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ORPHEUS' LYRE: A STUDY OF SYMBOLIST AND POST-SYMBOLIST MUSIC AND POETRY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

James Stephen Hsu, B.A., M.A., M.F.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2000

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Sebastian D. G. Knowles, Adviser

Professor Morris Beja Adviser Professor Barbara Rigney English Graduate Program UMI Number 9971567

UMI

UMI Microform9971567 Copyright 2000 by Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 Copyright by James Hsu 2000 ABSTRACT

This dissertation reconsiders a central matter in the field of modernism; the

replacement of religion with art in the symbolist and post-symbolist domains. It

argues that music was critical to the formulation of the new aesthetic religion.

While the role of music as a model for French symbolist poetry is well-known,

most writing on the subject dismisses it as a vague aspiration based on hazy

understandings. Beginning with the violent audience response to Wagner's 1861

Paris concerts, the dissertation traces the evolution of the music/poetry relationship

from its inception in Baudelaire, through its culmination in Debussy and

Mallarmé, to its legacy in Stevens and Stravinsky. Through close readings of

historical and literary texts, as well as musical scores, "Orpheus's Lyre" makes die

case that symbolist aesthetics represent a collective response to a common crisis.

Rather than falling into the interdisciplinary trap of cataloging cliches regarding

"the music of poetry" and "the poetry of music," this stutfy aims not only to reconstruct an important episode of aesthetic history, but also to identify corresponding developments in musical and literary form. Far from conventional notions of a musicalized poetry, the dissertation concludes tiiat symbolist music

U and poetiy conspired in a unique alliance that resulted in an enduring transformation of western language and tfiought

111 For my mother, Anna S. Hsu, and in memoiy of my father, Abraham Yu-Hsiang Hsu (1929-1997)

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I must begin by dianking my dissertation committee. Barbara Rigney and Morris Beja offered careful reading and valuable comments. 1 am grateful for dieir patience and support. Sebastian Knowles, my adviser, has been—from die beginning—an invaluable personal and professional friend. 1 came to OSU to work with Seb; his generosity and oversight made diis project possible. A dissertation is as much a psychological ordeal, as it is an intellectual one. Many friends have helped me. 1 would like to menton four whose constancy saw me through: Marie-Paule Ha and Steve Weninger, who made sure 1 had at least one good meal a week; Jeanie Hodges, who watched over me with sister-like care; and Tom Kane, who, no matter how busy, always made himself available to talk. Finally, most importantly, my most profound debt and gratitude is to my parents. My father passed during the beginning stages of this writing. I cannot begin to describe the immense feeling 1 carry for my parents. Any intelligence or beauty I bring to my work, began with them. VITA

May 3, 1962 ...... Bom - Bangkok, Thailand

1986 ...... B.A., Indiana University, Bloomington

1990...... M A , University of Texas, Austin

1993 ...... M.F.A. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page A bstract...... ii

D edication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

V ita ...... vi

List of Figures ...... vii

Chapters:

1. The Orphie Song: An Overview of Symbolist Music and Poetiy ...... 1

2. Baudelaire and the Wagnerian Musical M odel ...... 23

3. Mallarmé and Debussy: Poésie Pure, Absolute M usic ...... 53

4. Stevens and Stravinsky: Aesthetic Objectivity ...... 120

E pilogue ...... 195

Works Cited ...... 198

vu LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

3.1 Mozart, Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488 (1786), measures 1-9 ...... 64

3.2 Haydn Symphony No. 77 in Bb Major, Hoboken I: 77 (1782), Finale, measures 1-8 ...... 65

3.3 Beethoven, Sonata in C minor. Opus10, No. 1, measures 1-8 ...... 66

3.4 Wagner, Prelude to Tristan undIsolde (1857-59), measures 1-21 ...... 72

3.5 Debussy, Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894), measures 1-10...... 93

3.6 First three intervals of the overtone series ...... 95

3.7 Debussy, Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune (1894), measures 11-21...... 97

3.8 Debussy, Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune (1894), measures 32-33 measures 35-36 ...... 105

4.1 Petrouchka chord ...... 139

4.2 Stravinsky, Le Sacre du printemps (1 9 1 3 )...... 141

4.3 Stravinsky, Le Sacre du printemps (1913)...... 144

4.4 Debussy, La Cathédrale engloutie (1 9 1 0 )...... 147

4.5 Stravinsky, Symphony o fPsalms (1930), from 1st movement ...... 162

4.6 Stravinsky, Symphony o f Psalms (1930), from 2nd movement ...... 170

viii 4.7 Stravinsky, Symphony o fPsalms (1930), from 3rd movement ...... 179

4.8 Stravinsky, Symphony o f Psalms (1930), from 3rd movement (coda). . . . 183

IX CHAPTER 1

THE ORPHIC SONG: AN OVERVIEW OF SYMBOLIST MUSIC AND POETRY

As Ovid tells the story. Hymen, the god of marriage, had an uneasy premonition about the marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though he had traveled a long distance to bless the wedding, "the torch he held kept sputtering with smoke that drew tears and would not bum despite vigorous shaking" (10. 7-8).

Unfortunately, this ominous beginning augured the tragedy that was to befall.

While walking through the grass widt a band of Naiads, Eurydice was bitten on the ankle by a snake. The venom was swift; she collapsed dead. After mourning in the upper world, Orpheus descended to the lower world. In an attempt to rescue his new bride, the "bard" pleaded his case in song: "By these places full of fear, by this yawning Chaos, and by the silent vastness of this kingdom, reweave I pray the thread of Eurydice's destiny cut off too soon!" (10. 32-34). Widi the power to subdue beasts, and move rocks and trees, Orpheus' song—a divine union of music and poetiy—held deaüi's very home spell bound. Moved as never before. Hades and Persephone could not resist his suit. As he made this plea and sang his words to the tune of his lyre, the bloodless spirits wept; Tantalus stopped reaching for the receding waters, the wheel of Ision stopped in wonder, die vultures ceased tearing at die liver of Tityus, the Danaid descendants of Belus left dieir urns empty and you, O Sisyphus, sat on your stone. Then for die first time, die story has it, die cheeks of die Eumenides were moist with tears as they were overcome by his song, and the kind who rules diese lower regions and his regal wife could not endure his pleas or their refusal. They called Eurydice; she was among the more recent shades and she approached, her step slow because of her wound. Thracian Orpheus took her and with her the command that he not turn back his gaze until he had left the groves of Avemus, or the gift would be revoked. (10. 42-56)

Through "mute silence," "thick and black vapors," Orpheus and Eurydice negotiated die steep climb back to the upper world. But as they approached the border, Orpheus broke Hades' command. "[F]rightened that she not be well and yearning to see her with his own eye" (10. 59-60), he looked back at Eurydice.

Falling away, she only had time to utter a final farewell. Orpheus was sturmed by this second deadi. When Hades would not entertain a second suit, Orpheus withdrew to the mountains, living widiout female company for three years.

Angered by his rejection, the Maenads took vengeance upon him. At first the stones they threw were "overcome in mid-air by the harmony of voice and lyre"

(11. 9-10), but eventually the din of their fury drowned out his song and he was tom asunder. As they floated down the river Hebros, Orpheus's dismembered head continued to sing and his lyre continued to play. Filled with grief, the birds wept, the beasts, rocks and trees mourned, the naiads and their dryads wore black, and the river—whose banks echoed die final strains of Orpheus and his lyre as diey

floated past—swelled with tears.

*****

Though there are numerous recreations of die Orpheus myth, virtually all

emphasize two aspects of Ovid's version. First and foremost, Orpheus is a figure

who synthesizes music and poetry. In her exhaustive history of the Orpheus

legend, Orpheus with his Lute, Elizabeth Henry observes that "[t]he image of

Orpheus as the supreme poet-musician . .. was an enduring one; whatever

additional roles he might assume, Orpheus was essentially the embodiment of

poetry and music" (6). Son of the lyre-playing god, Apollo,* and the muse of epic

poetry. Calliope, Orpheus’ song not only tames the animate world of man and

beast, but also the inanimate world of rocks and trees. As Henry notes, "this is an

astonishing claim, but one so familiar that we forget (and previous generations

forgot) how astonishing it is" (1). Unlike the magician who bewitches nature, or the Promethean-like hero who dominates it, Orpheus' song appeals direcdy to die creative element residing within all nature's forms (animal, vegetable, and mineral). As a consequence, nature reorders herself into a single, harmonious response. Animals who are natural enemies listen togedier in stillness; die wilderness reorganizes itself into new patterns of attention; even the underworld— beyond nature herself— surrenders its dead.

Almost as much as an artistic mydi, however, Orpheus is also a religious

one. Setting aside its complicated relationship to die cult of Orphism,^ die stoiy of

Orpheus' descent and return links Orpheus' art to the experience of transcendent

meaning. Not only does Orpheus' song allow him to return from the underworld

alive, it also allows him to "restore others to life." The notion of transcendence is particularly apparent in Orpheus' function as a mediator between the rationality of

Apollo and the irrationality of Dionysus. While Apollo signifies a separation from the gods through reason (a faculty leading to individuation), Dionysus represents union with gods through the primitive unconscious. Orpheus not only synthesizes these two forces, but is also somedimg other—an autonomous figure of psychic and spiritual wholeness. As numerous modem appropriations of the myth attest, the notion of transcending opposites in order to discover an authentic center is essential to an understanding of his religious mission. Jung, for instance, saw

Orpheus as the archetype representing spirit (a synthesis of the Apollonian and

Dionysian archetypes); Rilke, in his "Sonnets to Orpheus," viewed him as a symbol for the existential category of "being"; and Mallarmé, as will be seen, imagined descent as a confrontation with the Void. Orpheus' descent is—in Ovid's classical source and ever since—a search for spiritual renewal.

Both features of the story speak to the crisis in thought and language that characterize the French symbolist movement. From a historical, as well as

4 aesthetic perspective, symbolism attempted to replace religion with art. While late nineteenth century religious crisis gave birtfi to many strains of modem literature, symbolism is distinguished not only by its startling reconception of language, but also by its ambition to create a religious aesthetic What resulted was a unique alliance between poetry and music—one which, while reciprocal, revolved around language's determination to "take back its own" from music Unlike odier forms of literary/musical genre crossing, symbolist pee try neither sought to lie next to music (as in song forms and opera), nor appropriate musical forms (as is in a number of modernist wodcs). Instead, it aimed at approximating music's non- representational nature. As the many manifestos of the movement attest, the new religious aesthetic was to be reconceived upon the model of absolute music—music free from text or other extramusical associations. Language, for die first time, didn't just try get close to music, but tried to co-opt what the symbolists beUeved to be its essence.

While the role of music as a model for French symbolist poetry is well known, the significance of this role has largely gone unexamined. Those that have considered the matter usually dismiss it as a hazy aspiration based on dubious understanding.^ This dissertation argues that music was critical to the formulation of the new aesthetic religion. Beginning with die violent audience response to

Wagner's 1860 Paris concerts, it charts the evolution of die music/poetry relationship from its inception in Baudelaire, through its culmination in Debussy

5 and Mallarmé, to its legacy in Stevens and Stravinsky. While dus study aims at a

careful reconstruction of an important episode of aesdietic history, it is also

concerned to identify corresponding developments in musical and literary form.

Through consideration of key musical scores, as well as historical and literary

texts, the case is made that symbolist aesthetics Represent a collective response to

a common crisis. Far from vague notions of a musicalized poetry, the dissertation

concludes that the symbolist music/poetry relationship contributed to a new

modernist language—a language which, as Mallarmé defined it in a famous letter to

Verlaine, endeavors toward an "Orphic explanation of the earth, which is die sole

duty of the poet" (OC 663).

What follows in this overview is a discussion of the Orphic in symbolist

poetry and music. For the most part, the analysis offered in the body of this study

is concerned with what took place (defining the aesthetic) and how it came about

(the unfolding of events). For diis reason chapters two and three, which focus on

the pre-symbolist and symbolist eras, are concerned with drawing that part of the

symbolist narrative arc that culminates in Mallarmé and Debussy; chapter four

finishes its curve with a discussion of the symbolist lineage in Stevens and

Stravinsky. While every attempt is made to relate somediing of the significance of the aesthetic movements under discussion, it is helpful to have some background to show "why" they happened. Aesthetic history is sometimes recorded as a series of reactionary gestures, as if form were only reflective of temporal artistic and

6 cultural fashion. The symbolist movement was not this By framing die symbolist music/poetry alliance in terms of the mydi of Orpheus, a clearer understanding of the significance of this relationship is possible.

*****

While die symbolist musical metaphor actually begins with Wagner, a discussion of its relationship to the Orphic might well begin with Nietzsche's The

Birth o f Tragedy. Nietzsche's famous statement that "God is dead" isn't fully explored until Thus Spoke Zarathustra (a later wodc not only chronologically, but also in terms of the evolution of his thought). Nevertheless, a central matter in The

Birth o f Tragedy concerns the search for an aesthetic solution to religious crisis.

Music provides much of the ground for this search, proving the critical element in his assessment of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche's interest in music, however, was not simply academic, but an impulse that resided deep in his imagination. Though his primary musical influence was Wagner (and, in a philosophical context, Schopen­ hauer), he also possessed an early musical predisposition. Like his father, he played the piano and wished to become a composer, compiling a large book of compositions (the most famous of which is Marfred Meditation), as well as a number of songs. When it first appeared in 1872, die complete tide of his first book was The Birth o f Tragedy out o f the Spirit o fMusic. However, the book's direct inspiration was Nietzsche's personal and intellectual relationship widi Wagner. Until the break in their friendship, his devotion to Wagner was complete. What particularly enthralled Nietzsche was

Wagner's Ring cycle, an attempt at a religious music drama that united myth widi music. As chapter two discusses, Wagner's theory of the unity of the arts—the foundation of Wagnerian music drama—not only provided the impetus for the symbolist interest in music, but was indebted to Schopenhauer's notion of the connection between music and metaphysics. His hierarchy of the arts held music in the premier position by virtue of its immateriality, a quality rendering it transparent to the movement of the will. One of the points made in chapter two is that it wasn't Schopenhauer's aesdietics (which more closely resemble that of the symbolists), but his metaphysics that correspond with W iper's music drama.

Thus even before the symbolist attempt at a musical metaphysics, there was great momentum toward a music/language union to create the new religion aesthetic.

At the center o f The Birth o f Tragedy is the concept of two contrary forces famously represented by the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Nietzsche used this notion to explain the phenomenon of Greek tragedy. While the prevailing view held the Greek mind as super-rational, balanced and disciplined, Nietzsche argued that this quality could only be understood by appreciating die forces that such a mind had to integrate. The Birth o f Tragedy points out that Greek tragedy originated as a celebration of die god Dionysus in the form of a procession of

8 singing and dancing (the dithyramb). The real achievement of tragedy—Nietzsche argues—is its fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian (the chorus sublimating the ancient Dionysian rite), a synthesis he eventually labels Dionysus. When rational explanation and dialectic (in the form of dialogue and die hero) replaced lyric poetiy and the chorus, tragedy quickly disappeared. According to Nietzsche's analysis, Euripides and Socrates brought about "the deadi of tragedy through the spirit of reason." Unable to integrate the Dionysian, Greek art became desiccated, sterile.

For Nietzsche all of this is vitally relevant to the modem condition. Not only did he view Greek tragedy as a paradigm of the human condition, but also as a model for contemporary cultural revival. This revival had its roots in what

Nietzsche perceived as a nexus between the historical moment of the ancient

Greeks and that of modem Germany. He observed the parallels as two-fbld. First, they had both survived imperialist threats (the Greek victory over the Persians, the

Germans over the French); secondly, diey had overcome revolutionary forces (the cult of Dionysus in Greece, the revolutionary sweep in Europe). While the former condition presented an excess of the Apollonian (Apollo equated with god of die state), the latter threatened an excess of the Dionysian (Dionysus representing god of the oppressed). For the Greeks, this conflict led to Aeschylus and Greek drama; for the Germans—Nietzsche argues—similar tensions produced Wagnerian music drama. By marrying Dionysian music to Apollonian drama, Wagner creates a

9 modem réintégration of forces first united in Greek tragecfy^. Nietzsche thus links

Wagnerian music widi the synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian forces he calls

Dionysus.

For a number of reasons, Nietzsche's The Birth ofTragecfy provides the ground for a modem Orphic song that finds its fullest realization in the symbolist poetry of Mallarmé. Both perceive a crisis in language at the end of the nineteenth century resulting in the break down in the forms of art; both identify a figure to mediate between the Apollonian and Dionysian poles that produced Greek tragedy

(for Nietzsche, Dionysus; for Mallarmé, Orpheus); and both respond to religious crisis in a way consistent with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. As Robert McGahey points out, however.

the most significant comparison of Nietzsche and Mallarmé emerges from their views on music. Life, for each of them, is fundamentally aesthetic. And music has a special status as the art form which has the power to overcome art's merely illusory quality, an aperçu Nietzsche took from reading Schopenhauer, Üiough it also clearly fit his own intuition. Mallarmé's reflection on the process of creation in lyric poetry led him to see music and literature as one, both springing from the same hidden source. The figure of Orpheus that emerges from dûs reflection in the French poet's woric is die analogue of Nietzsche's Dionysos, who represents for Nietzsche the common root of music and tragedy Both Nietzsche and Mallarmé are attempting to return an original' music, first conceptualized by the Greeks as mousike. (62)

Though McGahey is right to attribute Nietzsche's identification of Dionysus with music to Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer’s influence in this regard probably came

10 about indirectly rather than directly. Just as Nietzsche was enamored widi

Wagner, Wagner was enamored with Schopenhauer, consciously conceiving his music drama as a realization of Schopenhauerian mettqxhysics. Wagner would come to realize later that his romanticism was inconsistent with the music

Schopenhauer envisioned as "a copy of die will." Nevertheless, Nietzsche's embrace of the Wagnerian musical model caused him to identify Schopenhauerian notions of music with Dionysus rather than Apollo (the god of music). This is a key shift in the evolution of die modem Orphic figure: its identification with absolute music rather than music drama.

Ironically, Schopenhauer is identified more with the symbolists than

Wagner. Like Nietzsche later in life, Mallarmé had a conflicted relationship with

Wagner. While Mallarmé admired Wagner's iconoclasm, he rejected his romantic excess. As chapter three explores, Mallarmé embraced the absolute music of

Debussy over the music drama of Wagner. Absolute music was not only more consistent with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics (though Mallarmé never aspired to a philosophical agenda), but it was also more Orphic in that, as a model for poetry, it led to a negative aesthetics that denied emotionalism and extinguished die personal. Unlike the Wagnerian hero who conquers meaninglessness through transcendence, die modem Orphic poet gains insight by releasing himself into the void.

While it is clear that Mallarmé resembles Orpheus as poet/musician, his

11 relationship to the myth's descent and return theme is more complicated. One of

the primary sources for an account of this aspect of Mallarmé's aesthetics are his

letters. The most studied of these are those referring to the "lights of Toumon,"

the spiritual crisis Mallarmé underwent at the age of twenty-four. Though this

issue is touched on later, it is worthwhile here to consider what Mallarmé says

about the significance of this experience with regard his writing;

I have created my woric by mere elimmation, and any truth I have acquired was bom only of the loss of an impression that, after flashing, had been consumed and allowed me—thanks to the darkness supplanting it—to penetrate more deeply into the sensation of Absolute Daricness. Destruction was my Beatrice.

