Mallarmé Wagner: Music and Poetic Language

Heath Lees

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351559478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book challenges and replaces the existing view of Mallarm mission to 're-possess' music on behalf of poetic language. Traditionally, this view focused on only the last fifteen years of the poet's life, and sprang from a belief in Mallarm 'sudden awakening' to music during an all-Wagner concert in Paris, in 1885. Professor Heath Lees shows that Mallarm early knowledge and experience of music was much greater than commentators have realized, and that the French poet actually began his writing career with the explicit aim of making music's performance-language of 'effect' the ground of his poetic expression. Integral to the argument is Mallarm reaction to the work and ideas of Richard Wagner, whose impact on France came in two waves: the first broke during the tempestuous 1860s days of the Paris Tannhäuser, while the second arrived in the mid-1880s, and gave birth to the Revue Wagn enne. In refuting the critical literature that focuses on only the second of these waves, Lees shows that Mallarm xhibited a highly informed Wagnerian background during the first wave, and that his grasp of the composer's gestural motives and flexible musical prose led him towards a new kind of self-expressive, gestural rhythm that aimed musically to reinvent poetic language. In support of this, the book examines closely what Wagner 'really' said in the prose works that were becoming known in Paris by the 1860s, in particular, Wagner's important French text, the Lettre sur la musique. It also re-examines Baudelaire's classic Wagner-brochure, and reveals its author's surprisingly firm grasp of Wagner's musico-poetic fusion. In musically informed commentary, Professor Lees surveys the four decades of success and failure that resulted from Mallarm repeated attempts to draw out the musical gestures and resonances of words alone. In the process, he throws new light on many of Mallarm best-known texts, hitherto judged 'difficult' by those who have failed to

Chapter 1

Divergences and Convergences

At first sight, the figures of Wagner and Mallarmé present two of the most dissimilar personalities ever to have their lifetimes overlap within the one century. Wagner’s inflated egoism stands in stark contrast to Mallarmé’s demure, self-effacing personality, and the German composer’s lifelong struggle against huge odds towards the final triumph of Bayreuth seems dimensionally different from the course of Mallarmé’s life as a humble French schoolteacher who sought shelter in the anonymous title of ‘un littérateur pur et simple’¹ [a pure and simple pen-pusher], who retired in middle life, wrote sparingly, and died unexpectedly. Wagner’s barely concealed, single-minded exploitation of friends and supporters is utterly removed from Mallarmé’s discreet but unfailingly supportive attitude to his colleagues. Their domestic relationships reveal a world of difference too, with Wagner’s self-regarding artistic bohemianism thrown into the sharpest relief by Mallarmé’s adherence to the outwardly stolid and respectable home values of the petite bourgeoisie.

The view of art which each of them developed appeared to lie at opposite poles, since Wagner required that audiences give themselves up totally to the performed experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk, while Mallarmé encouraged an audience to contribute imaginatively to a theatrical encounter with language, and to participate in the experience of art by taking upon itself a role as performer. It is easy to see why the two artists have been thought of as complete opposites: Wagner a self-aggrandizing composer who viewed language as incomplete without music, and Mallarmé a committed poet with a fervent belief in the musical integrity of language.

These two nineteenth-century figures never met. Wagner was nearly thirty years older than Mallarmé, and left Paris after the 1861 scandals of Tannhäuser, only to return on rare occasions while en route elsewhere. He would not have known of Mallarmé’s writings, indeed it is highly unlikely that he ever heard of the poet’s name, except perhaps in conversation with Mallarmé’s greatest friends Catulle Mendès and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who visited Wagner in Triebschen, Switzerland, in 1869 and again in 1870.

