Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language (review)

Heath Lees’s absorbing book articulates how Wagner’s music and writings in Music and Drama (1855–56) and Lettre sur la musique (1860) provide an æsthetic and historical context for Mallarmé’s search for a poetic language arising “as a movement issuing from within language itself, a repossession and re-amplification of the musical properties and resonances that he believed had always been poetry’s natural and rightful domain” (144). Dating Mallarmé’s exposure to Wagner to the 1860’s, Lees reads a selection of poems and prose dramatizing the poet’s fraught attempts, influenced by Wagner’s ideas about music, to transcend the ornamental music of contemporary poetry and discover poetic language that unifies poetry and music.

The first chapter chronicles the history of Wagner’s reception in Paris before and after the 1861 uproar over Tannhäuser, during the Franco-Prussian war, and through the “second wave” of Wagnerism in the 1880’s. Lees explains in chapter two how music education in Mallarmé’s time furnished the poet, as well as schoolchildren of his generation, with knowledge that led to an appreciation of concert music. Lees identifies the technique of introducing music through terms such as “grammar,” “reading,” and “rhetoric” in Bocquillon Wilhelm’s Manuel musical as a source for Mallarmé’s appropriation of aspects of music in his use of language. Chapter two also speculates about scientific work in acoustics as a foundation for Mallarmé’s 1860’s notion of silence as “not merely the absence of sound, but as the inviting ground of resonance within a fundamental vibration, the unheard upper traces that are actually part of the chosen sound” (34). Baudelaire’s response to Wagner is the third chapter’s focus, as Lees relates how the poet’s pamphlet created an understanding of Wagner’s ideas about the fusion of drama and music, opening the way for their application to poetic language (69). The fourth chapter’s description of the influence on Mallarmé of Baudelaire, Catulle Mendès, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, supporters of Wagner, completes the book’s musical historical background. The next four chapters closely examine Mallarmé’s efforts to renew poetic language through music. After surveying the influences of Poe and musician Léon Marc, chapter five recounts Mallarmé’s struggle to find a spiritual unity for poetry as an alternative to a poetic language rooted in a divine source, dramatized in the poems “Pan,” “Spleen printanier,” “Les Fenêtres,” and “L’Azur.” This chapter’s comparison of “Le Sonneur” and “Sainte,” a realization of poetic music in a short form, lays the foundation for readings of “Hérodiade” and “L’Après-midi d’un faune” in chapter six, which Lees sees as allegories in sonata form of Mallarmé’s “laborious struggles and tentative experiments of the time” to sustain a musicalized language (147). Here Lees elaborates the difference between musique, the “material of decorative charm,” and Musique, “the poet’s gestural sound or ‘rythme’ that links words through sympathetic vibration, magically embodies and animates them from within, and transforms the reader into a performer who can experience an overwhelming sense of Beauty . . .” (152). He observes that even as “L’Après-midi d’un faune” narrates the faun’s misadventure, the work proffers a unity of music and poetry, embodied in the faun’s double flute and enacted in the poem’s words. Chapter 7 considers Mallarmé’s poetic autobiography in three poems from the 1860s, revised in the 1880s, “Prose pour des Esseintes,” “Sonnet allégorique de lui-même,” and “Le Démon de l’analogie,” which suggests the importance of Wagner’s concerts to Mallarmé’s recognition that the audience’s participation completes a performance, whether on stage or in the mind. Lees’s argument that Mallarmé’s reaction to the Concerts Lamoureux in 1885 was a culmination of his work in the previous twenty years, rather than a starting point, reaches a...