And in another letter:

But I take no pride, my friend, in this result: rather. I'm saddened, for all that has been discovered not by the normal development of my faculties, but by the sinful and hasty road, a road which is satanic and facile, the road of self-destruction which has produced not strength but a sensibility which was doomed to lead me to that point. 1 myself have no merit and I'd go so far as to say that it is to avoid remorse (for having disobeyed the slow process of natural laws) that 1 like seeking refuge in impersonality—which seems to me to be a consecration. {Selected Letters o f Stéphane Mallarmé 78)

What is interesting about Mallarmé's Orphic descent is the absence of a Eurydice figure. Descriptions of the descent itself^ as Walter A. Strauss says, "has die shape of the Orphic descent into Hades" : "the nocturnal setting, the plunge into the deepest recesses of the psyche, the encounter with death, and the recovery of

12 song" (82). Here, however, he doesn't return with his muse, but with a new sense

of being. Once again Mallarmé's aesthetics are negative—even in the extreme.

Rather than pursuit of poetic truth (Beatrice), he discovers it thro*%h "elimina­

tion." Whafs more, Orphic poetry not only replaces personal love, it results in

depersonalization altogedier. Direct perception of the sort that can only be gained

within the void leads to nothing less than a new consciousness.

In Mallarmé's poetry, the characteristic of negation is exhibited by its self- referentiality, its metaphoric suggestiveness and semantic autonomy. Chapter three examines the evolution and characteristics of Mallarmé's negative aesthetics as the they approximate the qualities of Debussy's music. This is revealed in particular detail in the comparison of Mallarmé's Après-midi d’un faune with the

Prelude Debussy wrote to honor it. Equally striking, however, is die contrast between the quality of negation in symbolist aesdietics and the practice of dramatic development in Wagner. Instead of tension and release being played out between opposing poles (tonic and dominant), symbolist aesthetics collapse the conventions of linear development, refusing dualities altogether. For Mallarmé, the aim wasn't emotional catharsis, but spiritual release—a key aspect of the Orphic quest.

While the interest of symbolist aesthetics as a way of writing poetry and music are woiked out in the particular readings diat follow, an appreciation of its significance in die scheme of aesdiedc history can be gained by considering the

13 distinction between the Orpheus story and its mythological antitiiesis, Promedieus.

In his well-known hook Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse observes that these two figures embody distinctly different cultural heroes Prometheus defies

Zeus on behalf of mankind. The quintessential rebel, he is also a leader—someone who transforms society by conquering. Orpheus, on the otiier hand, doesn't rebel, but refuses the world. Rather than leading, he wins followers by charming diem.

The movement fi^om a Wagnerian Prometheus to symbolist Orpheus is dramatic, setting the trajectory for at least one strain of modernist aesthetics in a new direction. While it is clear how this breaks down aesthetically (die contrast between romantic expression and symbolist negation), what's most compelling is the contrasting vision implicit in such a shift. An Orphic art is focused on the inner life, on consciousness, transforming society only incidentally fi-om the inside out. With the advent of symbolist aesthetics, modem art becomes a tool of metaphysical inquiry.

This same movement is evident in the evolution of musical modernism.

Debussy is the key figure in this regard—one who, more clearly than Mallarmé as his corresponding symbolist figure in literature, marks die beginning of modernism for music. Like Mallarmé, Debussy's response to Wagner is conflicted. He was moved by Wagner’s intensity, but sickened (much as was Nietzsche) at the spectacle of Wagner's quasi-religious festival at Bayreuth. As was the case with poetry, music was experiencing a breakdown in the order of its language.

14 Understanding that Wagner had extended the old conventions as far as they could be stretched, Debussy sought not just a new style, but a new musical order. A description of the Orphic element in Debussy requires some historical and technical context. While a number of elements go into Debussy's modernism, die key issue focused on in the next two chapters is his role in tonal music—in particular, the shift from tonaUty established by die conventions of functional harmony, and the new tonal order he conceived.

From roughly 1600 to 1900, functional harmony served as the organizing system for tonal music. In this system, a particular tonal center (tonic) served as the basis of relationship for a composition's harmonic activity. Drawn from the major and minor scales of a given tonal center, these relationships consisted of a strict, hierarchical arrangement of harmonic elements. Since members of this hierarchy could also serve as temporary tonal centers (with their own constellation of supporting harmonies), this set of relationships often became quite complicated.

Any given tone serving as tonic, for instance, not only had a sub-dominant and dominant key, but a number of other key relationships—each of which were related their own series of subservient harmonies. Nevertheless, virtually all die notes of a tonal composition could be traced back to its tonic, the point of reference that made the system of relationships possible.

By the end of die nineteenth century, the tonal system itself was eroding.

Various historical accounts narrative the chronology of diis process dififerendy.

15 What is relevant here, however, are the aesthetic events that began to weaken the system of tonal relationships established by functional harmony/ First, an increase in the number of temporary tonal centers widiin the principal tonality.

Berlioz's H arold in Italy, for example, uses eleven of the twelve degrees of die chromatic scale (aU but the one designated by the tritone interval, an important interval with regard to all three of die composers discussed later). Second, moments of tonal ambiguity began to lengdien. Chapter three examines Wagner's

Tristan und Isolde in this regard, but before him techniques such as Chopin's

"tonal parentheses"—an extended series of chords moving by steps—blurred tonal reference. Finally, the sense of tonic was weakened by an increase in chromatic writing. Chromaticism that used to function as ornamentation began to function independently. With more dissonance relative to diatonic harmonies, the sense of a central point of reference diminished.

With the diatonic system saturated to its limit, music was brought to a crossroads; abandon tonal music for an order of non-tonal music, or discover an order of tonal music that didn't rely on functional harmony. Debussy pioneered the latter path, placing him in a pivotal role in musical modernism. Chapter three describes what the new order looked like and how it came about with regard to the periodic patterns produced by diatonic writing. Forgoing for the moment the characteristics of diis aesthetic (which are discussed at length later), a sense of how the Orphic emerged in modem music can be understood by considering

16 Wagner's position with regard to Schopenhauer with diat of Debussy's. As

suggested earlier, W iner's attempt to realize Schopenhauerian thought was

grounded more in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics than his aesdietics. Though

Wagner brought tonal writing to a point of crisis, he still composed widiin the

system of functional harmony. As a consequence, the problem of will—the blind

force to which, Schopenhauer believed, the universe and humankind were

eternally subject—might momentarily be transcended, but could not be escaped.

The diatonic system itself—with its poles of tonic and dominant, the ceaseless

movement of tension and repose—embodied the very desire that Schopenhauer wished to thwart.

Rather than the linear relationships of functional harmony, Debussy's tonal writing focused on the autonomous musical moment. Just as Mallarmé asserted a self-referential contextual system of signification, Debussy established different points of tonal reference and employed a "circular" relationship between keys. As a result, the dualisms giving rise to desire were collapsed. In Debussy's Prélude à l'aprés-ntidi d'un faune-^di woric often identified as the beginning of musical modernism—Mallarmé's poem is reflected in the music's structure. Like

Schopenhauer, Mallarmé fiâmes religious crisis as tiie need to escape desire.

Rather than purging it with emotional intensity (as does Wagner in Tristan und

Isolde), poem and music resolve it aesthetically. This, finally, is the symbolist

Orphic solution. It isn't simply a backlash against romanticism (there are many

17 modernist responses to romanticism), but a descent via die principles of negation.

As will be seen in the readings of symbolist and post-symbolist works that follow,

symbolism refuses bodi intellectual rationalization and emotive catharsis. In both

music and poetry, the symbolist Orpheus—by means of a negative aesdietics—act

through the im^ination. The mind is purged, perception cleansed. Rather than

conquering, Schopenhaurian pessimism is escaped by means of die inner ear and

eye.

The chapters that follow precede chronologically. Chapters two and three trace the evolution of the symbohst music/poetry relationship from its inception in

Baudelaire, to its culmination in Mallarmé and Debussy. At the center of this discussion is the figure of Richard Wagner, who dominated the Parisian the arts community in the 1880s. Baudelaire and Mallarmé, figureheads for two successive generations of French poetry, each wrote only one essay on a composer—for both it was Wagner. Chapter two assesses the significance of

Wagner on die poetics of Baudelaire. Though Baudelaire discovered Wagner late in life, Wagner’s concerts in Paris in 1860 were a revelation for him. Moved by the emotional force of the music, as well as Wagner’s theory of the unity of die arts, Baudelaire recognized in Wagner the musical embodiment of his own notion of transcendental correspondence. The "synaesthetic” connection between poetry

18 and music—a notion central to Baudelaire's conception of an aesthetic religion—is a key theme worieed out in one of his last and most important essays, Richard

Wagner et Tannhàuser à Paris. A precursor to the symbolist movement,

Baudelaire challenged the next generation of poets to create a poetry that retained the clarity of the words while realizing the powerful synaesthetic effect of

Wagner’s music.

Conceived in three sections, chapter three takes up Mallarmé's response to

Baudelaire's challenge: it begins with a consideration of Mallarmé's essay, Richard

Wagner, Rêverie d'un Poète Français, which reveals his conflicted response to

Wagner; proceeds with an assessment of how Wagner's influence bore on

Mallarmé's technical development; and concludes with a lengdiy discussion of the correspondence between Mallarmé and Debussy as seen in Debussy's orchestral work. Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, written to honor Mallarmé's poem.

Though he rejected Wagner's emotionalism, Mallarmé recognized in Wagner a formal freedom that shaped the evolution of his own non-representational poetics.

For both Wagner and Mallarmé, a revolt against syntactic conventions was necessary in order to open new semantic possibilities. A central concern of this chapter is to explicate the relationship between Wagner's musical phrase and

Mallarmé's poetic line. Drawing on examples from Tristan und Isolde and "Un

Coup de Dés," this section demonstrates the similarities between Wagner’s subversion of the musical period and Mallarmé's rejection of the strict versification

19 of the Parnassians. For Mallarmé this was a critical stage in the evolution of a non-representational poetics, which, like Debussy's music, exhibits an autonomous, self-referential, contextual system of signification.

Finally, chapter four examines die principle of objectivity in Wallace

Stevens and Igor Stravinsky. After establishing dieir lineage to the symbolism of

Mallarmé and Debussy (a connection others have made), this chapter develops, in turn, the notion of objectivity in Stevens and Stravinsky, and concludes with a comparison of Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and Stravinsky's

Symphony o f Psalms. Side by side, Stevens and Stravinsky illuminate each other not just because of the character of their objectivity, but because for both objectivity arises out of a metaphysics founded on perception. As Stevens said in a letter to Henry Church, "[t]he major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God" {Letters o f Wallace Stevens 378). For Stravinsky this "idea " is not only imbedded in his aesthetics, but expressed direcdy in his religious music. What makes the correspondence between Stevens and Stravinsky particularly striking is their contrasting religious visions. Stravinsky aims to rescue religious tradition fi’om romantic sentimentality; Stevens seeks to salvage romantic union fi’om religious projection. One, in other words, wishes to resurrect

God the wake of lost belief. The other wishes to resurrect belief in the wake of

God's death. Nevertheless Stevens and Stravinsky realize the same aesthetic necessity. For both an impersonal aesdietics is necessary to strip reality of

20 imaginative accretions.

As a concluding thought, one final aspect o f die Orpheus myth might be noted. In Camille Mauclaifs, Le Soleil des morts, Calixte Armel—a character who, according to Walter A. Strauss,’ is a fictionalized portrait of Mallarmé—describes the personal requirements of the new art. It is difficult, pemaps, to imagine the immense creative energy necessaiy not just to create new patterns within die old order, but to discover a fimdamentally new order altogether. Along with the new art arrived a new notion of the artist—someone for whom art is a priest-like vocation. Since symbolist poetry's interest in music was structural, rather than aural, it's appropriate (having come full circle fi’om Wagner’s Bayreuth to

Mallarmé's "theater of theimagination"), that the following passage ends in silence. What shouldn't be overlooked, however, is that, for Armel, the story of

Orpheus is a cautionary tale: to come upon modem tmth, devotion to negation must be complete.

You can make a mistake in religion ... but not in art Therefore it's a terrible and exclusive vocation, making demands on die whole man and allowing no error; you've got to go into it widiout turning your head to see secondary joy, as did Orpheus our master; he lost Eurydice, the image of his soul, because he did not have the patience to contemplate her before he reached the light of day. Our own light is glory. And if we don't want Eurydice to die and if we don't want our glory to be, as the fateful expression goes, die sun of die dead —then we must forever close our eyes to die sun of ordinary life . . . The credo of the modem artist is silence.''

21 NOTES

1. This is according to some versions. One o f the myth's variables is of Orpheus' parentage. According to others, Orpheus had a human father and the lyre was a gift from Apollo—one he was taught to play by his mother and the poet Linus. Henry says this accounts for Orpheus' gift in that "the music which could sway both animate and inanimate nature, and restore the dead to life, had a divine origin, but required human discipline for its realisation" (6).

2. From the ancient Greeks through the twentieth century, there are a number of religious cults that are often referred to by the term Orphism. About the difiBculty of keeping them straight, Strauss says the following; "As far as the myth of Orpheus is concerned, the materials are utterly confusing—and not merely to the nonspecialist in classical studies. In his discussion o f Orpheus and Orphism within the context of Greek culture, E.R. Dodds throws up his hands in despair at the proliferation of theories concerning Orphic cults. Speaking of the 'edifice reared by an ingenious scholarship,' he remarks. I am tempted to call it the unconscious projection upon the screen of antiquity of certain unsatisfied religious longings characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries " (4).

3. A notable exception to this is David Hertz's, Tuning o f the Word, mentioned in chapter three. This provocative book examines the music/poetry relationship in French and German symbolism. It is one of the only books to argue for the strong structural correspondences between musical and literary modernism.

4. These three points are taken from Wenk, 116.

5. "In a novel entitled Le Soleil des morts, written by Mallarmé's fnend Camille Mauclair in 1897, there is, by Mauclair"s admission, un portrait tout intellectuel'of Mallarmé in the character of Calixte Armel. The name, but for one letter, contains anagramatically Mallarmé's name, and even the ix' of the "Sonnet allégorique de lui-même" (Strauss, 138).

6. Camille Mauclair, L e S o le il des m ort quoted in Strauss 138-139.

22 CHAPTER 2

BAUDELAIRE AND THE WAGNERIAN MUSICAL MODEL

Though there was little direct influence, Arthur Schopenhauer's thought is

often regarded as a philosophical correlative to symbolist aesthetics. Godless and

indifferent, the universe—as depicted in The World as Will and Representation—is

driven by the demands of the "will," a ceaseless flux of yearning, a yearning both

unconscious and insatiable; the fundamental principle of the cosmos, this force resides beyond the world of phenomena, yet "appears in every blindly acting force of nature." Moreover, humankind, as a part of the material world, is but a manifestation of this principle. Subject to tfie caprice of myriad desires, die individual is doomed to suffering. Distressed either by the discontentment leading to desire, or the anxiety resulting from it, satisfaction can never be more than momentary. "Everything in life," writes Schopenhauer, "proclaims that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated, or recognized as an illusion. The ground for this lies deep in the very nature of things" (573).

To confront the chaos of cosmic disorder, Schopenhauer proposes a new aesthetics. Such an aesthetics, he argues, must be founded on the principle of

23 objectivity, "i.e., the objective tendency of the mind, as opposed to die subjective, which is directed to one's own self—in other words, to the will" {Contemplating

M usic 146). Yet, the value of an objective aesthetics is not only to thwart the desires of the will, but also to reveal the essence of nature. "Art created by genius," writes Schopenhauer, "repeats or reproduces die eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding in all the phenomena of the world" {Contemplating Music 146). By linking the state of will-less contemplation with the "eternal Ideas," Schopenhauer makes a revolutionary claim for the function of art, a claim fundamental to symbolist aesthetics. An objective art, such as Schopenhauer describes, is an instrument of metaphysics, "a clear mirror of the timer nature of the world" {Contemplating Music 147).*

The alliance between symbolist poetry and music—as exemplified by

Mallarmé and Debussy—was bom of a common crisis. While the crisis is often discussed as an aesthetic event, it is important to recognize the timer impulse fi'om which it was motivated. For the poets of the era, the barren imagery of the

Parnassians (and, more generally, the practices of realism and naturalism), not only violated the changing sensibility, it foisted an untenable cosmic paradigm

Edmund Wilson suggests the significance of this relationship in citing

Whitehead's analysis of the movement from classicism to romanticism as the "key" to what followed in the movement from naturalism to symbolism. Whitehead argues that what "really [took] place" was "a philosophical revolution," in that "a

24 revolution in the inu^ery of poetry is in reality a revolution in metaphysics" (5).

For the symbolists the revolution was motivated by a breach between their inner

and outer worlds. Stripped of the familiar forms of mediation, existence, as

Schopenhauer summed it up, seemed a meaningless, "troubled dream": "Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself as an individual in an endless and boundless world, among irmumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, and erring; and, as if through a troubled dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness" ( 573).

If die gravity of this claim seems overstated, it would not have to the symbolists themselves. The familiar tropes woven throughout the literature—

Baudelaire's "gouffre dont I'odeur/Trahit l'humide profondeur,/D'etemels escaliers sans rampe"; Verlaine's "berceau/ Qu'une main balance/ Aucreux d'un caveau";

Mallarmé's "Azur" that "rit sur la haie"—as well as the tides of the poems themselves—"Spleen," "Épitaphe," "L’Éternité," "Ville Morte,""La Mort," "Âme"— are evidence of the terms in which diey framed their experience. But it is the collective letters of Mallarmé that provide one of the most revealing records of timer conflict in the period. Shortly after the spiritual crisis he suffered in 1866-

1867 (a crisis that his English translator, Henry Weinfield,^ calls "a reflection of a general religious crisis occurring in Europe during the nineteendi century"), he wrote to Cazalis of his "terrible struggle with that old and evil plumage, which is now, happily, vanquished: God":

25 I confess, moreover, but to you alone, diat die torments inflicted by my triumph were so great, I still need to look at myself in that mirror in order to think and that if it were not in front of diis desk on which Fm writing to you, I would become the Void once again. That will let you know that I am now impersonal and no longer die Stéphane that you knew—but a capacity possessed by the spiritual Universe to see itself and develop itself^ ^ o u ^ what was once me. (SL 74)

It is characteristic of Mallarmé to associate his "torments” with die "Void." Like

Schopenhauer, he seeks an aesthetic experience with the Absolute; yet, poetry is not only a technology probing die essence of phenomena; by achieving a state of impersonality, he becomes "a capacity possessed by the spiritual Universe.” ”1 have made a long enough descent into the Void to speak with certainty,” Mallarmé writes later in the same letter. "There is nothing but Beauty—and Beauty has only one perfect expression. Poetry. All the rest is a lie” {SL 75).

To forge the new aesthetic, poetry and music looked to each other.

Symbolist poetry's numerous references to music are by now well documented.

Walter Pater’s dictum that "all art aspires to the condition of music,” and Verlaine’s poem, "Art Poétique,” which begins, "De la musique avant toute chose,” are only among the most often cited of these. But this phenomena in and of itself is not sufficient to stake a claim for music's central position in symbolist poetics. French romantic noveUsts, in particular, chose music as their subject for numerous works; moreover, many of these writers (Stendhal, Balzac, George Sand) not only wrote at length, but also with a technical understanding that surpassed their symbolist

26 counterparts. Instead of the degree of interest, what distinguishes these two literatures—as Hillery notes^—is the pressure music exerts on their respective genres. While music informs the French romantic novel at the level of subject, it affected symbolist poetry at the level of form. The geme of the French novel, in other words, was not significantly altered by the romantics' interest in music, but the symbolists' interest in music greatly influenced the evolution of French prosody.

