider one of Mallarme's most crucial poetic techniques: And since, finally, Lacoue-Labarthe provides no example of how one might read Mallarme's poetic works in light of the "archi-music" created by rhythm, his argument never leaves the theoretical plane, as if Mallarme were first and foremost a philosopher and not a poet.

Several useful contributions to the study of music in Mallarme have also been made by musicologists. In his article "Sea-Changes: Here, Lacoue-Labarthe invokes Derrida's notion of arche-writing. See Derrida, OfGrammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, , The portion dealing with Mallarme can be found on pages However, the example he chooses for this is somewhat disappointing.

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