Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire's Legacy to Composers by Helen Abbott (review)

The Parisian intersections that concern Helen Abbott in her fascinating study of the transmission and transposition of Baudelaire's sonnet 'La Mort des amants' pertain to the dual encounter between poetry and music. Powerfully argued and richly illustrated, the book is an important addition to a growing body of word and music studies, and the author's dual specialisms in poetry and music are put to excellent use in this properly interdisciplinary volume. An accompanying website provides both recorded performances and, usefully, editions of the music (sources that are otherwise difficult to obtain). The 'legacy' of Baudelaire's sonnet, most notably set by Debussy as one of his Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (1890), is used as a central case study to investigate musicopoetics in Paris during the period 1840-1900. The author assesses the networks of transmission, circulation, and encounters that the sonnet undergoes in musical settings by Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (transcribed by Charles de Sivry), Augusta Holmès, Alexandre Georges, and Judith Gautier, and in Léon Valade and Verlaine's extraordinary parody 'La Mort des cochons', which the Sivry transcription inspired. She also treats 'straight' settings by Gaston Serpette, Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, and Debussy to a thorough comparative analysis of their 'settability'. Signalling the breadth of musical response to Baudelaire's sonnet and seeking to understand the troublesome ways in which 'the quasi-musical in poetry relates to actual music' at this time (p. 18), Abbott underlines the textual ambivalence of the poem in its relation to music. Her central analysis of the musical settings is framed by chapters investigating the thematics of the Liebestod, in which she provides a detailed poetic analysis of the sonnet and further explores the Wagnerian shadows in a theoretical assessment of Baudelaire's musical legacy. A detailed study of Valade and Verlaine's parody is given a chapter of its own, and it is here that Abbott's polyvalent approach to the journeys taken by musical and poetic texts is seen at its most original. The closed social context in which the texts circulated is richly described, and the collaborations that concentrated on writing and performing parodic texts (the Vilains bonhommes), particularly with regard to the participation of Verlaine, are clearly laid forth. Through recourse to Gérard Genette and the lineage of libertinage in musico-poetics, Abbott strengthens her analysis of parody to offer a close reading of the parodic text, but her major step is to view Villiers's music as also participating in a playful reading of the Baudelairean text. 'La Mort des cochons' is a multi-layered double parody revealing 'crucial embarrassing truths concerning Baudelaire's own poetic language' (p. 156). The aesthetic challenge the parody presents, Abbott argues, targets the very heart of Baudelaire's hidden poetic legacy to music itself. This will prove an interesting and useful book for performers of French mélodie, and for those who work on the endlessly challenging and ambivalent intersection between the musical and poetic in French cultural production.