The nature of this influence has been muddled by—among other things— clichés regarding "the music of poetry" and the "poetry of music." It wasn't music's relationship to the sound of words that captured the symbolists' imagination (one could argue, in fact, that symbolist poetry is fundamentally a silent presence on the page), but their perception of music's essentially nonrepresentational nature."* In his discussion of the hierarchies of art,

Schopenhauer grants music its own category, praising it as a "universal language," which—unlike the other arts—is not a "copy of the phenomenon, or more accurately, the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world" {Contemplating Music 154). Schopenhauer is clear that the values he ascribes are limited to instrumental music—for music associated with words "is striving to speak a language which is not its own." Robert Morgan points out that

"[tjhis view reflects, and presupposes, a uniquely modem and Western conception

27 of music as an autonomous art, freed from the verbal texts to which it had

traditionally been attached and upon which its meaning and significance had

always depended” (37). The idea of absolute music—instrumental music

unassociated with text—and its relationship to both the symbolist poets and notions

of metaphysics will be explored in the next chapter. For now it is enough to

observe that this was the tradition that the symbolists embraced as a model for a

hermetic poetry, I'art pour I’art, in which words—and thus symbols—"illuminate

one another reciprocally."

Ironically, the notion of music as pure, autonomous, unadulterated, was an

anathema to progressive composers at the end of the nineteenth-century. It had not

been until the eighteenth century that instrumental music had been granted

importance equal to vocal music. When instrumental music finally was liberated

from language, it set out to discover a grammar of its own. Rameau's Traité de

Tharmonie, published in 1722, was one of the most celebrated documents in this

endeavor. What evolved was a rigorous system of tonal writing based on the

practice of functional harmony. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however,

the harmonic conventions and symmetrical structures of this tradition began to feel stultifying for composers. Far from pure and autonomous, music seemed codified into a fixed system of worn conventions. Wagner attacked these conventions by saturating the harmonic language with chromaticism in order to create sustained harmonic ambiguity; he also fractured the periodic unit in favor of a more organic

28 phrase structure, touting the "endless melody" over the "tyranny of the quadratic

compositional construction." Like the symbolist poets, the composers of the end

of the century sought spirituality in their art.’ Yet, the inherited language of music

seemed no purer to them than that of the representational arts. Nietzsche's

comment on form applied to music as much as it did to poetry: "I fear we shall

never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar."

With Debussy and Prélude à l'Après-midi d ’un faune music found its first

modernist language. "In the history of music," argues Stefan Jarocinski, "Debussy

opened a new chapter. Almost all the new tendencies that have appeared in the

twentieth-century had their origin in his art, were directly inspired by it, or sprang

in opposition to it" (162). Debussy's debt to symbolist poetry is noted by Paul

Dukas, a composer and critic who befiiended Debussy while they were students at

the Paris Conservatory:

Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Laforgue used to provide us with new sounds and sonorities. They cast a light on words, such as had never been seen before; they used methods that were unknown to the poets that had preceded them; they made their verbal material yield subtle and powerful effects hitherto undreamt of. Above all, they conceived their poetry or prose like musicians, they tended it with the care of musicians and, like musicians, too, they sought to express their ideas in corresponding sound values. It was the writer, not the musicians, who exercised the strongest influence on Debussy.®

The nature of Debussy's fascination with poetry was similar to that of the poets for absolute music. He sought a self-contained art, an independent aesthetic order.

29 While the symbolist poets secularized belief Debussy reconceived tonality. To this end he looked to "circular" development rather than "linear" progression," suggestion and ambiguity as opposed to rhetoric and direct statement. In contrast to the titanic bombast of Wagner, Debussy aspired to Mallarmé's "impersonal" poetics; he shunned dramatic expressivitiy, cultivating instead an objectivity closer to Schopenhauer’s ideals. It is "the voice of tradition," Debussy said, " which prevents [the composer]... from hearing the voice that speaks within him."

The narrative of the musical/literary aesthetics of the symbolist movement is one of both influence and confluence. Paris at the turn of the century was a place of great ferment among the arts. While musicians and poets mingled at

Mallarmé's "Tuesdays," debates about the relationship between the arts raged in journals like La Revue Wagnérienne. Moreover, key aspects of symbolist aesthetics—the breaking of the poetic and musical Une, the emphasis on semantic and harmonic ambiguity, the preference, in both arts, for suggestion over direct statement—also surfaced directly from internal pressures within music and poetry.

The recognition of these aesthetic traits in each other—a kind of artistic mirroring- served to reinforce and advance the movement. Though the spirit of symboUsm was one of purification, distillation, and essence, it was achieved through a concern for artistic unity.

At the center of dûs activity was die figure o f Richard Wagner. It is difficult to overestimate Wagner's influence at the end of die nineteendi century.

30 As remarkable as the depth o f his influence is the broad range of his appeal. Not

only was he a force for the era's writers and composers to contend with, but he was

also an important figure for leading philosophers, politicians, and even painters.

In the 1880s, Paris was one of the first cultural centers to come under Wagnerian

domination. As much as his music, it was Wagner’s prose on the relationship

between the arts, especially poetry and music, that bore on symbolist writing.^

Baudelaire and Mallarmé (the figureheads for two successive generations of

French poetry) each wrote only one essay on a composer—for both it was Wagner.

Says Bryan Magee of Wagner's influence: "Wagner was—both directly and,

through Baudelaire, indirectly—the acknowledged progenitor of the Symbolist

movement" {Aspects o f Wagner 78).

For the symbolist poets, Wagner not only embodied music, but also

romanticism. Both Baudelaire and Mallarmé are important in this regard. Though

Baudelaire discovered Wagner late in life, Wagner's concert in 1860 was a

revelation for him. Moved by the emotional force of the music, Baudelaire recognized in Wagner the musical embodiment of his own notion of transcendental

correspondence. The "synesthetic" coimection between poetry and music is a key theme worked out in one of his last and most important essays, Richard Wagner and Tannhàuser in Paris. Thus Baudelaire, as a precursor to symbolism, concretizes the musical analogy for poetry. Twenty years later, Mallarmé wrote his own essay on Wagner. While Mallarmé affirms Wagner's artistic importance,

31 he rejects the model of music drama. Nevertheless they are united in their opposition to worn out convention based on formal symmetry. Mallarmé looked to music to free himself from the limits of the alexandrine line; similarly, W s^ e r was the first to attack the four- and eight- bar phrase (the periodic unit).

Ultimately, however, it is Claude Debussy who shares the most with Mallarmé.

Instead of the dramatic expressivity of Baudelaire and Wagner, Mallarmé and

Debussy employed a negative aesthetics that cultivated suggestion and evocation.

Debussy's orchestral work. Prélude à lAprès-midi d'un faune, written to honor

Mallarmé’s poem, provides a key example of symbolist aesthetics for both music and poetry.

As of 1860, the year that Baudelaire first heard Wagner's music, Paris had not been kind to Wagner. Over two decades earlier—from September 1839 to

April 1842~he had lived in Paris hoping to present his work at the Opera. The endeavor was a bitter failure, leaving Wagner impoverished and humiliated. "I do not believe in any other type of revolution," said Wagner, "than that which begins with the burning down of Paris." Though he made a series of short visits in 1850s, it wasn't until 1859 that he moved back with his wife—settling in a house on the

Champs-Elysées. Feeling that Paris was finally ready to receive his music, he planned three concerts for the following year. Baudelaire reported that "Wagner

32 had been very bold: the programme at his concert comprised neither instrumental

solos nor songs, nor any of those exhibitions so dear to a public fond above all of

virtuosos and their vocal feats—only choral or orchestral extracts" (SIV 327).

Public reaction was generally favorable, but critical reception hostile. By the time

he performed Tannhàuser, the battle lines between Wagner's supporters and

detractors had been clearly drawn. After a year’s preparation—including 164

rehearsals—Wagner was forced to withdraw his opera on the third night.

Observers at the concerts described "dog-noises" and tumult that caused Wagner to

have to cease playing for as long as fifteen minutes at a time.* On the final night a near riot broke out. Catulle Mendes, founder of the Revue fantaisiste, wrote: "In

1861, Charles Baudelaire and I exchanged blows with the hecklers; I remember having even received certain thwacks which I returned with interest."’

It was in this climate of antagonism that Baudelaire first heard Wagner.

Less than thirty years later the Parisian attitude toward Wagner would come full circle. "Writers not only discussed musical subjects, but judged painting, literature, and philosophy from a Wagnerian point o f view," Romain Rolland said.

"The whole universe was seen and judged in the thought of Bayreuth." Among

Wagner's earliest and most ardent Parisian defenders was a coterie of poets.

Baudelaire' alliance with this group—the fact that they were fighting against the current of critical opinion—partially explains the motivation behind Baudelaire's letter to Wagner upon hearing his first series of concerts. He opens with an

33 extended apology that concludes: "... I would have hesitated much longer to express my admiration to you through a letter had 1 not day after day set eyes on unworthy, ridiculous articles where all possible efforts are made to defame your glory. Yours is not the first case where my country has caused me suffering and shame. In short, it's indignation that has led me to express my gratitude. 1 said to myself: 1 want to be distinguished from all those jackasses'" (SL 145).

But Baudelaire is quite clear about true reason for his letter: "Above all, 1 want to say that I owe you the greatest musical pleasure I've ever experienced.”

The body of this letter—which is a useful point of entry to the issue of Baudelaire's relationship to Wagner—elaborates on this sentiment and is useful to consider in full:

The first time 1 went to the theater to hear your works 1 was pretty ill- disposed toward them. I admit 1 even had a lot o f bad prejudices. But I had an excuse, for I've so often been a dupe. I've heard so much music by charlatans making great claims. I was instantly won over. What 1 felt is beyond description, but if you'll deign no to laugh. 111 try to convey my feelings to you. At first it seemed to me that 1 knew your music already, and later, in thinking it over, 1 understood what had caused this illusion. It seemed to me that the music was my own, and I recognized it, as any man recognizes those things he is destined to love. For anyone who isn't a man of intelligence such a claim would seem ridiculous in the extreme, above all when it's written by someone who, like me, does not know music and whose entire musical education extends no further than listening (with great pleasure admittedly) to a few fine pieces by Weber and Beethoven. Then the element that struck me above all was fire grandeur of your music. It represents the heights, and it drives the listener on to the heights. In all your works I've found the solemnity of Nature's great sounds, her great aspects, and the solemnity, too, of the great human passions. One instantly feels swept up and subjugated. One of the strangest pieces, one of

34 those that aroused in me a new musical emotion, is that designed to depict religious ecstasy. The effect produced by "The Introduction of the Guests" and "The marriage Feast" is immense. 1 felt all the majesty of a life greater than the one we lead. And another thing, too; in hearing it, 1 frequently experienced a rather odd emotion, which could be described as the pride and joy of comprehension, of allowing myself to be penetrated and invaded—a truly sensual pleasure, recalling that of floating through the air or rolling on the sea. And at the same time the music occasionally expressed all the pride of life. Generally those deep harmonies seemed to me comparable to those stimulants that speed up the pulse of the imagination. Finally, I experienced in addition—and 1 beg you not to laugh- -feelings that probably stem from my particular cast of mind and my frequent preoccupations. Your music is full of something that is both uplifted and uplifting, something that longs to climb higher, something excessive and superlative. To illustrate this, let me use a comparison borrowed from painting. 1 imagine a vast extent of red spreading before my eyes. If this red represents passion, 1 see it change gradually, through all die shades of red and pink, until it reaches the incandescence of a furnace. It would seem difficult, even impossible, to render something more intensely hot and yet a final flash traces a whiter furrow on the white that provides its background. That, if you will, is the final cry of a soul that has soared to a paroxysm of ecstasy. (SL 146)

Beyond the degree of recognition (and there are few similar testimonials in his writing), the letter suggests the nature of Baudelaire's fascination with

Wagner’s music. What "struck [Baudelaire] above all" was the music's visceral effect on him—in other words, its sensible aspect, as distinguished from its cognitive. Lloyd James Austin argues that the occasion for Baudelaire's famous poem, "Elevation, " was the experience of hearing Weber and Beethoven (the experience to which he refers in the letter). This seems even more likely when one compares the rhapsodic language of Baudelaire's letter (" truly sensual pleasure, recalling that of floating through the air or rolling on the sea"), with the tropes of

35 the poem ( "Par dela le soleil, par delà les ethers/Par delà les confins des spheres

etoilees"). For subsequent modernist writers (Eliot, Joyce, Mann, for instance),

music provided a formai schema. Baudelaire's thinking about music, however,

always begins with emotional experience itself; what he is interested in taking

back for poetry is the feeling of, as he says in "La Musique,""me prend comme un

mer;

Yet, there is also another aspect to his interest. Baudelaire is clear about

what won him over fi’om his "bad prejudice": "At first it seemed to me that 1 knew your music already, and later, in thinking it over, I understood what had caused this illusion. It seemed to me that the music was my own . . ." Why he felt this way is less clear; all he can articulate at the moment is a generalized sense- divined fi’om the emotional experience of the music—of "the pride and joy of comprehension." Moreover, most of what follows is a description of something outside himself that caused him to feel "uplifted. " In other words, it isn't the experience of music that is "his own, " but rather something in this foreign experience of music that caused recognition in the way that "any man recognizes those things he is destined to love." Thus, while the sense o f recognition is an obvious source of interest for Baudelaire, the nature of this recognition is neither resolved for us—nor, one senses, for Baudelaire.

Later in the letter Baudelaire mentions that he "had begun to write a few meditations on the pieces fi'om Tannhàuser and Lohengrin.” These meditations

36 will become his long essay, Richard Wagner and Tannhàuser in Pûm —the writing of which he described to his mother as a "grand travail.” Consistent with his philosophy of criticism, it is these issues—how Wagner’s music achieves its effect, and the nature of Baudelaire's personal response to it—that he will try to work out in his writing:

From the moment, that is from the first concert, 1 was possessed by the desire to penetrate more deeply into an understanding of these singular works. I had undergone, or so at least it seemed to me, a spiritual operation, a revelation. My rapture had been so strong, so awe-inspiring, that I could not resist the desire to return to it again and again. My feeling was no doubt largely compounded of what Weber and Beethoven had already revealed to me, but also of something new that 1 was powerless to define; and that powerlessness produced in me a sense of vexation and curiosity mixed with a strange delight. (SfV 332)

Baudelaire's acknowledgement, yet again, of Weber and Beethoven indicates that

Baudelaire's response to Wagner was cumulative—that is, it was not only about

Wagner, but about the possibilities of music itself. "For some time," Hyslop argues, "[Baudelaire] had been dreaming of an alliance between poetry and music, encouraged perhaps by his former talks with Nerval as well as other friends, and further stimulated by the knowledge he had acquired about the theories and aspirations of the German composer" {Baudelaire: Man o f his Time 83). There is circumstantial support for this view: Baudelaire's relationship not only with

Nerval, but also Champfleuiy and Charles Barbara (poets devoted to Wagner); musical allusions in his poetry (even a musical "thematics"); and for Verlaine and

37 later poets there was a vague nodon of a "musical haunting" in Baudelaire's poetry.

To whatever degree these things might be true, however, nothing brought

Baudelaire to a specific examination of the issue until Wagner’s concerts. Broadly

speaking, what Baudelaire finds in Wagner is a correlative to his own ideas about art; the analogy of music as a paradigm for poetry is thus made particular; in the experience of Wg^er's music, Baudelaire finds clarification and direction for his aesthetic aspirations.

Commentary on Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris often centers on the essay's beginning. Here, as in the end of the letter, Baudelaire argues for a synesthetic correspondence between the arts. What generally receives attention is

Baudelaire's comparison of three responses to the Lohengrin overture: the program written by Wagner; an assessment of the overture by Liszt; and Baudelaire's own notes (which he claims to have written without reference to either of the other w ritings).However, his point of departure is interesting in and of itself. Framed as a defense of Wagner's music, Baudelaire's counter-attack begins with an affirmation of Wagner's belief in the synthesis of the arts. Yet, part of his agenda, as Baudelaire acknowledges, is to advocate a long-standing aesthetic tenet of his own:

The reader knows the aim we are pursuing, namely to show that true music suggests similar ideas in different minds. Moreover, a priori reasoning, without further analysis and without comparisons, would not be ridiculous in this context; for the only really surprising thing would be that

38 sound could not suggest color, that colors could not give the idea of melocfy, and that both sound and color together were unsuitable as media for ideas; since all dung always have been expressed by reciprocal analogies, ever since the day God created the world as a complex indivisible totality. (SW 330-331)

Baudelaire's proof of this idea lies in the demonstration of similar associations in the mind of three listeners. As part of this explication of diis idea, however, he cites the first two stanzas of his most famous expression of this idea, his poem

"Correspondences" :

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unité. Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté. Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

(Nature is a temple where living pillars At times allow confuse words to come forth; There man passes dirough forests of symbols Which observe him with familiar eyes.

Like long echoes which in a distance are mingled In a dark and profound unison Vast as night is and light. Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another)

Earlier in the essay he asserts that: "In music, as in painting, and even in the written word, which, when all is said and done, is the most positive of the arts,

39 there is always a gap, bridged by the imagination of the hearer" (SfV 328). The

word that Baudelaire uses is "lacune," which is often cited when describing

Baudelaire's understanding of the function of the imagination. However, this

"lacune" is filled in two ways: through synesthetic and transcendental

correspondences. Synesthetic correspondences operate as described in the

preceding passages; the imagination discerns connections between color and

abstraction, melody and image. Even more important, however, is transcendental

correspondence, for it unites the particular with the universal, the temporal with

the eternal." In other words, according to Baudelaire's cosmic paradigm "[l]es parfums, les coulerus et les sons se repondent " only because they originate "[d]ans

une tenebreuse et profonde unite. "

It is this second idea, rather than the first, which is critical to Baudelaire's correlation between poetry and Wagner's music. Baudelaire says in the essay that he was "determined to discover the why and the wherefore, and thus to exchange

[his] sensuous pleasure for knowledge" (S1V 333). Since both Art and Revolution and The Art-work o f the Future were untranslated, his primary book for this purpose was an English translation of Opera and Drama, Wagner's explication of his idea for musical drama. Wagner embraces Greek tragedy as his point of reference for music drama (Wagner's name for the modem opera). There are a number of reasons for this: its collective use of all the arts, its use of myth for subject matter, its religious significance (both in content and occasion), its

40 celebration of "die purely human” ( by which Wagner seems to mean a celebration

of life itself), and finally the fact that it was artistic event in which the entire

community took place. For Wagner, Biyan Magee summed up, ”[t]his art-fbrm

was ideal because it was all-embracing; its expressive means embraced all the arts,

its subject matter embraced all human experience, and its audience embraced the

whole population. It was the summation of living" {Aspects ofWagrter 13).

Anyone who has tried to read Wagner's books will understand the difficulty

of trying to accurately sununarize his writing. It is enormous and sprawling,

sometimes contradictory and often digressive.’^ What is of concern here, however,

is not so much Wagner himself, as the way in which Baudelaire understood

Wagner (though Baudelaire seems to understand Wagner on his own terms quite

well). What Baudelaire ultimately discovers is that his own notion of

transcendental correspondence has much to do with Wagner's sense of myth. To

understand the nature of this revelation, however, it is necessary to follow the

unfolding of Baudelaire's analysis. This can be seen in three of the Wagner

passages that Baudelaire quotes.