Mallarmé, despite having a German wife, learned little German, and never ventured across the Rhine. As a young man, though, he was undoubtedly introduced to Wagner’s work early in his life through the lively musical interests of his contemporaries. A passing mention of the composer in one of Mallarmé’s first articles L’Art pour tous (1862) shows that, like many people of the time, he considered Wagner as the acknowledged heir to the reigning, ‘profound’ Austro-German musical tradition of Mozart and Beethoven.² By the mid-1880s, a second wave of Wagnerism was becoming increasingly strong in France, and Mallarmé joined its movement. In spite of carefully articulated reservations, he remained a wagnériste for the rest of his life, and followed Wagner’s lead closely in his commitment to restore the theatrical intercourse between language and music – though from a determinedly literary standpoint rather than a musical one.

In terms of artistic belief and practice, there were fundamental elements in the work and aims of the two artists that helped to erase some of the personal distance between them. Most obviously, each of them believed firmly in the mystical, binding power of art at a time when orthodox religion had lost its centralizing force, and national and regional communities were searching for other modes of self-identifying ritual and performance. In response to the need for new solennités, Wagner conceived the ultimate, concentrated art festival in the form of a quasi-religious pilgrimage and retreat at Bayreuth; Mallarmé held weekly, ‘secular’ house services in his apartment in the rue de Rome, and dreamed of half-real performances of community-shared reading events from Le Livre.³

Both artists took their priestly roles seriously enough to sermonize repeatedly against the pseudo-theatre that was particularly associated with the Paris of the day – a pandering to the prevailing bourgeois desire for grandiose entertainment that had all the appearance of art but lacked depth or challenge. In their own ways, Wagner and Mallarmé continually articulated the need for profundity through the richly layered complexity of art, out of which myriad intangible, sometimes concealed messages and effects could be liberated through the act of performance, to operate on a variety of conscious and unconscious levels.

Given the broad congruence of aims and ideas between the two artists, it appears strange that in the particular area they shared most – that is, in the field of natural connections between music and language – they have often been brought into direct opposition. This has come about through the traditional presentation of Mallarmé as an exasperated French poet who saw his literary inheritance in danger of being spirited away by a German musician. Yet the perception of music at odds with poetic language was by no means widely shared during Mallarmé’s youth and artistic development. On the contrary, most of his literary contemporaries welcomed the nineteenth-century explosion of music, and eagerly accepted its increasing prominence in their society’s leisure-time activities. Many, such as Théodor de Wyzewa, Catulle Mendès, and Edouard Dujardin, could be found participating directly by promoting music in their writing activities, while others such as Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Augusta Holmès gained wide reputations as evangelizing mélomanes at important salons and concerts; a few, like René Ghil, even went so far as to attempt a direct transfer of musical techniques and analogies to poetic construction.

In the mid-1870s, Mallarmé himself, affecting the animated innocence of the abonnée of La Dernière Mode, spoke enthusiastically of the enjoyable ‘invasion’ of music; his main irritation was directed against those who assumed that music’s powers were exclusive to music, and therefore denied to poetry. It was this narrowly separatist aspect of the contemporary understanding of music which, in one fashion or another, all his later work would seriously challenge:

Agée à peine d’un siècle, la Musique aujourd’hui règne sur toute âme: culte pour plusieurs d’entre vous, éprises, et pour d’autres plaisir, elle a des catéchumènes et des dilettantes. Son prodigieux avantage est d’émouvoir par des artifices que l’on veut croire interdits à la parole, très-profondément, les rêveries les plus subtiles ou les plus grandioses; […]. Qui oserait se plaindre que, Muse incorporelle, toute de sons et de frissons, cette déité, la Musique, non, cette nue, douée de la pénétration d’un adorable fléau, envahisse maintenant un à un les théâtres de la ville … [?]⁴

[Scarcely a century old, today Music holds sway over every soul: a cult for several of you who are in love with it, and for the others a pleasure, Music has both its novice priests and its dilettantes. It possesses the prodigious advantage of being able to move listeners by tricks considered forbidden to words, very deeply, the most subtle and most grandiose of reveries; […]. Who would dare complain that as an incorporeal Muse, made uniquely of sounds and shivers, this deity that is Music, no, this naked figure, possessing the same ability to penetrate as an adorable plague, now invades one after the other all the theatres of the city … [?]

