État présent: Word and Music Studies: The Nineteenth Century

The comparison of text to music is perhaps one of the most enduring metaphors of our critical practice, and, as Steven Paul Scher observed in an essay of 1972, its many variants are among the terms most often abused and misused in literary criticism.¹ Musical techniques such as counterpoint, melody, harmony and rhythm abound in analyses of both verse and prose, and critics frequently resort to a musical metaphor when discussing textual effects or processes which seem to transcend the denotative, representative realm of language and enter the domain of the properly literary. While the 'terminological chaos' against which Scher rails may frustrate a musically literate reader, scholars are not entirely to blame for the irresistible attraction that musical metaphors exert, for it is a commonplace among poets themselves to trace the relationship between poetry and music back to Antiquity and the myth of Orpheus, in whose song both word and lyre accompaniment formed an indivisible whole.² Moreover, as Ardis Butterfield demonstrates in Poetry and Music in Medieval France, text and music were joined in a single practice during the Middle Ages, in the performances of chansonniers and troubadours.³ The essays in Poetry and Music in the French Renaissance explore how this close relationship is maintained by Pierre de Ronsard and the Pléiade poets, Louise Labé, and composers of lute-song.⁴ Ronsard's Abbrégé de l'art poëtique françois (1565) appears as a key text, highlighting the common aims of poetry and music; indeed, only five years later the Académie de poésie et de musique was founded by Jean-Antoine de Baïf and Thibault de Courville to promote the kinship between the two arts.

In the nineteenth century, however, poetry and music emerge as separate cultural artefacts. Whereas they had historically been conceptualized as complementary parts of the same art form, the surge in interest, post-Beethoven, in instrumental concerts, along with the rapid rise of a mass print culture and an educated, wealthy middle class, made the printed book, rather than oral performance, the home of a new, exciting Romantic poetry: Alphonse de Lamartine's Méditations poétiques (1820) and Victor Hugo's Les Orientales (1829). Similarly, instrumental music, which Beethoven's symphonies had taken to previously unscaled heights of expression, captivated the public and made stars of the great virtuosi Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paganini. It is remarkable that during this period of separation, poets refer to music, and conceptualize their work as music, as never before. Léon Guichard captures in two volumes the excitement generated by music and literature as independent genres which nonetheless call out to each other incessantly. La Musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, PUF, 1955) documents the fascination music held for major writers such as Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Gérard de Nerval and George Sand, as well as the proliferation of revues musicales, concerts and composers.⁵ Guichard's second study, La Musique et les lettres en France au temps du wagnérisme (Paris, PUF, 1963) is more broad-ranging, dealing with the explosive impact of Richard Wagner on French poetry, prose and drama. Although Guichard acknowledges his study lacks a central analytical thrust (largely, he argues, thanks to the difficulty of defining Wagnerism precisely), he explores responses to Wagner's main publication in French, the famous Lettre sur la musique, preface to his Quatre poèmes d'opéra (1860) which summarizes for a French public the main points of his theories, expounded in Oper und Drama (1851), on the expressive limits of poetry and music when taken separately, the transcendent power of their fusion in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the importance of legendary subject matter, and a new, religious conception of art.⁶

The poets Guichard shows responding to Wagner include the major figures of post-Romanticism —Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jules Laforgue —alongside less prominent writers such as Stuart Merrill, René Ghil and numerous minor symbolists. The major names alone have generated a huge industry in word and music studies, which is all the more remarkable given...