As noted earlier, fi*om the begirming Baudelaire focuses on Wagner's attention to the unity of the arts. However, he extends this discussion past the essay's introduction and into his exploration of why Wagner's music affects him in the way that it does. Noting Wr^ner's assessment of the Greek theater as the model for "the perfect art work "--for instance—Baudelaire quotes Wagner in a

41 letter to Berlioz;

We are rightly astonished, nowadays, that durty thousand Greeks could follow with sustained interest the performance of Aeschylus's tragedies; but if we ask by what means such results were achieved, we find diat they were due to the alliance of all the aits concentrated on the same goal, that is to say the production of the most perfect and die only true art-work. From there 1 went on to study the inter-relationship between the different branches of art, and having understood the relationship between plastic and mimic forms of art, 1 came to examine die links diat exist between music and poetry: fi-om this analysis, a light dawned suddenly that completely dissipated the darkness that had hitherto worried me. (SW 336)

Baudelaire's interest in this passage is clear enough: he himself is venturing the

same examination. The dawning "light" of which Wagner writes is his revelation that "at the precise point where one of these arts reached limits beyond which it could not go, there began at once with rigorous precision, the sphere of action of the other" (336). Wagner is speaking of emotional expressivity here, but he clearly means more; music and poetry, according to Wagner, are each expressive of insight unique to their own artistic domain; it is only through reunification that the complete experience—art as religion—can be rendered

What Wagner concluded about the "precise point" of limitation for poetry and music was of great interest to Baudelaire. For Wagner the task of poetry, which more naturally captures the particular, is to yield to forms than suggest the universal; music, by die same logic, which by its nature is transparent to reality, must anchor itself in the here and now. Baudelaire also quotes Wagner on this

42 point:

The ihydunical arrangement and the (almost musical) adornment of the rhyme are, for the poet, means to assuring to his line or to his sentence a power diat captivates, as though by means of a spell, governs feeling as it will. This tendency, which is essential to the poet, leads him to the extreme limit of his art, a limit to which music is immediately contiguous, and it follows therefore that the most complete work of any poet ought to be the one that in its ultimate form was perfect music {SW 339)

Baudelaire will take from Wagner bodi his sense of artistic paradigm (for Wagner,

Greek theater; for Baudelaire, Wagner’s music), and his notion of die aim and role of the arts. Yet, just as Wagner's writing is an articulation of that which he already grasped creatively, Baudelaire's attempt to understand Wagner is aimed at deepening his own musical experience. Ultimately, it is the religious sense of

W iner's music that Baudelaire hopes to reclaim for poetry.

This idea of the limits of art is what led Wagner to some related ideas that number among his most interesting. Of primary significance in this realm is his understanding of myth. It is through the notion of myth—one that Wagner not only borrows from the Greek theater, but develops according to his own, premonitory assessment of its value—that Wagner cultivates his theory of artistic unity. For when Wagner argues that poetic limits and musical limits are "contiguous," it is myth itself that he finds at their common border. From the example of the Greeks

(though he eventually moves beyond this), Wagner discerns an artistic material that speaks to both the "concrete form" of language and the "abstract reasoning" of

43 music. Baudelaire quotes Wagner regarding die appeal of myth:

From this stage I saw diat I was inevitably being led to point to the myth as the ideal material for he poet. The myth is the primitive and anonymous poetry of the people, and we find it taken up again in every age, remodelled constandy by the great poets of cultivated ages. In die myth, indeed, human relations discard almost completely their conventional forms, intelligible only to abstract reason; they show what is really human in life, what can be understood in any age and show it in diat concrete form, exclusive to all imitation, that confers upon all true myths dieir individual character, which is recognizable at the first glance. (SW 339)

One of the most distinctive characteristics of the music drama is that it

depicts the inner life of its character rather than limiting character to social

relationships. Since the plot of traditional drama depended on a series of cause

and effect incidents to propel it forward, it was burdened by the need to realize

convincing social and political situations. Music drama would be different firom

this in that it would explore die inner lives of its characters, rather than relegating

itself to the depiction o f their motives. Beethoven's music, Wagner argues,

prepared for this by cultivating the ability of music to depict inner realities; yet

music had been limited by language that was dependent on representing particular

ideas and subject to the rational principles of logic. The value of myth for the new

opera that Wagner envisioned was that it offered archetypal images that expressed universal experiences; since it wasn't overwhelmed by the requirement of verismilitudinous depictions of time and place, it could better realize the inner realities of its characters.

44 Certainly one of Wagner's most provocative insights regarding the limits of

music and poetry is his sense of the value of myth. There are different facets to

his sense of its universality, but one of the primary—and most far reaching—ideas is

his sense of its relationship to the unconscious. On this point L.J. Rather has said

that "Wagner may have been the first to formulate the task confi’onting European

humanity of the present age as the making conscious of the unconscious. In so

doing he anticipated Eduard von Hartmann's use of the same words in 1868 (with

reference to a philosphical and social task) and Freud's use of the them in 1896

(with reference to a psychological task)" (110). To some degree, Wagner's notion

of the unconscious was derived fi*om his experience with Schopenhauer. Many

contemporaries of Wagner have commented on Schopenhauer's influence on him; by all accounts he is the most influential intellectual presence in Wagner's music.

Without digressing, it is suggestive to point out that after Wagner read The World as Will and Representation, he withdrew into a six year hiatus—the only such period in his life—during which he revised the theory of opera laid out in Opera and Drama. Yet, what Wagner took fi*om Schopenhauer was not his aesthetics

(this, as we will see, is much closer to those of Debussy), but his metaphysics—the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal, die tragedy of individuation.

Cut von Westemhagen writes: "More than the thoughts expressed, Schopenhauer's metaphysics and Wagner's music share somediing that is outside the province of reason " (344). Most importandy, he embraced Schopenhauer's notion of music as

45 the direct representation of the metaphysical will."

By applying this idea to myth, in particular, and music drama, in general,

Wagner gave Schopenhauer a literary inflection. The metaphysical universe as

described by Schopenhauer~by means of the archetypal expressions of mytfi—

could be accessed through the unity of poetry and music as set forth by Wagner.

Yet, there is also a less linear aspect of die unconscious at p l^ in Wagner's relationship to Schopenhauer. Though the break in Wagner's music before and after his six-year hiatus is clear (it is afterward that he began writing the Ring cycle), it is not total—there is, to be sure, a continuous thread. Bryan Magee, one of the most thorough scholars on the subject of Wagner and Schopenhauer, offers this summary of Wagner's own account o f his development:

As Wagner now began to see it, his early self had developed an ever- widening schism between the conscious and the unconscious sides o f his personahty. At the conscious level he had evolved a sophisticated assortment of culturally-derived views ... But deep down in the recesses of his unconscious he had not really subscribed to any of diis. And his works of art, sprung as they were from the intuitive and unconscious levels of his personality, reflected what he really believed and not what he believed he believed. In a way, he had become increasingly puzzled by his own work. Then at last, in Schopenhauer, he found the unconsciously held convictions and intuitions of his buried self raised to the level of consciousness and articulated verbally in the form of a systematic philosophy This moved him to tire roots of his being, and caused him to embrace consciously tire view of reality to which his unconscious had been subscribing. And by putting his conscious self fully in touch witii his unconscious self for the first time it rendered him whole. {Philosopi^ of Schopenhauer 340)

46 Explicitly or implicitly, Wagner’s music drama demonstrates two types of relationships between the imagination and the unconscious. Whedier one accepts the equality^ of the arts as outlined in Opera and Drama, or the primacy of music as suggested by Wagner's later comments, the requirements for a religious art are the same; it must point toward both the real and the ideal; die world of here and now, as well as the eternal and universal. For W%ner, it is mydi—as die projection of the unconscious—that unifies the discrete provinces of music and poetry. Moreover, in the use of aesthetic paradigms Wagner suggests another role for the unconscious. In both Wagner’s use of Greek theater initially, and

Schopenhauer eventually, the idea of an artistic model as a conduit to the unconscious is evident. His use of Greek theater, for instance, is not simply a looking back; with the advent of Shakespeare, "a genius the like of which was never heard of" and Beethoven, who developed the expressive power of music beyond the powers of language, Wagner believed that the new music drama would not only exceed what had come before it, it would be different in kind. Similarly,

Schopenhauer’s ideas were not a template for Wagner’s music. As Magee says about Schopenhauer’s influence over Wagner, "it was not a bolt fiom-the-blue conversion so much as a case of Wagner discovering intuitions which were already his in the hidden-from-himself depths of his creative personality, now openly and boldly expressed for the first time. In aesthetics, as in other matters,

Schopenhauer put Wagner in touch with his own unconscious." {Philosophy o f

47 Modem Music 348)

In cultivating music as a correlative for a poetry, Baudelaire accepts both

precepts. As with Wagner's acceptance of Schopenhauer, Baudelaire hears in

Wagner’s music the resonance of his own art. Yet, it isn't in the particulars of

Wagner's aesthetic program that he recognizes his own ambition, but in his

subjective artistic temperament. Toward the end of the essay, he draws dûs

important distinction; "We have already, 1 think, identified two men in Richard

Wagner, the man of order and the man of passion. It is the man of passion, the man of feeling, 1 want to discuss here" (51T 354). Later in die same paragraph

Baudelaire uncovers not only what it is that moves him about Wagner’s music, but also the significance of the Greek model—something we by now understand— through his emphasis in quotation—to be a parallel theme:

What therefore appears to me to characterize above all, and in an unforgettable way, die music of the master is nervous intensity, violence in passion and in willpower. That music expresses, now in the suavest, now in the most strident tones, all that lies most deeply hidden in the heart of man. An ideal ambition, certainly, hovers over every one of his compositions; but if^ by the choice of his subjects and his dramatic mediod, Wagner come close to antiquity, by the passionate energy of his expression he is in our day the most genuine representative of modem man And all the technical loiowledge, all die efifoits, all die strategy o f this fertile mind are, in truth, no more than the very humble, the very zealous servant of this irresistible passion. (Sff^ 355)

By affirming Wagner's "violence in passion and in willpower"—something he elsewhere describes as Wagner's "overriding despotic taste"—Baudelaire affirms

48 those elements of Wagner's music that correspond to the Schopenhauerian Will.

Its ability, in other words, to evoke the universal (whether that be the unconscious,

the mythic, or die Absolute). Certainly this is part of what Baudelaire hears of

himself in Wagner. Thus what he first recognizes in Tannhauser is "the struggle

between the two principles that have chosen the human heart as their main batde-

ground, the flesh and the spirit, hell and heaven, Satan and God” (SW 341). It is

this same unity—the duality of existence—that binds the poems of Les fleurs du

mal. "Every well-ordered brain," says Baudelaire in reference to Tannhauser, "has

within it two infinities, heaven and hell; and in any image of one of these it

suddenly recognizes the half of itself" (SIV 342).

Furthermore, in concretizing the nature of the musical model for poetry,

Wagner also provides an example for its use. In defending W iner's role as critic and artist, Baudelaire offers an assessment of the role of aesthetics in an artist's life; "In the spiritual life of great poets, a crisis is bound to occur that leads them to examine their art critically, to seek the mysterious laws that guided them, the idea being to draw from this study a series of precepts whose divine aim is infallibility in the poetic process" (SW 340). Ostensibly Baudelaire is talking about Wagner; manifestly he is speaking of himself. Wagner's music amounts to a "crisis” in

Baudelaire's life in that the experience itself threatens the supremacy of poetry as the principal art form. By discerning the "mysterious laws” that guide Wagner,

Baudelaire is engaged in a process of self-discovery. Yet, he is not only

49 uncovering an aestfietic self^ but an unconscious self as well. Baudelaire's recognition of diis point is signalled in die earlier quote regarding Wagner as "the most genuine representative of modem man"; music was no more a template for

Baudelaire, than Schopenhauer or Greek theater was for Wagner. Radier, die proper aesthetic correlative (for Baudelaire, music) places the artistic imagination in touch with the unconscious (the collective psyche). This is even more evident if we remember that what ignited Baudelaire's imagination to begin with was the visceral aspect of W%ner"s music: emotion over ideas, aesthetic experience over theory. In drawing a parallel between W%ner and Schopenhauer with Wagner and his admirers, M%ee makes a similar observation: "As [the unconscious] is the key to what Wagner himself does for those who are susceptible to his art, it explains why his attitude towards Schopenhauer is similar to their attitude towards him" {Philosophy o fSchopenhauer 348).

Ultimately, Baudelaire's relationship to music is a matter of convergence, more than direct influence. By the time he heard Wagner in 1860, he had completed Les fleurs du mai, and, widi die exception of his essay on Wagner, almost all of his important critical works. Six years later he had a debilitating stroke resulting in his death. Even as he found music a worthy imaginative and aesthetic correlative, the reason Baudelaire redrew "a series of precepts" for poetry—at this late stage in his career, with his poetics fully constituted—was the challenge of music laid down by Wagner. For die poets of the age, Wagnerian

50 music was a double-edged sword: provocative in the possibilities it st%gested,

while it threatened to usurp poetry's supremacy among die aits. One of the

striking aspects of Baudelaire's attitude in diis regard is die completeness widi

which he acquiesces. Yet, in clarifying the connection between Wagner and

himself, Baudelaire bequeaths to the next generation of poets a refined challenge—

to create a poetry with the powerful synesdietic effect of Wagner's music, a poetry

that retains the clarity of the word while realizing the evancesence of music. It is this challenge that, twenty years later, Mallarmé takes up with great seriousness.

51 NOTES

1. Janaway reviews the terms will and representation as they relate to art, 23-34. 2. See the introduction to Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems, xiii. 3. See Hillary, 8-11.

4. A key point demonstrated in chapter three is that the symbolist interest in music was structural, rather than aural. Especially as seen in Mallarmé, symbolist poetry aimed to approximates music's self-referential system of signification. 5. See Morgan, 37-41. 6. See Valias, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, 52. 7. For a review of the notion of artistic synthesis in several of Wagner's operas see Stein's, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts. 8. See Rather, 66-68.

9. Quoted in Magee, Aspects o f Wagner, 81. 10. For a reading of this letter with regard Wagner's significance to Baudelaire, see Lacoue-Labarthe's chapter entitled "Baudelaire," 1-40. 11. For a discussion of the distinction between synesthetic and transcendental correspondence, see Chadwick, 8-16. 12. Rather discusses Wagner's prose in chapter two of Reading Wagner, "On the Quality of Wagner’s Poetry and Prose," 32-59. 13. For a discussion of the influence of Schopenhauer on Tristan und Isolde (music discussed in the next chapter), see Aberbach, 159-194.

52 CHAPTER 3

MALLARMÉ AND DEBUSSY: POÉSIE PURE, ABSOLUTE MUSIC

By the time Mallarmé wrote Richard Wagner, Rêverie d'un Poète Français,

Wagner was embraced—even idolized—by the Parisian arts community. One of the

primary sources for Wagner’s ideas about music drama and German musical transcendentalism was La Revue Wagnérienne. Though it was only published for three years, the journal was an important venue for progressive poets interested in a musical poetics.' In January of 1885, the journal's editor, Édouard Dujardin, asked Mallarmé to contribute an article on Wagner. "I have spent all of yesterday and today on the study,” Mallarmé replied on July 5. ”lt is half article, half prose- poem, but 1 haven't been able to finish it. It has been more difBcult than anything 1 have ever done, 1 think. . . . 1 have never seen any Wagner, and yet 1 want to write something original, something accurate, something important on him. You must give me time” {SL 146). Two weeks later the essay was forwarded for publication.^

Mallarmé's essay on Wagner stands in striking contrast to Baudelaire's.

While Baudelaire wrote his essay toward the end of his career, Mallarmé was in

53 the nascent stages of his; while Baudelaire wrote in praise of Wagner against the tide of critical opinion, Mallarmé wrote with reservation at the height of

Wagnerolatry; while Baudelaire wrote a long discursive essay in an effort to explicate Wager's music, Mallarmé wrote a "half article, half Prose-poem" critique of music drama; and while Baudelaire was inspired to write by the experience of

Wagner’s music, Mallarmé had "never seen any " What unites these essays is the respect with which the authors consider their subject, and the care with which the essays were drafted, a solicitousness resulting in an important entry in the criticism of both poets/

Mallarmé's feelings about Wagner are decidedly more conflicted than

Baudelaire's. On the one hand, Mallarmé—like the poets who surround him—is in awe of the ambition o f music drama; on the other hand, he is uncomfortable with what he perceives as a crudeness to Wagner's "dazzling" display of will. This ambivalence is apparent in a passage from his essay Solennité*:

Even in the case of Wagner (the most haughtily French of Poets begs his forgiveness for failing to discuss him here at lengdi), 1 would not, in the strictest sense of the word, speak of theater (without any doubt, there is much more of the dramatic in Greece or in Shakespeare). His is rather a vision of legend which lives for itself beneath a veil of sounds, and mingles with them. His scores, moreover, compared to those of a Beethoven or a Bach, are not merely musical. Something more special, something more complex is involved; namely. Fiction or Poetry, which lies at the crossroads of the other arts, stems from them, and controls them. {SPP 71)

Here is the germ of the critique he will offer in Rêvery. Rather than unifying

54 music and poetry, he feels that Wagner has lost the essence of both. "Refusing

analysis (which would have meant a fruitless suicide)," writes Mallarmé, "this

creator so used the singular, rich gift for synthesis which lived within him, that he

was able to many two elements of beauty which are mutually exclusive or at least

unrelated; intimate drama and ideal music" {SPP 75). Cook's translation does not

quite carry the harsh tone of the original, in which Mallarmé refers to "l'étrange

don d'assimilation en ce créateur" ("the creator's strange gift of assimilation ").

Mallarmé's objection is that rather than create a transformed theater, Wagner has only created an amalgamation of the arts. It is an unnatural "hymen" (as Mallarmé says in the original), because music and poetry are not organically fused, but artificially attached.

Mallarmé’s thoughts on public theater—as opposed to the private theater of the imagination—are involved and largely theoretical. Elsewhere he describes a plan for an Ideal Theater: a secularized religious myth integrating parts of the

Catholic mass.® More generally, Mallarmé wishes to cultivate a theater of

"mystery"—an idea, as we will see, that arises out o f the proper relationship between music and poetry. It is in this regard specifically, Rêvery makes clear, that music drama fails.

Music's mere presence will constitute a triumph provided that it is not brought to bear upon the outmoded methods of the Theater (even though it might be able to expand them to perfection). Music must burst forth and regenerate all vitality. Then the audience will feel that if the orchestra

55 suddenly stopped pouring forth its influence, the actor would immediately become a statue. {SPP 74)

Mallarmé's complaint is that Wagner neither reinvigorates an "anachronistic” form,

nor creates a modem one. Though Mallarmé concedes the effect of music drama,

he argues that it has been achieved at the expense of poetic clarity. Stripped of the

capacity to "recount” (mimesis), drama can only allegorize; drama, in other words,

loses the integrity of its art (without music the actor ”become[s] a statue"). Later in Rêvery Mallarmé argues that ”[t]he central principle of the old Theater has been annihilated" (SPP 74). Ironically, the criticism Mallarmé levels at Wagner, is the same that Wagner directed at opera. Even Wagnerian music, Mallarmé argues,

"escapes" its own "principle”; rather than representing the Idea, it is only used as

"stage music," music that is subordinated to the role of propping up a character.

Baudelaire, of course, addresses the issue of myth at length. Mallarmé, however, makes it the focus of his critique, rather than the subject of praise.

For the second time in history the people (first Greek and now German) can borrow sacred feelings fi-om the past and look upon the secret of their origins, even as that secret is being acted out. Some strange, new, primitive happiness keeps them seated there before that mobile veil of orchestral delicacy, before that munificence which adorns their genesis. Thus, all things are restrengthened in the primitive stream. Yet not in its spring. (SPP 76)

The problem of "origins” will come up again when Mallarmé works out his own view of the relationship between music and poetry. Here, however, he locates

56 Wagner's interest in myth as—partially—a national affectation. By repeating Greek

tragedy, a model Mallarmé considers insufficient, Wagner plays to the

expectations of the German public. This bias is contrasted with the disposition of the French mind, which is strictly imaginative, abstract, and therefore "poetic."

Regardless of national character, however, myth is inadequate not only because it is "anachronistic," but because it lacks universality. "The Theater," says

Mallarmé, "calls not for several established, eternal, or well-known Myths, but for one Myth free of individuality, since it must embrace the many aspects of human life" (SPP 77). The value asserted, then, is for a transformed art that is organically new, since only this will be free of particular bias, national or otherwise.