Of course Mallarmé did share with a number of his literary colleagues a healthy, sometimes frustrated sense of envy and competitiveness in response to the contemporary music-making scene. Privately, he was prepared to admit to being ‘boudeur’ [sulky] over its seemingly unlimited ability to attract and hold deep emotional sway over the audiences of the day.⁵ But he was also famous for his conviction that poetic language was itself music, already owning all the rights to those aspects of performance-related solennité that were being increasingly ascribed to the musical concert-giving of the time, and to Wagner in particular. No one was more careful than Mallarmé to render to Wagner the things that were Wagner’s, but he consistently refused to allow that any composer might have sole title on the marriage of sound with idea – an activity that he related firmly, though not exclusively, to the ancient and sacred calling of the poet.

Mallarmé realized that he and Wagner were in fact progressing along different yet parallel paths within the one field, and his much quoted rallying cry to poets to ‘reprendre notre bien’⁶ [take back what is ours] from music was less a call to arms than a call to brotherhood through the widest conception of ‘la Musique’ as ‘l’ensemble des rapports existant dans tout’⁷ [a whole formed by the connections that exist in everything]. Despite the polarization that was to become more common towards the end of the century, Mallarmé insisted on understanding the two arts reciprocally, as each other’s ‘alternative face’,⁸ and he eagerly accepted Wagner as a poet with the same breath that he would use to pronounce himself a musician. Thus, in Crise de vers he firmly acknowledged Wagner’s regrounding of poetry ‘ou la Musique rejoint le Vers pour former, depuis Wagner, la Poésie’⁹ [or Music rejoining the poetic line to form, since Wagner, Poetry]. Yet in his correspondence he could also lay proprietorial claim to music for his own poetic ends: ‘Je fais de la Musique, et appelle ainsi […] l’au-delà magiquement produit par certaines dispositions de la parole’¹⁰ [I am making Music and apply this term […] to the beyond which is magically produced by certain dispositions of the word].

As time went on, however, others found it increasingly difficult to appreciate the genuineness of Mallarmé’s view of music. His occasionally ambiguous remarks about the exaggerated music worship of his age were coupled with reservations over the Wagner ‘cult’ that gave an impression of continuous, grumbling ambivalence. In time, this became interpreted as antipathy, even antagonism. To his credit, though, Mallarmé was always able to make a sharp distinction between the highly successful world of public music-making that surrounded him (music that he often described with a small ‘m’), and the more profound understanding of music in an aesthetic dimension, as a marriage of sound and idea within the poetic act (music of the highest calling, which Mallarmé frequently distinguished by a capital ‘M’). Thanks to his perspicacity and instinctive generosity of spirit, he freely accepted the genius of Wagner in its joined, musico-poetic manifestation.

Nonetheless, Mallarmé was careful to keep himself at arm’s length from the uncritical adulation that the composer received from those of Mallarmé’s colleagues who formed the contributing ranks of the Revue wagnérienne.¹¹ In his Revue wagnérienne article Richard Wagner. Rêverie d’un poëte français,¹² Mallarmé makes some careful reservations over the extent of Wagner’s success, and he shows a clear preference for a musical art that will certainly learn from Wagner’s, but will also embrace the all-important ‘esprit français’ [French mind]. Startled by such provisos, Edouard Dujardin, founder-editor of the Revue wagnérienne and for some time the most public of Wagner’s French...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Divergences and Convergences
• 2 Music and Mallarmé’s Generation
• 3 Wagner and France
• 4 Mallarmé’s Wagnériste Influences: Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
• 5 The Attempt to Repossess Music: 1860–1865
• 6 The Attempt to Repossess Music:1865–1869
• 7 Other Musicalized Poems of the Hérodiade Years
• 8 Homage to Wagner and the Way Ahead
• Bibliography
• Index