In spite of Mallarmé's sharp criticism, however, his respect for Wagner remains intact. One of the striking aspects of the voice in this essay is the balance he sustains between reserve and regard. Mallarmé saves the clearest expression of his approval for the essay's conclusions;

Oh Genius! that is why 1, a humble slave to eternal logic, oh Wagner!— that is why I suffer and reproach myself, in moments branded with weariness, because 1 am not among those who leave the universal pain and find lasting salvation by going directly to the house of your Art, which is their journey's end. In times of gladness—gladness for no single nation— this unconquerable portico offers us protection against our insufficiency and the mediocrity of nations; it lifts the ardent to the heights of certainty. For them, it is not merely the greatest journey ever conducted under the aegis of man and your leadership: it is the end of man's journey to an Ideal. (SPP 78)

57 Many of Wagner's concerns—ceremony and ritual, the religious mission of art, the

relationship between language and music—are central concerns for Mallarmé as

well. Moreover, those aspects of Baudelaire's poetry that Mallarmé affirms—

aspects that Baudelaire heard echoed in Wagner's music—suggest an indirect

connection between Mallarmé and Wagner In the end, the problem for Mallarmé

is that he carmot endorse music drama as a model for the unity of the arts What is

particularly troubling—the challenge handed to him by Baudelaire—is the notion of

the supremacy of music over poetry. While Mallarmé acknowledges the challenge

that Wagner's art poses to poetry, Mallarmé is clear that poetry must inevitably reassert itself as the higher form of metaphysical aesthetics. "Oh strange defiance," Mallarmé writes in the begirming of Revery, "hurled at poets by him who has usurped their duty with the most open and splendid audacity; Richard

Wagner! " {SPP 1).^

Ultimately, Mallarmé seeks a musical poetry to be performed in the silent theater of the imagination. "1 am asking for a total restoration [of word and music],"' writes Mallarmé, "in perfect and neutral silence, whereby the mind may seek its own native land again" {SPP 50). Though his commentary on this topic is ubiquitous. Musique et Literature provides some of Mallarmé's most elaborate statements. Like Baudelaire and Wagner, Mallarmé sees the domains of poetry and music as residing in the concrete and the abstract, respectively:

58 For what is the magic charm of art, if not this: that, beyond the book itself^ beyond the very text, it delivers up that volatile scattering which we call the Spirit, Who cares for nothing save universal musicality. (SPP 45)

And later:

Music will release the powers lying within that abstract center of hearing, and even of vision which is Comprehension; while Comprehension, in all its spaciousness, will lend equal power to the printed page I suggest, at my own esthetic risk, the following conclusion ...: namely, that Music and Literature constitute the moving facet—now looming toward obscurity now glittering unconquerably—of that single, true phenomenon which 1 have called Idea. (SPP 50)

Though the metaphors are different, the theology is similar to Baudelaire's: while

Mallarmé senses a "universal musicality" beyond the "dust" of reality, Baudelaire hears the "echoes" of a "dark and profound unison" beyond a "forest of symbols "

Both propose a poetry that reveals an ideal world o f infinite relationships by approximating the synesthetic effect of music. Moreover, Baudelaire and

Mallarmé circumscribe the domains of words and music in ways very similar to

Wagner: poetry is valued for its specificity, music for its abstractive power. As has already been seen, Wagner's notion that the limits of poetry and the limits of music are "immediately contiguous" led him to conclude "that the complete work of any poet ought to be the one that in its ultimate form was perfect music " (339).

It is a sentiment both Baudelaire and Mallarmé would have endorsed.

What changes, therefore, between Baudelaire's encounter with Wagner and

59 Mallarmé's encounter twenty years later, is neither a shift in thought regarding the

discreet character of music and poetry, nor a change of attitude about the value and aim of an aesthetic union; rather, it is Mallarmé's vision of a union achieved through poetry's approximation of music's essential non-nonrepresentational nature, a poetry that, by loosening its semantic ties and obeying its own irmer logic, achieves the suggestive, evocative effects of absolute music. Rather than an amalgamation of the arts—such as Mallarmé accuses Wagner of creating—

Mallarmé argues for a union of essences. This union would be modem not only in its avoidance of "legend, " but also in its origin in genuine imaginative synthesis.

A religious art, of the sort to which Mallarmé aspires, carmot be achieved by wrapping language in music; this leads to a vulgar display of virtuosity that arouses emotion, but does not achieve transcendence; what Mallarmé wishes to practice is a distilled art that retains the "necessary character" of both music and literature, while achieving something organically new. Only by assimilating music into language, a process of a tme imaginative synthesis, can poetry return to its proper status among the arts. "[T]his [the play of music]," says Mallarmé, "will all be useless until language, retempered and purified by the flight of song, has given it meaning" {SPP 49).

To a great extent, the importance of Wagner to Mallarmé is that he helped codify Mallarmé's thoughts about music. Unlike Baudelaire, who embraced the

Wagnerian musical model almost unconditionally, Mallarmé both pushed against it

60 and pulled it toward him. What is at stake for Mallarmé, of course, is not egoism regarding the hierarchical arrangements of the arts: it is the question of what would constitute an effective modem metaphysical aesthetics. Underlying his critique of Wagner’s emotionalism is his rejection of the correspondence between music drama and a Schopenhauerian vision of music as a "a clear and universal exactness.” As will become clear, Baudelaire and Wagner's writing remain embedded in the idiom of nineteenth-century romanticism; moreover, it was not an impersonal, "objective" aesthetics, but one that exploited dramatic expressivity.

For art to respond to the movement of the will, Mallarmé believed, it must be free to follow its own irmer imperative. To this end, he found a more appropriate model in the absolute music of the symphony, a model, unlike music drama, useful in cleansing poetry of its reliance on mimesis.

The Wagnerian musical model, finally, was less important to Mallarmé in its conception of music as such, than as a representation of romantic aesthetics. In

Wagner’s romantic iconoclasm, in his volcanic creative energy, Mallarmé recognized a formal freedom that shaped the evolution of his own non- representational poetics. Rather than a general appreciation of the romantic spirit,

Mallarmé’s interest in Wagner concerned, specifically, the correspondence between the musical phrase and the poetic line.

How tiresome it all is! Official verse must be used only in the crisis moments of the soul. Modem poets have understood this. With a fine

61 sense of the delicate and the sparing, they hover around the official alexandrine, approach it with unusual timidity almost with fear; and rather than use it as their principle or as a point of departure, they suddenly conjure it up, and with it they crown their poem or period! Moreover, the same transformation had taken place in music. Instead of the very clear delineated melodies of die past, we have an infinity of broken melodies which enrich the poetic texture, and we no longer have the impression of strong cadence. (SPP 19-20)

Just as Baudelaire heard a musical correlation to his poetic values, Mallarmé found

confirmation in Wagner's writings of something he had intuited about the music he

had actually heard. For both Wagner and Mallarmé, a revolt against syntactic

conventions was necessary in order to open new semantic possibilities. An

important aspect of the correspondence between symbolist music and poetry, an

aspect that is sometimes misunderstood, is that it took place not at the level of

large scale form, but at the local level of the musical phrase and the poetic line.

Above, Mallarmé speaks about the strict versification of the Pamasians, but his

complaint is similar to Wagner's regarding the tyranny of the "quadratic phrase "

To understand the evolution and significance of this correspondence, it is necessary to consider the nature of the old periodic musical structures, the way in which Wagner disrupted it, the aesthetic tenets underlying these changes, and

Mallarmé's consequent transposition of this innovation into his poetics.

In its historical context, the four-bar phrase was the primary unit of musical syntax in the classical and early romantic style. It was already prevalent in the early part of the eighteenth-century; by the end of the eighteenth-century it was the

62 fundamental unit of compositional organization. It should be noted that the four- measure length carries little inherent value. Throughout the eighteenth-century two-, three-, five-, six-, and even seven-measure phrases were employed. The four-bar phrase, in other words, was not introduced as the model for classical phrase structure; rather, it evolved over time as a consequence of convenience and convention. As much as anything, four-measures were neither too short nor too long and fell easily into symmetrical pairings. What is important about the four- bar phrase, then, is not the number of measures, but the phenomena of articulated phrases themselves. The introduction of regular, repeated phrase structures broke the linear continuity of the Baroque style. As a consequence, new forms of musical architecture exhibited a slower harmonic pulse that reinforced the vertical aspect of the music's structure.’

The characteristic symmetry of the classical style is most clearly demonstrated in the pairing of four-bar phrases into periods. Typically a period is comprised of an antecedent and consequence phrase (sometimes described as question and answer clauses). Though a period may be comprised of more than two phrases, the final phrase must complete a harmonic movement that the preceding phrase or phrases left incomplete. The following examples illustrate this relationship (see figures 3.1 to 3.3):

63 rtm99m

wimitm ti

FMmstêiUê

LwkV •< C

A\ %_ I X .

Figure 3.1 Mozart, Piano Concerto in A Major, K. 488 (1786), measures 1-9

64 C .o\,iS «-% Oc»_»

3 Caral lm3f/mWW

% c '. 3 - 2 . "szr

Figure 3 .2 Hadyn Symphony No. 77 in Bb Major, Hoboken 1: 77 (1782), Finale, measures 1-8

65 Allegro molto e con brio. a

C-CNA\-«i^vj«.wk V c.'. I

Figure 3.3 Beethoven, Sonata in C minor, Opus 10, No. I, measures 1-8 As a system of musical syntax, the period corresponds to poetic verse form: primary syntactic units—phrases paired by length and conventionalized points of articulation—form large scale metrical patterns Broadly speaking, the effect of the period is to slow down music's harmonic tempo Cadences occur at the beginning and end of phrases, regulating the rate of harmonic change at four and eight measure units. As a consequence a piece's large scale structural dimensions unfold clearly, without the concentration of harmonic and rhythmic activity within the bar.*

By the 1820s the period not only formed a work's primary syntactic unit, but also determinined its large-scale architecture. Periodic structures had become the material for the formal design of sections, movements, entire works. Though it is true that periodic phrasing is susceptible to monotony, this was not the substance of the late romantic's critique of classical style (obviously the successful composers of the classical/romantic period were able, through a number of techniques, to find intelligent solutions to this problem). Rather, criticism focused on the role of periodic differentiation in creating pre determined, formulaic writing. It is to this aspect of classical writing that Wagner's famous appellation,

"the quadratic phrase," refers. What he objected to were aspects of a melody that were not original or organic in character, but existed only to fill a formal need, completing a period or finishing a phrase. He was particularly critical of Mozart,

67 whose symphonies he regarded as filled with padding, rather than sustained by

genuinely expressive musical ideas.

Largely in response to what he viewed as the empty rhetoric and formulaic

repetitions of periodic forms, Wagner introduced the concept of "infinite melody."

Like the terms leitmotif and music drama, infinite melody is a fimdamental

W^nerian idea that is often misunderstood. In its aesthetic meaning, as opposed to its technical one, infinite melody refers to a writing in which every note has musical significance; rather than phrases without internal relationships being arranged side by side, infinite melody is "perfectly coherent," each musical development proceeding out of a previous idea. By melody, Wagner is not referring to the term's conventional meaning. For Wagner, writing that is continually expressive and genuine is "melodic." It is from this aesthetic premise that the technical characteristics of infinite melody are derived. The absence of formal cadences (or cadences that are disguised), in other words, is a consequence of working out an aesthetic principle that honors semantic meaning over syntactic convention. Wagner is thus concerned with creating a constantly evolving, continuous musical idiom, one in which every detail has significance.

Mallarmé, of course, is also concerned with semantically driven form. For him, vers libre itself is often associated with music. "'We are now wimessing a spectacle,'" says Mallarmé, " which is truly extraordinary, unique in the history of poetry; every poet is going off by himself with his own flute, and playing the

68 songs he pleases. For the first time since the beginning of poetry, poets have

stopped singing bass. Hitherto, as you know, if they wished to be accompanied,

they had to be content with the great organ of ofQcial meter"’ (5Z, 18). Moreover,

the characteristic impersonality of Mallarme's poetry evolves as a consequence of this concern. Unlike Baudelaire, the first-person is removed, the language depersonalized; with the poem made more abstract, the structure is determined from within. This finds its ultimate manifestation in "Un Coup de Des," a poem— for reasons that will be explored—occupying a singular position in Mallarme's corpus. While "Un Coup de Dés" exhibits the extreme end of Mallarme’s experimentation with form, it also embodies—as the most self-consciously shaped and highly disciplined of his poems—the sum of this thinking regarding the requirements of both a musical and a metaphysical poetics. Under the influence of music, Mallarmé wrote in the poem’s preface, the poem unites ”a number of pursuits that are dear to our time: free-verse and the prose-poem ” {CP 123).

Carl Dahlhaus, among others, has observed the correlation between the symbolist line and the musical period. The most thorough and interesting analysis, however, has been undertaken by David Hertz, who traces the notion of the musical period back to Aristotle's classic statement on tragedy:

The tendency to form symmetrical phrases in Western music is highly similar to the ancient and ubiquitous practice, in literary discourse, of organizing language in syntactical units of uniform length. Roland Barthes, who published an outline of rhetoric in Communications, credits Aristotle

69 with designating a phrase that has a beginning and an end ('debut et fin'), with at least two members ('elevation et abaisement ) and at most four members, as a period. A period for Aristotle is, in efifect, a microcosm of his definition of a proper plot for a tragedy. Like a plot, it must have a beginning, an end, and a length that one can grasp easily. Like the plot, the period must be a complete, self-contained entity (2)

Whether or not a correspondence can be located in the origins of the term, the

underlying aesthetic principle is fundamental to both the music and poetry of the

era; the notion of regular, paired, closed, symmetrical phrases in the creation of

large scale design. Moreover, Wagner attacked the periodic unit for much the

same reason Mallarmé subverted the alexandrine. Both saw the old structures as outmoded conventions—conventions once creative, but not stultifying. Each had mentors who had worked primarily in this idiom (for Wagner, Beethoven; for

Mallarmé, Baudelaire); yet, they recognized that the language of the past was no longer tenable. Mallarmé explained his appreciation of the relativity of aesthetic form: "A more immediate explanation of recent innovations is this: it has finally been understood that the old verse form was not the absolute, unique, and changeless form, but just one way to be sure of writing good verse'" (SPP 19).

Fundamental to both figures was the notion that formal structure should be determined fi'om within a work, rather than imposed firom outside.

One of the most compelling examples of Wagner's notion of this aesthetic is found in the Prelude to the opera Tristan und Isolde. Historically this music holds a significant place in the evolution of western music. It isn't only the disruption of

70 traditional syntactic patterns that make the piece revolutionary, but the semantic ambiguity that necessitates a different sense of "melody." The piece's harmonic movement, its instability and chromatic daring, augured a crisis in tonality itself.

This aspect of the Prelude is apparent from the opening measures (see figure 3.4);

71 TRISTAN UND ISOLDE. Brster Aufzuç.— Fir«t Act.- Acte Einlei&um^— Introduction.- Prelude. LentoLmegmmm «UmieutnU. u d ■ekaaektead Rickard Wacnee 2 Hoboen

z Elaziaettea ia A

1 Englimcke# Horn, t. a Z. Fagott. I Violoncelle.

Figure 3.4 Wagner, Prelude to Tristan und Isolde (1857-59), measures 1-21

Figure continued

72 Figure 3.4 continued

f,n.a. fom aïf,

BPMtvViolia^a.

||lu«h u « Oraak VM BrattkafTAliatM u tolfU c. 0»»yHc»l tM «,tM « »r ■ralttipf* W H«I. 3. > •53 -V i ,______l L -______I '------

Figure continued

73 Figure 3.4 continued

m

KI.A.

HkLA. DS£l!

Kr»tiimh

C '. 12.

74 The central issue of this work is its relationship to tonality. Apparent in

the Prelude’s opening phrases is the harmonic ambiguity that characterizes the

entire piece. The very key of the opening phrase, for instance, is not at all clear.

The phrase cadences on a dominant-seventh chord on E; however, this chord

doesn't resolve, as it should, to its tonic, A minor. Moreover, the functional

ambiguity of the chord in the second measure (the notorious "Tristan chord," a

half-diminished seventh chord), and the fact that A minor is only suggested by the

first three notes (the F must be read as an appoggiatura for this to make sense),

reinforces the uncertainty o f the phrases tonal identity. The phrase ends with a

long pause, disrupting the music's rhythmic movement; syntactic discontinuity and

harmonic instability thus mirror one another. (The problem of whether or not the

first note in each of these phrases is an upbeat or a downbeat, the fermata and long

counted rests, the tempo indication ["slow and languishing"], all give the opening a

feeling of timelessness, of rhythmic ambiguity.)

From this point, the key centers shift quickly and in startling ways. The

first three phrases move by thirds (A minor, C major, E major). Phrase two, in a major key, repeats the original phrase, this time more insistently, the opening minor sixth extended to a major sixth; similarly, phrase three lengthens the original idea, the cadence echoed, seemingly brought to crisis, in the two-bar fragments of the next six measures. Rather than regular periodic structures, the initial idea is

75 developed by the accumulation of fr^;ments; moreover, without a "consequent” response to the "antecedent” inquiries, it is as if the music proceeds by means of a

series of vaguely formed antecedent clauses. In measure 16, the dominant-seventh chord on E, fails, once again, to resolve to A minor (the key of the opening phrase); rather it resolves to F major, forming the first of a number of the Prelude's deceptive cadences. As with the piece as a whole, the rapid key changes, the unresolved dominant chords, the extended dissonances, contribute to the effect of fluid movement with which Wagner was concerned. Instead of a series of periodic formal relationships, the Prelude's achieves a remarkable organic unity by developing the initial musical idea itself.^

As with theTristan Prelude, Mallarme's "Un Coup de Dés" collapses traditional periodic structures. The syntactic boldness of the poem is obvious at a glance. The different type settings, the complete absence of punctuation, the ideograms and pictorial representations, the use of white space—these aspects of the poem suggest only its most obvious syntactic difRculties. Not all of this, particularly the general tendency toward syntactic obfuscation, is new in Mallarmé

(the lack of punctuation, for instance, is also found in his late sonnets). Here, however, Mallarmé intended that "the [Page be] taken as the basic unit, in the way that elsewhere the Verse or the perfect line is{CP " 122). The poem was to be published on eleven double-pages, on which it would be possible to read fi-om all directions (left to right, and right to left; top to bottom, and bottom to top).

76 Consistent witii Mallanné's thematics, the poem explores die problem of metaphysical uncertainty: how to wrest meaning from an essentially meaningless universe.

As in Tristan und Isolde, the opening folios announce the formal principles upon which the work is based (for the purpose of discussion, each double-page will be referred to as a folio). The poem's tide, printed in bold letters, is also a recurring dominant motif. "Un Coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le hasard" ("A throw of the dice will never abolish chance"), begins on the first folio, but carries over to the second, fifth, and ninth folios. In die phrase, "jamais n'abolira le hasard, " the word order is reversed; "jamais," which can mean "ever" as well as "never," comes before the negative; thus a kind of fluctuating effect is created, reflecting the problem of uncertain meaning that the poem explores. On the second folio, a second motif is introduced in smaller type: "Quand bien même lancé dans des circonstances étemelles du fond d'un naufiage" ("Even when cast in eternal circumstances from the depdis of a shipwreck"). This is followed at the beginning of the third folio by the word, "Soit" ("Though it be"), in the same size type; "Soit" can thus be read as the end of one phrase, and the beginning of another, erasing, even at this clear juncture, any sense of complete syntactic or semantic resolution.

Visually, the third folio is traditionally viewed as a simultaneous depiction o f from left to right, water washing down, and the Big Dipper (which is mentioned later); thematically, it describes, metaphorically and literally (in terms

77 of the shipwreck), a descent into the depths. The shipwreck metaphor appears in

three of Mallarme's other poems, and is generally associated with a break with

traditional forms leading to a transcendence that comes from identification with

the Absolute. The word "Abîme" ("Abyss") is capitalized, one of only four words

to be emphasized in this way. Three images dominate this foho: the wave, the

wing, the sail. These images are confused, however, and seem to transform into

each other. The crest of the wave is also a wing, a Mallarméan symbol of doomed

heroic action, as well as a sail covering the gash in the ship. Even the Abyss itself,

into which the reader descends, is paradoxical, collapsing both creation and

destruction, being and nothingness. Words and symbols, while rendering a

sharpness of image and a specificity of expression, depend upon their own

contextual, self-referential meanings. °

In many ways, "Un Coup de Dés" reflects Wagner's notions about the "art

of the futime." Mallarme's obvious concern with the unity of the arts in this poem,

his own words about viewing the poem as a score, its theatrical conception and use

of motifs to bind the dominant themes, suggest the possibilities of a Wagnerian

reading of the poem. While such a point of view has merit, the purpose of juxtaposing the openings of these two works here is more narrowly to demonstrate how, in both instances, periodic differentiation was replaced with a semantically driven line, one that honored ambiguity and the continuous development of the artistic idea itself. In this regard, Mallarmé corresponds with Wagner in

78 interesting ways: the forging of a poetic line whose contour was determined &om

within, rather than prescribed; the generation of evolving and even overlapping

transformations of the "idea"; and in the use of semantic ambiguity. In each o f

these instances, the movement is toward greater freedom, richer possibilities.

Nevertheless, even in Mallarme's most Wagnerian work, the contrasts are as

striking as the correspondences. For while Mallarmé refuses clear, predictable

syntactic structures, and consciously cultivates a structural semantic ambiguity, he does not do so in the service of greater dramatic expressivity. On the contrary, the impersonality of the poem closes off any possibility of romantic emotionalism, favoring, once again, the "silent theater" of the imagination over the music drama of Bayreuth. Moreover, his self-referential language creates a system of symbolic meaning that is self-contained or hermeneutic—relative to the context of the meanings established within the poem itself. In this way, too, Mallarmé contrasts

Wagner. For though Wagner obscures the experience of tonal reference with an overwhelming degree of chromaticism, he still works within the system of functional harmony. Thus, both in the aim and the nature of his ambiguity,

Mallarmé departs from the Wagnerian musical model.

One of the remarkable coincidences of historical dates is the writing of

Tristan und Isolde and the publication of Les fleur du mal (1857). An argument

79 can be made that Tristan und Isolde marks the begmning of modem music, just as

Les fleur du mal ushers in a new era in literature. The merits of this view are

clear. Valéry maintained that the essence of symbolism—the concept of "poésie

pure"—originated with Baudelaire. What is particularly modem is the system of metaphysics that this poetics presupposes. For Baudelaire, the proper posture for the poet is not, as with the Parnassians, as an observer outside the phenomenal world, but at the center of experience, where imagination and reality, inner and outer worlds merge. Pure poetry, by Baudelairean and, later, symbolist thinking, reflects the Absolute itself. Similarly, within the harmonic innovations o f Tristan und Isolde can be found the modernist seeds of Schoenberg's serial music. By saturating the tonal system with chromaticism, Wagner brought western music to a crossroads: either abandon tonal writing altogether, or establish tonality by means other than functional harmony. For generations of subsequent composers, Tristan und Isolde was a crisis work: it represented the limits to which tonality could be stretched.

While there can be no doubt as to the seminal influence of Baudelaire and

Wagner on the modernist movement, neither figure, it should be understood, introduced a new "principle" of aesthetic organization. Wagner, as has been suggested, strained the limits of functional, harmony as a way of establishing tonality; nevertheless, the traditional poles of tonic to dominant, and the system of hierarchal relationships that unite them, remain firmly in place Wagner, in other

80 words, brought music to a crossroads, but did not venture down either road himself. Similarly, Baudelaire's profusion of semantic possibilities, while suggesting elements of both romanticism and modernism, are always contained within the strict limits of classical verse form. His belief that one of the ruling passions of a poet was for order in the form of balance and symmetiy is reflected in his famous definition of beauty: "C'est I'infini dans le fini." (It is the infinite in the finite.) Baudelaire's modernist interests, the exploration of consciousness, the nature of "correspondences, " are consistently apprehended through the classical virtues of lucidity and analysis.

Mallarmé, in creating a non-representative language, draws on Wagner's formal innovations, and Baudelaire's metaphysical precepts. By forging a hermeneutic poetics, however, Mallarmé shows more affinity for the aesthetics of

Claude Debussy. Mallanné's symbol, his language itself exhibits a profusion of meaning, while retaining a concreteness of expression; like absolute music," it is autonomous in that it asserts its own self-referential, contextual system of signification; nevertheless it retains the expressive clarity unique to the word. In establishing a "closed " poetry, Mallarmé finds a new principle of organization, one that carries a structure for metaphysical order—in the absence of religious paradigms—into the t%% entieth-century. For reasons that will be explored,

Debussy's writing also redefines traditional values of belief through new aesthetic practices. His exploration of a relationship between keys that is "circular," rather

81 than linear, extended tonal music beyond the three-hundred year practice of

functional harmony. As in the case of Mallarmé, the problem of creating a

continuity between art's changing requirements and inherited traditions

necessitated a new principle of aesthetic order. That Mallarmé and Debussy share

this aesthetic unite them not only as symbolists, but also as figures at the vanguard

of modernism.

The correspondences between Mallarmé's poetry and Debussy's music can

be examined best in the orchestral work. Prélude à VAprès-midi d’un faune,

Debussy's musical rendering of Mallarmé's famous poem. It has become a commonplace to regard Debussy's Prélude as the beginning of modem music. His deep literary interests—his appreciation for Mallarmé, in particular—have much to do with this aspect of the music's conception. Almost as often as Mallarmé speaks of music, Debussy speaks of poetry. Not only did he firequent Mallarmé's

"Tuesdays " and set several symbolists poems, but he himself also wrote verse. In one of his letters to fellow composer Ernest Chausson, Debussy reveals, in his criticism of Wagner, his aesthetic sympathies: "1 believe that we have been taken in, always by the same R. Wagner, and that too often we think of the fi'ame before having the picture . . . Look at the poverty of symbol hidden in several of the last sonnets of Mallarmé, where still the craft of the artisan is carried to its furthest limits . .." {Prelude to the Afternoon o fa Faun 136). The notion of a work's formal stmctures not obscuring the idea itself—what Debussy, a little later, refers

82 to as "the lightness of the underpinnings" that "never [absorb] the main point"—is

central to both poem and music. To understand the structuring principle that

Debussy tried to mirror in his music, it is necessary, of course, to begin with the

poem itself. Whereas "Un Coup de Dés" was written two years before Mallarmé's

death, "L'Après-Midi" was written at the beginning of his career; nevertheless the

two poems stand as the most "musical" of his writings.

Though the narrative is artificial in character, its premise is straightforward.

A faun wakes in the middle of the afternoon.*^ Dazed from sleep and enveloping heat, he recalls holding two nymphs. He is unclear, however, whether this memory is of a dream or an actual event. Through a series of hypotheses, the faun tries to work out the truth of this experience. Implied in the faun's conflict is the poem's central concern: to penetrate the order of reality by means of art.

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer. Si clair. Leur incarnat léger, qu'il voltige dans l'air Assoupi de someils touffus.

Aimai-je un rêve? (1-5)

(These nymphs that I would perpetuate: So clear And light, their carnation, that it floats in the air Heavy with leafy slumbers.

Did I love a dream?)

83 Throughout the poem, the faun experiences his conflict as unfulfiUed

desire.'^ His true problem, however, is not desire per se, but the dualism that gives

rise to it. Though Mallarmé seems to have been inspired by François Boucher's

painting. Pan et Syrinx ( 1759), which depicts a satyr surprising two nymphs, the

source for his poem is Book I of Ovid's Metamophoses, in which a Syrinx that Pan

is pursuing turns into a reed. In the original, Ovid writes: "Charmed by the

sweemess of the tone, he / murmured/ This much I have!" When Mallarmé carries

this mythic frame over to his own poem, he not only retains the duality of desire

and art, but also infuses it with that of reality and illusion. Both oppositions

suggest the poem's method. Dualistic by nature (he is part man, part goat), the

faun looks to art to release him from the anxiety of desire. Indeed, art will, in one

sense, release him—but not through catharsis. Rather it will make possible insight,

rendering transparent a true order beneath the veil of oppositions. *■*

Mallarmé's intention to take from music its suggestive power, its ability to transcend representation and penetrate to the pure Idea behind phenomena, is evident throughout the poem, but particularly in the imagery evoking the playing of the flute.

O bords siciliens d'un calme marécage Qu'à l'envi de soleils ma vanité saccage. Tacite sous les fleurs d'étincelles, CONTEZ ’Que je coupais ici les creux roseaux domptés 'Par le talent: quand, sur l’or glauque de lointaines

84 'Verdures dédiant leur vigne à des fontaines, 'Ondoie une blancheur animale au repos: 'Et qu'au prélude lent où naissent les pipeaux 'Ce vol de cygnes, non! de naïades se sauve 'Ouplonge . . .' (23-31)

( RELATE, Sicilian shores, whose tranquil fens My vanity disturbs as do the suns. Silent beneath the brilliant flowers of flame: "That cutting hollow reeds my art would tame, I saw far off, against the glaucous gold O f foliage twined to where the springs run cold. An animal whiteness languorously sM>aying: To the slow prelude that the pipes were playing. This flight o f swans~no! naiads—rose in a shower O f spray.. . ")

Unable to discern the reality of his experience, the faun calls on the marsh to tell him what happened. Set in italics—the first of three such passages—the shift to memory signals a more fragile depiction than was rendered in the faun's speculation. Characteristic of Mallarme's symbolism, the images themselves are autonomous, yet translucent. The faun was cutting reeds, the instruments of his art, when he saw a white form constrasted against the green forest. The liquid quality of this scene is prepared for earlier by the description o f the "immobile et lasse pâmoison" ("weary swoon") of heat, and the "bosquet arrosé d'accords"

("chord-besprinkled thickets") in lines 14-17. In this earlier description the creative powers of music break the stillness of landscape: "Le visible et serein souffle artificiel/ De l'inspiration, qui regagne le ciel" ("The visible, serene, and calculated breath/ Of inspiration, as it is drawn back to heaven") [21-22]. Breath

85 thus turns into sound diat transforms into image (chords sprinkling on the grove).

In the memory passage, the modulations between reality and art, sight and sound,

are refined. The collapsing of oppositions extends to the swans and nymphs,

where symbols of purity and sex are confused. Like the synesthetic production of

images that Baudelaire imagines in Wagner's music, images that are suggested but never manifest, the nymphs appear to die faun on the crest of memory, yet continually regress into the abstraction of sleep. The faun, whose monologue exists between states of dreaming, remains through the poem on this side of the nymphs, "perpetually" chasing them into the void of imconsciousness.

Following this, the flute emerges as a symbol of art itself. Unable to maintain his concentration in the burning heat, he loses the thread of his memory.

Inerte, tout brûle dans l’heure fauve Sans marquer par quel art ensemble détala Trop d’hymen souhaité de qui cherche le la: Alors m’éveillerai-je à la ferveur première. Droit et seul, sous un flot antique de lumière, Lys! et l’un de vous tous pour l’ingénuité. (32-36)

(Day bums inert in the tawny hour And excess of hymen is escaped away— Without a sign, fi*om one who pined for die primal A : And so, beneath a flood of antique light. As innocent as are the lilies white. To my first ardors 1 awake alone.)

Bernstein, in his reading of Debussy’s music, suggests that "the symbolic word la’

8 6 was bom phonologically rather than syntactically, that it was motivated by its

inherence in the earlier word détala," which, coming so soon after the musical

idea of'Prelude,' in turn suggested the musical association o f la.’ (UQ 255).'^ This

is quite possible and—in terms of its structural impulse—is certainly in keeping

with the spirit of the poem. Nevertheless, the observation goes more to Mallarmé's

creative process, than the place of the word in the passage. The most obvious

accounting of the "la," which is also the conventional reading on this point, is that

the faun is trying out his flute. This, too, however, has deeper resonance than first

appears. For "la,” which is A natural, is a note with special significance in that it

is the one to which instruments time—the pitch, in other words, against which other

pitches are measured. To achieve this quality of signification—the

"transcendental" pitch, as it were—is what the faun "chercher " but never achieves, either with the nymphs ( "trop d'hymen") or his art ("par quel art").

The difficult final lines of this passage leave narrative and return to the faun's meditation. Implied in these images is a series of conjectures. Considering what the consequences would be if the nymphs did escape, he concludes that he would awake the next morning in a continued state of sexual desire. He wonders if he will end up like the lilies on the water's edge, waiting for fulfillment of their desire, having to be content with "un flot antique de lumière " ( "a long familiar wave of light")—an unsatisfactory, impersonal response. The identification of ceaseless desire with the structure of nature itself is, as has already been discussed,

87 consistent with Schopenhauer's metaphysics. Schopenhauer, who maintained a strict classification of the arts, placed music in its own category apart fi’om the others. Nevertheless, his assessment of fire value of music is similar to the representation of music in "L'Aprés-midi": "Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related to the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but quite of a different kind, and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness” (CM 154). Modulation between the universal and the particular is a primary process of "L’Aprés-midi." For the faun, of course, who is an artist himself, it is associated with the playing o f his instrument.

Neither memory nor conjecture has enabled the faun to discern the truth of his vision. Unable to resolve his conflict, he returns to his flute.

Mais, bast! arcane tel élut pour confident Le jonc vaste et jumeau dont sous l'azur on joue; Qui, détournant à soi le trouble de la joue. Rêve, dans un solo long, que nous amusions La beauté d'alentour par des confusions Fausses entre elle-même et notre chant crédule; Et de faire aussi haut que l'amour se module Évanouir du songe ordinaire de dos Ou de falnc pur suivis avec mes regards clos. Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne. (42-51)

(Enough! Arcana such as these disclose their nature Only through vast twin reeds played to the skies. That, turning to music all that clouds the eyes,

8 8 Dream, in a long solo, diat we amused The beauty all around us by confused Equations with our credulous melody; And dream that die song can make love soar so high That, purged of all ordinary fantasies Of back or breast—incessant shapes diat rise In blindness—it distills sonorities From every empty and monotonous line.)

Even more than in die initial flute passage, the evolution of this stanza's imagery resolves its key thematic oppositions; silence and sound, reality and dream, nature and art, music and language. Whatever die origin of the faun's vision, the only thing he can be sure of is its truth in art. Recalling the faun’s initial question,

"Aimai-je un rêve?" ("Was it a dream I loved?), music is "dreamed" to life as a consequence of the faun's desire. The verb "amusions" suggests the nature of this movement (the poem's transcedental synesdiesia). Music teases nature ("amuser" can be translated as "to beguile"), "distilling" its beauty, and creating play between the realms of art and reality. Moreover, this act of artistic alchemy connects, albeit through a state of absence, the faun and die nymphs. By changing the faun's sensual daydream into "[u]ne sonore, vaine et monotone ligne," his vision of the nymphs has left its imprint on his inner eye. The single line of music is "vaine" because it is devoid of materiality; nevertheless die music itself^ having its own meaning, is not empty; like the flute's melody, the faun's imagination does not possess the nymphs actually, but resonates widi their presence nevertheless.

In Mallarmé's poem, reUgious crisis is framed as the need to escape from

89 desire. As has been discussed, Schopenhauer’s thought on the tyranny of desire

explicates the philosphical underpinnings of this sensibility. Mallarmé explores

this problem through a poetics founded on "musical imageiy"—self-referential

images with contextural meanings. Rather than linear development, and the

exploitation of dramatic structure (as Wagner and Baudelaire practiced), Mallarmé

transcends desire by a catalytic act of poetry. The imaginative consciousness is

left changed, no longer caught between the binary poles of desire. Debussy

arrived at a similar aesthetics, in a similar way, for similar reasons. Like

Mallarmé, he embraced Wagner's formal freedom, but rejected his emotionalism.

Nevertheless the problem of desire, almost inherent within the linear relationships

of ftmctional harmony, remained a problem deeper than Wagner's dramatic

sensibility (tension and repose are the hallmarks of a music founded on the tonic/dominant relationship). As will become clear, Debussy's focus on the autonomous musical moment correlates to the hermeneutic symbolism of

Mallarmé's poetry. In this regard, Debussy's music might be said to be more in the spirit of Schopenhaurian vision of music than Wagner's, which, in terms of its harmonic foimdation, exploits the structure of desire, rather than transmuting it.

As is the case in Tristan, the character of thePrélude's ambiguity is apparent in its opening phrases (figure 3.5). An enormous amount has been said about the opening flute melody.'^ What is especially striking is its chromatic nature, which falls and rises between the poles of C# and G. The ambiguity

90 created here evolves largely from its uncertain harmonic character. It isn't only

that neither of these notes are tonic, but also that they don't have a relationship,

within the hierarchical structure of functional harmony, to any notes that would

suggest the music's eventual tonic, E major. C# and G don't point ahead toward

any progression, but are suspended in the ear precariously. The phrase itself,

however, is not harmonically indifferent. As with Mallarmé's imagery, the phrase

has a precise internal structure. It is suggestive, rather than declarative.

Nevertheless it is the foundation of an extraordinarily tightly knit unifying scheme.

Mention should be made of the special significance of the tritone interval in

the history of music harmony. By conventional ways of counting this interval is

actually that of an augmented fourth (or, alternatively, a diminished fifth), but it is

been conventionally referred to as a tritone because it spans three whole steps (the

relevance of this will become clear in the discussion of Debussy's use of the

whole-tone scale). In the Middle Ages the tritone was nicknamed the "diabolus in musica " (the devil in music) because of its instability as a diatonic interval. It held this status until the late Renaissance, since which time many important composers have employed the tritone in various and interesting ways. Nevertheless the uniqueness of its essentially non-tonal nature has remained a constant. What gives the tritone this character is its contrariness to the practice of functional harmony—it directly refutes the practice of diatonic tonality (1-lV-V-I) upon which the use of periodic structures depend. This can be seen clearly in the overtone series itself

91 (the arrangement of higher tones that one actually hears when a single note is

played). For any note in the twelve tone octave, the first three intervals of the

overtone series sound as illustrated (figure 3.6): an octave, a fifth, a fourth. The raised half-step of the tritone conflicts with the tonic/dominant relationship not only essential to diatonic tonality, but inherent within the overtone series itself.'^

92 PRELUDE TO "THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN'

Trê» (M.M. J- - 44)

3 riUTES

t MiUTIOIS

i CLAIIiaCTTM M U

4 eoi

aq-ra», mu i aWM* fhummét

fioioacfuis

eaarauAMfS

Figure 3.5 Debussy, Prélude à rAprès-midi d'un /aune, measures 1-10

Figure continued

93 Figure 3.5 continued

34 Debussy

§liê9mmé0

94 r g

Figure 3.6 First three intervals of the overtone series.

95 In the third bar of the opening phrase, the key of E major is suggested after two bars of chromatic uncertainty between the tritone interval. Measure four introduces a wash of sound from the harp; then, almost unthinkably, a resolution on the dominant-seventh chord of E flat (Bb7) follows. The structure of the harmonic ambiguity is realized in the interval created between the two chords; a tritone, echoing the C# to G tritone in the first two measure. The sense of being suspended between a tonic E major and a dominant function B flat is reinforced in the ensuing silence, which, much likeTristan, can't truly be counted, leaving the listener a drift in a kind of tritonic no-man’s land. However, the structural significance of these four notes in these two different tritone intervals is far deeper than suggested above. For the moment it will sufflce to point out that, the first C# appears, repeatedly, each time in the context of a different chord (figure 3.7). In measure 11, it is a major seventh against a D major triad; in measure 17, it is the root of a chord with dominant function; in measure 21 it appears as an added sixth against an E major triad. This pattern goes continues throughout the piece suggesting that what is fixed is the not the chords, but C# as but one note in the important four notes of the two tritone intervals.

96 Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun"

Figure 3.7 Debussy, Prélude à l’Après-midi d ’un faune, measures 11-21

Figure continued

97 Figure 3 .7 continued

Debussy

C9« «MU

mrnm r u ï o J

Figure continued

98 Figure 3.7 continued

Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun"

Vf K.( 2) .. H Wj

99 Debussy's unique use of this interval as a structural device becomes clearer when compared widi its use by Wagner.'* As touched on briefly in the discussion of the period, Wagner’s use of the half-diminished sevendi chord in die Tristan

Prelude is characteristic of the piece's harmonic ambiguity. The Tristan chord, the name by which this chord is conventionally referred, appears for die first time in the second full measure of the first phrase. From the bottom up, die chord is spelled F-B-D#-G#. The tritone interval, o f course, is die span fi-om F to B. The movement fi’om G# to A creates another tritone (with D#), and the E against die

A# in the beginning the third measure implies a third. However one accounts for chromatic movement of top line, the Tristan chord ultimately resolves to die dominant sevendi chord of an absent A minor, creating the feeling of the postponement of a tonal goal that is only ever implied. In other words, the inherent hannonic ambiguity of the tritone is employed to exploit die tensions of tonic/dominant relationship. Consistent widi the story of Tristan und Isolde, desire is thwarted, but the experience of the music—its very idiom—is representative of desire nevertheless.

Though spelled differendy, a half-diminished seventh chord also appears in

Debussy's Prelude. It has already been shown that die tritone interval structures the opening flute solo and the primary key areas of E major and Bb dominant seventh. What occurs in measure four, separating E major and Bb dominant is the

100 harp glissando, which is actually a half-diminished seventh chord spelled A#-C-£-

G. Like Wagner, Debussy's chord makes cadence and thus periodic phrasing

impossible. Unlike Wagner, however, this chord doesn't postpone a tonal goal, but

collapses the logic of goal oriented tonality itself. In fact, the final key of the

Prélude does, eventually, prove to be E major. But this is established by means of tonal centers related tritonically, rather than diatonically. Much like Mallarmé's symbolism, ambiguity is a consequence of self-referential aesthetic structures, structures that avoid linear progression. In the case the Debussy's Prelude, the movement firom a writing based on the perfect fifth interval to the tritone interval results in whole new kind of harmonic logic previously unimaginable.

Though it has been suggested before, it is important to emphasize that the significance of the tritone in the Prélude is not ornamental, but structural. Two studies that explore this aspect of the music might be mentioned here. William

Austin's detailed account of the work traces the appearances of the four pitches that constitute the two tritones noted in the opening phrase (C#, 0, E, A#). He demonstrates convincingly that "[t]he susceptibility of the C# and the G and their connecting line of melody to being harmonized with various chordal accompaniments (mm. 11,21, 26, and, with the low note adjusted, m. 100) is the outstanding harmonic feature of the Prelude” (Austin 82). As a corollary to this,

Arthur Wenk, in his discussion of the influence of Javanese gamelan music on

Debussy, extends Austin's analysis by suggesting that "these pitches, in the order

101 listed, fonn a flexible pattern about which the piece takes its shape" (Claude

Debussy and Twentieth-Century Music 58). Part of boA these analyses is an

explication of the unity of melody and harmony. Though the returning pitches

provide tonal stability, the fact that they always return in the context of a different

chord makes them functionally ambiguous. Austin points out that "Debussy does

not simply show off a bit of melotfy against various surprising chords. Rather he

uses the chords to support the onward movement of the melody" (82). This, of

course, constrasts the periodic phrase, in which melody and rhythm are generated

by harmonic change. What it more remarkable, however, is that, as Wenk

observes, these four pitches not only constitute the Preludes structural

underpinnings, but also produce the choice of harmonic possibilities in between.

"The C#-G tritone appears in the bassline in phrases 5,6,7, and 8, each time

supporting different chords. The other tritone, E-A#, occurs most often within

changing vertical formations. Thus the axis of interlocking tritones forms a fixed basis for a variety of melodic and harmonic embellishments" (60).

It is this aspect of the Prelude's composition—its organizing principle—that unites it with Mallarmé's poem. Commentary on the Prelude typically notes surface points of correspondence: 110 alexandrines in the poem, 110 measures in the music; structural mimicry; different sorts of text painting.'* While dtese details are interesting, they do not bring to light the revolutionary significance of die music/poem correspondence. For both Debussy and Mallarmé, the forging of a

102 new aesthetic language meant preserving points of structural clarity, while

exploiting a radical ambiguity. Though it is continually undermined, Mallarmé's

poem is written in strict hexameters with perfect alexandrine rhymed couplets.

Part of the "music" of the poem is the counter rhythm that Mallarmé composes to

create tension with the conventions of the poem's form. Similarly, Debussy retains

points of tonal articulation, yet avoids traditional ways of relating them. That

Debussy saw this aspect of his music in Mallarmé's poem is made clear in a letter

to fellow composer Ernest Chausson: "1 believe that we have been taken in,

always by the same R. Wagner, and that too often we think of the frame before

having the picture . .. Look at the poverty of symbol hidden in several of the last

sonnets of Mallarmé, where still the craft of the of the artisan is carried to its furthest limits ..." {Prelude to the Afternoon o f a Faun 136).

One o f the difficulties in assessing the Prélude is its very unity. To tug at any aesthetic strand is to unravel the whole structure. As a way of understanding how Debussy creates ambiguity between the points of tonal articulation established by the tritone, it might be useful therefore to consider a particular innovation of his—the whole-tone scale. It appears first in measures 32-33, then again in measures 33-36 (figure 3.8). The structure of the scale itself is, in fact, organic to the tritone. Since the tritone measures three whole-steps, the whole- tone scale is actually the intervallic distance of two tritones. In other words, the octave span, instead of being arranged diatonically, is divided into six equal

103 intervals. What is of interest about this is that the scale can't function diatonically.

Without the interval of a perfect fifth (or a perfect fourth), there can't be a tonic/dominant relationship. Concurrently, the interval that is present is the tritone, which bisects the scale at exactly its midpoint.

104 Debussy

Figure 3.8 Debussy, Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un fourre^ measures 32-33, measures 35-36 Figure continued 105 Figure 3 .8 continued

Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun’

(Sans trainer)

(San* Irainar)

Figure continued

106 Figure 3.8 continued

Debussy S

(M.M. J-72)

* • # 0i mwpremif

Figure continued

107 Figure 3 .8 continued

Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun’ 43

108 The whole-tone scale

109 In the example cited, the whole-tone scale functions much like the half-

diminished seventh chord in measure four. After cadencing on a dominant B

major, the whole-tone scales enters in the clarinets and flutes in measure 32-33;

this is, then, repeated in measure 35-36, only this time the other whole-tone scale

is used (because of the unique properties of this scale, only two spellings are

possible). The tonic of B major, E major, finally emerges in measure 37, but only

after a sort of atonal interruption. Once again what is of significance here is the

phenomena of clear points of structural articulation (the establishment of the

Prélude’s key in E major), separated by harmonic ambiguity

The implications of this aesthetic evolution—to a reordered ambiguity—are registered in the poem's conclusion. Framed earlier was the relationship between the poem's "musical imagery" and the problem of engaging "reality" (or even

"truth") through artistic transformation. Theme and method are brought to crisis just before the poem's close. Desire, which was once a "quiver," becomes "ripe,"

"swarming."

Tant pis! vers le bonheur d'autres m'entraîneront Par leur tress nouééux cornes de mon front: Tu sais, ma passion, que, pourpre et déjà mûre. Chaque grenade éclate et d'abeilles murmure; Et notre sang, épris de quie le vas saisir. Coule pour tout l'essaim étemel du désir. A l'heure où ce bois d'or et de cendres se teinte Une fete s'exalte en la feuillée éteinte:

110 Etna! c'est parmi toi visité de Vénus Sur ta lave posant ses talons ingénus. Quand tonne un somme triste ou s'épuise la flamme. Je tiens la reine!

(Others will lead me on to happiness. Their tresses knotted round my horns, 1 guess. You know, my passion, that, crimson with ripe seeds. Pomegranates burst in a murmur of bees. And that our blood, seized by each passing form. Flows toward desire's everlasting swarm. In the time when the forest turns ashen and gold And the summer's demise in the leaves is extolled, Etna! when Venus visits her retreat. Treading your lava with iimocent feet. Though a sad sleep thunders and the flame bums cold, I hold the queen!)

At the beginning of this stanza the faun addresses "ma passion " ("my

passion"). Passion, however, is much more than the culmination of desire. It is a

different order of sensitivity that includes, presumably in some kind of sublimated

form, not only desire but, significantly, thought ("Tu sais" ["You know").

Nevertheless it seems that if passion is within the faun, he is unable to access it.

Though the tone of the first two lines is light ("Tant pis!" ["So much the worse!"] suggests fairly good natured resignation), it quickly ignites, making clear that the faun looks to the Eden of passion from a wilderness o f desire. The imagery of the two alexandrines reinforce this idea, culminating in the "greande éclate "

("pomegrantes burst "), which then, foreshadowing Ema, "[cjoule" ("flow ") like lava "tout I'essaim étemel du désir " ("toward desire's everlasting swarm"). In this

111 State the faun remembers (or imagines) that Ema is near (since he is in Sicily).

Whether it is real or imagined is unclear, a significant point not only because it is

consistent with the oppositions the poem has established, but also because in

places pressure on the method of the poem to, as it were, yield. In other words

this aesthetic probing must, finally, answer the faun's anxiety.

Imagination, in one respect, is a genuine problem for the faun. Rather than

confi-ont the absence of the nymphs in his "waking" state, he repeatedly retreats

into the illusion of a daydream. Neither realm, however, is more "real" than the

other in the sense that neither provides him the truth he craves—union with the

nymphs. What distinguishes this imaginative act, if that's what it is, from the

others is suggested in the "music " of lines 99-104. The "fete" ( "festival") "[à]

l'heure" ("at the hour "), in its most literal sense, is sunset. The obvious dualisms in

these lines are united in the tensions of the imagery; the light of the dying sun (the

reality of his "waking" state), flare in the darkness of the woods (the reality of a

true "imaginative"" state, as distinguished fi’om escapist one). It is, of course, the

exquisite precision of the language that catches the deep subtlety of this exchange.

In terms of imagery alone it is a kind of spiraling hall of mirrors in which, for

instance, the implied, internal fire of Ema reflect the glow of sunset. Here the poem's most intense "musical imagery" reaches a critical mass, collapsing on itself so as to reveal its essence.

Three central elements focus this moment: Ema, Venus, the faun. Just as

112 the faun addressed "ma passion" ("my passion") earlier, here he addresses

"Etna!". The phrase he uses, "c'est parmi toi visité de Vénus" (Weinfieid's

translation doesn't quite catch the significance of "parmi toi," which literally

translates as "among you, " suggesting a process of internalization), indicates the

level of identification that the three figures share. Venus, who is, of course, the

goddess of love, is a force similar to "passion." Here, however, the force is

personified as a goddess. Once again, this is rendered in the nuance of the

language, in this case the possessive pronouns in the images of "ta lave" and "ses

talons." The strongest fusion of these elements, however, is offered in line 103;

"Quand tonne un somme triste ou s'épuise la flamme" ( "Though a sad sleep

thunders and the flame bums cold"). Consistent with the "musical imagery "

throughout the poem, and much like Debussy's Prélude, the line's semantic ambiguity is controlled by context and precision of language. "[T]onne" and

"flamme" most obviously relate to the volcano (though also to the sky in which the sun set), but in the context of "un somme triste, " the most immediate association is with the faun, whose ardor coincides with both Ema and Venus in the phrase

"s'épuise la flamme," which then turns the poetic line back around to the original image of the sun, another symbol of nature that, by dying ("bums cold"), reveals an animate current that runs through all things. In the stanza's final line, "Je tiens la reine!" ("1 hold the queen!"), what might be recalled is the "la" that the faun plays on his reed when the literal image of music was introduced. As suggested

113 then, "la" is A natural, the tuning pitch, the transcendental signifier, a reality

beyond the state of wakefulness and dreaming. At least for the moment, the faun's

desire does indeed yield to the elusive musicality of the poem. The insight is into

the Absolute,"passion," "Venus," that for which no representation is adequate—an order available only to an imagination cleansed by the symbolist act.

Given the character of symbolist ambiguity, which seeks not to transcend desire but to escape it, it is surprising that Schopenhauer's "ideal" music—and indeed his metaphysics itself—is not related to Debussy's music, as it is to

Mallarmé's poetry. Wagner is not only the composer most often associated with

Schopenhauer, but Tristan und Isolde the piece that most notoriously—no doubt, because of Wagner's own comments of the music's source—manifests this connection. The issue is relevant not to a discussion of the merits of Tristan, which is of course beyond dispute, but in assessing the character of the new religious aesthetic for which Schopenhauer articulated a need. Wagner's own words on the subject point in two directions. "All doubt," he says, "at last was taken fi-om me when 1 gave myself up to the Tristan. Here, in perfect trustfulness 1 plunged into the inner depths of soul-events, and fi^om out this inner center of the world I fearlessly built up its outer form" ("Zukunfismusik," PW, 3:330). If moving fi-om the "inner center" out is the criteria, then Wagner's claims are

114 accurate. Certainly there can be no argument as to the organic quality of Tristan, which is revolutionary, in part, because it disregards convention to fulfill the demands of the idea. It however, die character of the music's transcendence is at issue, then it seems quite clear that Tristan achieves its effect by pushing through desire, achieving catharsis, but not escaping its mode. Even Baudelaire might have appreciated diis distinction, for what he responded to in Wagner’s music was this very quality—the pitch of its emotional intensity.

Of course, Mallarmé's poem, like Tristan, concerns a sexual union. Wagner was never able to completely resolve for himself whether the relationship between

Tristan and Isolde was literal or a metaphysical metaphor. In Mallarmé's poem, however, the union is clearly metaphoric.^ Both poem and music work by cleansing the imaginative palate, purging it not only of classical convention, but also romantic notions o f triumph and defeat. "Je tiens la reine!" ("I hold the queen!"), is not, after all, the end of the poem. This would be too Wagnerian.

Another stanza foUows:

Ô sûr châtiment. . . Non, mais l'âme De paroles vacante et ce corps alourdi Tard succombent au fier silence de midi: Sans plus il faut donnir en l'oubli du blasphème. Sur le sable altéré gisant et commme j'aime Ouvrir ma bouche à l'astre efficace des vins!

Couple, adieu; je vais voir l'ombre que tu devins.

115 ( Sure punishment.. . No, but the soul. Weighed down by the body, wordless, struck dumb. To noon’s proud silence must at last succumb: And so, let me sleep, oblivious of sin. Stretched out on the thirsty sand, drinking in The bountiful rays of the wine-growing star!

Couple, farewell; I'll see the shade that now you are.)

Empty of thought, desire dissipated, the faun releases himself to the somnolence of the afternoon's heat. The admonishment, "Ô sûr châtiment" ( "Sure punishment"), signals the recognition that any attachments, even to a representation of love, can only lead to the punishment of desire. This is the very crux of Schopenhaurian thought. As long as the world is experienced in dualities— will and representation, faun and nymph, language and music—there can only be longing, suffering. Having cleansed perception of imaginative accretions, symbolist aesthetics escapes Schopenhaurian pessimism through an act of seeing

(by means of the inner eye). Rather than ending in bitterness, the poem, in the last two stanzas, turns back toward life. The faun cannot fulfill his individual desires, but having viewed the unifying force of Venus, he is also no longer subject to the tyranny of desire. In this sense, he has indeed captured the queen. As he drifts off to sleep, he bids "adieu" in a state o f peace. Having perceived the queen herself, the "noon's proud silence" no longer threatens finality, but echoes with the infinite promise of symbolist song.

116 NOTES

1. Lehmann recaptiulates the significance of Wagner in the La Révue Wagnérieme and other symbolist journals in his chapter entitled "The Classification of the Arts" of The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 194-229.

2. For an exhaustive reading of the history of this essay, see Lacoue-Labarthe, 41-84. 3. For a translations and commentary for this and other poems in Divagations, see Cohn Mallarmé's Divagations: A Guide and Commentary. 4. This essay is collected in Divigations along with Richard Wagner, Rêverie d'un Poète Français 5. See Crayonné au Théâtre in Divigations. 6. See Cooperman's discussion of the significance of Wagner to Mallarmé, 87-118. 7. For a sense of the significance of the four-bar phrase within the context of classicism see part 1 of Rosen's chapter entitled "The Classical Style" (57-98), in The Classical Style.

8. Commentary on the four-bar phrase in romantic music, along with several examples, appears in part 2 of Rosen's chapter entitled "Formal Interlude" (257-278), in The Romantic Generation.

9. A history an analysis of the Prelude to Tristan mui Isolde appears in Baur, 147-175. 10. For an overview of "Un Coup de Dés" see Weinfield, 264-275. 11. For an fascinating reading of the relationship between symbolism and absolute music, see the last chapters of Dahlhaus'The Idea o f Absolute Music, "Absolute Music and Poésie Absolue” 141-157.

12. See Chisholm for a history of the poem. 13. For commentary on the theme of desire and binary oppositions that it produces throughout the poem, see Weinfield, 179-183.

117 14. For a line-by-line discusson of musical illusions in this stanza, see Cohn Tcnvardthe Poems o f Mallarmé, 14-15. 15. What's interesting about Bernstein's reading is that he sees the relationship between poem and music as structural (as opposed to thematic). Just as Stravinsky and Eliot (Bernstein argues later), both employ corresponding characteristics of modernistic aesthetics.

16. In the opening chapter 0)îModem Music, Griffith's states the conventional view: "If modern music may be said to have had a definite beginning, then it started with this flute melody, the opening of the Prélude à L ’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy (1862- 1918)" (7). 17. See Bernstein, 241-245. 18. For a contrast of Wagner’s "Tristan chord" with Debussy’s "Faun chord," see Hertz, 68-72. 19. See Wenk's Claude Debussy’s and the Poets, 148-171.

20. Williams argues with regard to L ’Aprés-midi d ’un faun that ”[t]he symbolism of the hierosgamos—oi physical union with the divine—touches on die most central experiences of the mystic: the deep longing of consciousness for reintegration into Being” (59-60).

118 119 CHAPTER 4

STEVENS AND STRAVINSKY: AESTHETIC OBJECTIVITY

While symbolist aesthetics evolved as a backlash against Wagnerian romanticism, high modernism's most direct symboUst descendants consciously extended both symbolist technique and its underlying ethos. For Wallace Stevens, the influence of the French symbolists began as early as 1914,* when he was exposed to them as an undergraduate at Harvard, and was still in evidence as late as 1955, the year in which he wrote a preface to a volume of Valery's collected works in English translation. In Adagia he writes, "French and English constitute a single language" {OP 202), and in response to a queiy by René Taupin, whose book LHnJluence du Symbolisme français sur la poésie américaine, 1910-1920

{The Influence o f French Symbolism on American Poetry, 1910-1920) was one of the first comparative studies of modernist French and American poetry, Stevens responded; "La légèreté, la grâce, le son et la couleur du fiançais ont eu sur moi une influence indéniable et une influence précieuse" (276) ("The lightness, the grace, the sound and color of French have had an undeniable and precious influence on me"). His interest in French symbolism was by no means indio-

120 syncratic. Eliot is, of course, the most famous advocate of symbolist doctrine, but

the Imagism of Pound and Williams is also indebted. Across the American avante-

garde arts community there was a general fascination with things French.*

Several writers have argued that the symbolist lineage in America ends in

Stevens.^ This view, however, emerges not so much out of a theory o f influence,

but a feeling of affinity. Valery's famous term for Mallarmé, poésie absolue, is

suggestive for Stevens as well. Not only does Stevens share Mallarmé's sense of

impersonality, his austerity, but he also extends Mallarmé’s closed, self-referential poetics. For Stevens, pure poetry is reflected in his concern with poetry about poetry, his private system of metaphor, his reluctance to reach beyond the circum­ ference of the poem for historical or intertextual meaning. Most importantly he is concerned with cleansing perception: poetry, at once, purifies and is purified by perception. Aesthetic objectivity in Stevens is not a posture—it is a fundamental poetic act. Decreation, or, as Stevens calls it, "abstraction,” allows for the possibility of a metaphysics of reality.

The significant difference between Mallarmé and Stevens lies in the character of this negation in a poetry that, for both poets, is narrowly concerned with what is at heart an existential problem. For Mallarmé, negation is placed in the service of an identification with the absolute, perception of the idee in the

Platonic sense. Words are thus severed fi’om their meanings, placed next to each other in a reciprocally illuminating musical relationship. Stevens' asceticism isn't

121 as mystical. Symbols do not lose their meaning, but generate their own clusters of

meaning. Rather than rejecting the world, he saw the world as the only possible

point of departure/ When he speaks of the "first idea," it isn't Platonic perfection,

but "things as they are," "reality" without any projections. "If you dunk about the

world, " he wrote in a letter to Henry Church, "without its varnish and dirt, you are

a thinker of the first idea" {Letters o f Wallace Stevens 426-7). Purity, for Stevens,

is a means, rather than an end. Negation thus becomes a kind of scientific

objectivity. By observing what is actual, rather than projected, one arrives at a

clear perception of reality.

Stravinsky's relationship to Debussy's symboUsm is more complex. Adorno

views modem music as a dichotomy between Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Schoenberg represents the positive pole (expressive, developmental, progressive),

Stravinsky the negative (intellectual, non-developmental, regressive). This

dialectic is contrary to the prevalent view of modem music that regarded all its

forms as evolving out of a common tradition. Adomo viewed Stravinsky as

categorically different firom Schoenberg. What Adomo particularly disdained was

Stravinsky's neoclassicism, which, like Debussy, extended the life of tonal music beyond the limits of fimctional harmony. For Adomo, the spUt between tonal and non-tonal music represented the difference between a music organically continuous with the romantic tradition of Wagner and one that was, essentially, a modernist fi-aud. One of the peculiarities of Adorno's attack is that Debussy does

122 not suffer the same wrath as Stravinsky. Adomo is particularly unforgiving o f the

objective element in StravinslQ^'s neoclassism, which Adomo considers

intellectualized and disingenuous. This quality of objectivity, as has been

discussed, veiy much follows in the modernist legacy of Debussy /

Because of Stravinsky's neoclassicism, the poet to whom he is most often

compared is T. S. Eliot^ The nature of die comparison is fairly straightforward.

Eliot's allusiveness, his intertexuality, create an obliquity of expression similar to

Stravinsky's neoclassicism. However, this point of similarity can be misleadingly

superficial. The full significance of the Stravinsky/ Eliot comparison lies less in

the particular practices of indirection than in dieir common understanding of

tradition. Stravinsky was sensitive to the characterization of his neoclassic music

as the scavaging of history in search of style—"Bach with wrong notes," as

Prokofiev lampooned. One of the most interesting expressions of an "Impersonal

theory" is Eliot's essay. Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot argues that die proper task of the artist is not self-expression, but the impersonal rendering of the collective experience. The essay is famous for the analogy of die catalyst, which

Eliot compares with the creative imagination. The tme artist transmutes his material, without personally entering into the outcome. Thus meaningful originality emerges not as an extension of the self^ but out of the process of understanding cultural tradition. "The emotion of art is impersonal," Eliot concludes at die end of his essay, "And the poet carmot reach this impersonality

123 without surrendering himself wholly to the woric to be done And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives what is not merely the present, but the present moment of die past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living" (Selected Essays 22).

Eliot's sense o f the historical as "timeless and temporal" is similar to

Baudelaire's sense of it as "relative and circumstantial" in The Painter o f Modem

Life. Given the broad influence of French symbolism, it isn't surprising that it inspired more than one aesthetic strand. Baudelaire was one of the significant

French poets for Eliot, and he was well aware of Baudelaire's criticism, a familiarity that is made clear in his own essay on Baudelaire, which Eliot writes

"to affirm the importance of Baudelaire's prose works." Though Stravinsky didn't meet Eliot until later in life—and there is no evidence that he read or knew of

Eliot's essay—his often repeated remarks on tradition sound strikingly similar:

Tradition is entirely different from habit, even from an excellent habit, since habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition and tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition results from a conscious and deliberate acceptance. A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably one; it is a living force that animates and informs the present. In this sense the paradox which banteringly maintains that eveiything which is not tradition is plagiarism, is true . . . Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear finit before passing it on to one's descendants. (Poetics o fMusic 57)

This sense of continuity is different from that of Adomo, who views

124 tradition as a linear progression. Adomo’s dialectic frames Schoenberg as the

progressive product of historical necessity, and Stravinsky as the reactionary

product of a sterile culture. Stravinsky's distinction between habit and tradition

makes an effective rebuttal to this. True continuity is a genuinely imaginative

action, not systematized, formal order. Rather than the practice of intertextual

reference, it is this sense of tradition that relates Stravinsky and Eliot. However

the particular character of Stravinsky's objectivity, which, especially in his

religious writing, is more austere with regard to his subject than Eliot's, reveals a

sensibility more inclined toward the historical importance of a metaphysical

aesthetics, than the need of metaphysical aesthetics for history. Stravinsky's deep

concern is that his neoclassicism evolve out of what both he and Eliot describe as

that aspect of tradition that is living in the present, not the formal tradition from

which it is inherited. As in Stevens, Stravinsky's neoclassic objectivity emerges

from life itself. "The need for restriction, for deliberately submitting to a style,"

wrote Stravinsky in his autobiography, "has its source in the very depths of our

nature, and has a bearing not only in matters of art, but in every conscious

manifestation of human activity. It is the need for order without which nothing

can be achieved, and upon the disappearance of which everything disintegrates "

(20).

Side by side, Stevens and Stravinsky illuminate each other not just because of the character of their objectivity, but because for both objectivity arises out of a

125 metaphysics founded on perception. While the concern for metaphysical order

may be identified with the "living force" of tradition, the aesthetics of perception is

unique to modernism's "present moment." It is what distinguishes, for instance,

English romanticism fi’om French symbolism. John Senior suggests this by ob­

serving that "the difiference between the two "kinds' of poetry are differences

between the philosophical and the presentational. The world views are the same,

but the Romantic poet tends to write about his ideas or to relate experience in

which these ideas were acted out; the Symbolist poet tries to create the experience

on the page" (51). What makes the correspondence between Stevens and

Stravinsky more striking is their contrasting religious visions. Stravinsky aims to

rescue religious tradition firom romantic sentimentality; Stevens seeks to salvage

romantic union fi’om religious projection. One, in other words, wishes to resurrect

God in the wake of lost belief. The other wishes to resurrect belief in the wake of

God's death.

Nevertheless Stevens and Stravinsky realize the same aesthetic necessity.

In his essay, "Two or Three Ideas," Stevens says: "... the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of the earth remains to be written"

{NA 142). For Stevens, the poetiy of the earth is a poetry of reality, one whose point of departure is "things as they are,” rather than as one wishes or fears them to be. An impersonal aesthetics is needed not only to discern what is real, but to bring about the "supreme fiction"—"a poem equivalent to the idea of God" {Letters

126 o f Wallace Stevens 369-70). This requires not romantic transcendence, but careful

observation. A cleansed perception, as Stevens suggests in O f Mere Being, results

in a consciousness of pure being, "the palm at the end of the mind." Stravinsky's

neoclassicism is comparably grounded. It isn't his primitivism that suggests this

(the use of folklore, the mythic element), but the extension of tonality in the tradition of Debussy. Certainly this is what Leonard Bernstein had in mind in titling his last lecture on Stravinsky in the Norton series, "Poetry of Earth." (In a controversial statement he said that the "creative mystery . . . is inextricably rooted in the rich earth of our irmate response, in those deep, unconscious regions where the universals of tonality and language reside " [417]).’ For Stravinsky the extension of religious belief and tonality are intertwined. As with Stevens, a cleansing of the personal was necessary to rediscover tradition in a modem aesthetic, a tradition "whose source was the very depths of our nature " What follows is a discussion of objectivity in three parts; (I) the objective element in

Stevens; (II) the objective element in Stravinsky; (HI) a comparison of two central works, Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and Stravinsky's Symphony o f

Psalms.

I Objectivity in Stevens

127 Objectivity in Stevens is a mode of inquiry. In Tradition, Eliot introduces

his analogy of the catalyst by saying: "It is in this depersonalization that art may be

said to approach the condition of science" (17). However, the metaphor of science

applies more to Stevens than Eliot. Scientific objectivity is necessary to discern

both what is real and "what will suffice." Poetry, practiced in this way, is an

instrument of metaphysics, a form of investigation. So prevalent is this quality of

mind that it is present not only in the poem's conception, but also in the nuance of the poetic line. Man and Bottle, for instance, an early poem from Parts o fa

World, begins:

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man. Who, to find what will suffice. Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice (1-4)

The first line of the poem posits an arithmetic formula: the mind is equated with winter. In its logic, as well as its tone, the opening suggests the certainty of scientific method. It functions, in effect, as a hypothesis, a statement to be tested, a premise to be investigated. It also suggests the area of the poem's concern: the nature of the imagination and its relationship to reality. That the mind is a "poem of winter" and not spring, suggests the poet's sensibility. The imagination is not, as it were, a tropical paradise rich with exotic growth; it is a frozen landscape, in which "destroy[ing] romantic tenements" is paramount to metaphysical order.

128 In the poem's second line the poet's queiy is framed, a question implied:

"What will sufBce?" Two points might be noted here First, it completes a sense of the first stanza as a rather formal inquiry with clear parameters A problem is defined (the relationship between the imagination and reality), a hypothesis advanced (the mind as winter), an investigation initiated (what will sufiGce?). The rest of the poem employs a variety of rhetorical strategies to engage this question.

Second, the diction suggests the sort of answer Stevens seeks. In relationship to an overwhelming problem—a relationship between the self and the world from which it is estranged—the speaker understates his question. What is important here is the refusal of religious or grand metaphysical answers. The poet isn't interested in myth or systems or analysis, but in direct perception discerned from experience.

As many have observed, the relationship between the imagination and reality is Stevens' singular concern. Over and over again it is framed as an existential moment. It is often a moment of confrontation, a Mallarméan sense of the void, a gaze into the abyss Such a moment, for example, occurs in the final stanzas of "The Snow Man":

For the listener, who listens in the snow. And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (13-15)

And also in the closing stanzas of The Course o f a Particular.

129 The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention, Nor the smoke drift of puffed out heroes, nor human cry. It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more Than they are in die final finding of the ear, in the thing Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all

What is starding is the austerity with which it is rendered. There is a void

of emotion, a staric objectivity. Absent is the rage, the sense of despair or protest

that occur in romantic poetry. In Keats, with whom Stevens is often compared,

there is an end-of-the-world intensity:

.. . —then on the shore O f the wide world I stand alone, and I think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. (12-14) When I Have Fears

In Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode, in which he laments his waning creative powers

(what, for the non-poet, is the equivalent to the loss of self or identity), there is dark lament:

A grief widiout a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief. Which finds no natural oudet, no relief. In word, or sigh, or tear— (21-24)

Even in Dylan Thomas, Stevens' contemporary, there is outrage in the face of

130 extinction:

And you, my father, there on the sad height. Curse, bless, me now with you fierce tears, I pray Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage %ainst the dying of the light. (16-19)

But there is none of this in Stevens. The quality of absence in his poetry isn't that

of repression, as it sometimes is in Eliot; rather it is suspended emotion, emotion

held in abeyance, so that it doesn't interfere with the gaze of the poet. No struc­ tures for belief or assertion of values can be made without a cleansed perception, a perception stripped of tradition and other "romantic tenements." For Stevens, poetry is "a destructive force," as well as a productive one. The first section title in Notes is "It Must be Abstract." The term abstract, in Stevens' private system of metaphor, refers to the ability to look at reality without imaginative accretions. In

Adagia, Stevens writes: "Life is the elimination of what is dead" (169).

While any number of poems demonstrate the exploratory aspect of Stevens’ objectivity, the complexity of voice in Peter Quince at the Clavier makes it a particularly interesting example to consider.* As with Man and Bottle, Peter

Quince begins with an equation. The algebra, however, is more difficult than before. Through a series of analogies, Stevens collapses the distinction between spirit and sense. In essence, it is a kind o f logic problem: fingers produce music, as music produces emotion. Yet, this equation, with the rtietoric of logic, holds

131 the status of metaphor. What is advanced, then, is a hypothesis that is arrived at

through a sort of commutative property of language.

Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. (1-3)

Just as with the symbol of music, the figure of the pianist functions in dual roles.

He is both the artist who produces beauty, and the listener who is moved by it.

The aim, then, of this difficult opening stanza (in which Stevens simultaneously

sounds like philosopher, poet, and logician) is to complicate the usual aesthetic,

and by extension, ontological positions; sense and spirit, performer and audience,

instrumentalist and instrument. Beauty in art, the reasoning in this stanza

suggests, does not reside in its aesthetic medium, but exists in its effect on its receiver.

In the second stanza, Stevens makes the first of a series of imaginative leaps that make the poem so difficult to comprehend as an artistic whole.

Music is feeling, then, not sound. And thus it is that what I feel. Here in this room, desiring you, (4-7)

The words "then" and "thus" are misleading indications that the poem will proceed according to the same principles of logic that are in evidence in the first stanza. In

132 fact, the equation in the first line, ”[m]usic is feeling," is simply the hypothesis

arrived at as a consequence of the first three lines. The move, then, firom this line, to the second line in which the speaker addresses the object of his desire, reflects a connection in the poet’s mind between the meditative and the personal, spirit and sense. This might not be so disruptive if it were not the only reference to the

"you" of the poem. As it happens, however, the speaker moves directly fi'om the possessor of the "blue-shadowed silk," to the Susanna motif.

What is established in these first eight lines is the interdependent relationship between art and feeling, music and sexual desire. From this point on, it is impossible to say whether the poem is about one or the other; art and desire are collapsed into the same event. Read literally, the Susanna episode is introduced as a simile for "what I (eel/ Here in this room, desiring you." What the speaker feels for his lover, in other words, ”[i]s music . . . like the strain/ Waked in the elders by Susanna." In fact, this third direction in the poem serves three functions: it is an analogy for the speaker’s desires (since he is like the elders), it is the concrete embodiment of the abstractions in the first stanza, and it is a mythic, archetypal projection of both the abstraction and the speaker's desires. There are, then, a range of rhetorical strategies that Stevens uses—in the first stanza alone—to interrogate the problem that the poem defines for itself. He moves firom musings on the relationship between music and feeling to a hypothesis, to a transposition of this notion into the personal, to a more universal contexturalization into the form

133 of mythic images.

The Susanna motif in sections H and m presents a number of difficulties.^

There have been numerous accounts of this passage, none of them definitive. As a

form of inquiry, however, these middle sections are part of the poem's evolution

from the disjunction of the first section, to the integration in section IV. The poem

as a whole, then, whether or not it can be fully accounted for, is best read as a movement from hypothesis, to process, to poetic realization. The difficulties of this section begin with the fairly bizarre nature of the "narrative." These sections, after all, describe the nude Susanna as she "searched/ The touch o f springs,/ And found/ Concealed imaginings." This display sexually arouses a group of elders who are watching her and then make some sort of overture that leads to "Susaima and her shame.”

These sections, however, probably shouldn't be described as "narration," for really they are a series of highly stylized images. What is sometimes overlooked in these middle sections is the richness of language. Each of this poem's four sections display a different formal pattern. Section 0 is made up of four stanzas; the first three are scenes that successively describe Susarma lying in water, standing on the bank, and walking on the grass. In each of these scenes the fusion of spirit and sense, music and desire, is apparent. They also combine die abstract with the concrete image. While she is standing on the bank, for instance, she is in

"the cool/ Of spent emotions./ She felt, among the leaves,/ The dew/ Of old

134 devotions."

In general these scenes reflect the harmony of Susanna and her environment, and suggest the idealized sort of beauty that art pursues but can never fully capture. But however one reads this section there is a clear distinction between the first three stanzas and the fourth, which functions as a transition to the rhymed couplets in section three. This break occurs in what is sometimes read as the narrative portion of the poem: Suzanna's attendants arrive to find Susanna crying "[ajgainst the elders by her side." The shift in "mode," then, in the middle two sections, functions as a sort of development section, in which the hypothesis about the relationship between music and feeling is further complicated. The primary process for this is the intricate language, the complicated imagery, and the m>thic figures. By setting up Susanna and the elders as the poles of tension

(beauty, so to speak, and the artist), Stevens is able to work through the disparate parts of section one imaginatively, thus leading to the lyric statement in the final section.

Section IV, then, is not only lyrical, but also a thesis that could not have been formulated except for the poem's process. It is a final statement that simultaneously brings together all of the poem's oppositions: spirit and sense, the individual and the mythic, rationality and lyricism.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going.

135 A wave, interminably flowing. (54-56)

The corporeal and ethereal are interdependent, yet in giving over to the collective

(as indicated in sections II and III) one can rejoice in beauty’s continual rebirth.

All things must die (maidens, evenings, poems), but there is an "interminably flowing" wave of beginnings that runs through human history. Moreover, it is celebration grounded in the knowable, a basis for meaning rooted in reality And for this reason, it is a true religion, a music that "makes a constant sacrament of praise."

It is also the point of emotional and spiritual catharsis. The poem is orchestrated such that the point of highest tension is reached in the third section.

Section I began with an emotionally distanced meditation that led to the hypothesis that "[m]usic is feeling"; a reference to the speaker is then made in the line "what 1 feel,/ Here in the room, desiring you"; an identification with the elder’s follows with ”[i]t is like the strain/ Waked in the elders by Susaima; and then, of course, the Susanna motif makes up the next two sections. If one traces the emotional engagement of the speaker through this division of the poem, it is clear that he moves from cerebral contemplation in the poem’s beginning, to a dissolution— almost an extinction—of the self in the mythic images of Susanna and the elders. It is out of this, however, that a more unified, more integrated self appears in the voice of section IV. It is the lyrical song of the poet who is able to participate in

136 both the temporality and constancy of life ("The body dies; the body's beauty

lives").

n Objectivity in Stravinsky

Stravinsky's notorious statement that "music is powerless to express

anything at all" {Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography 53) is not as much a denial of

music's ohvious expressive quality, as an assertion of the autonomy of musical

form. "[Most people]," Stravinsky says later in his autobiography, "never seem to

understand that music has an entity of its own apart from anything that it may

suggest to them " (163). As indicated earlier, Stravinsky is at odds with Adomo not only in his sense of artistic tradition, but in his conception of an autonomous aesthetic order. In outlining the parameters of Adorno's aesthetics. Max Paddison frames Adorno's "dilemma of modernism" as "the predicament faced by the artist caught between, on the one hand, the traditional demands of the art work for unity and integration (the harmonious relationship between part and whole) and, on the other hand, the loss of faith in any overarching unity on both individual and social levels in the face of the evident fragmentation of modem existence" (3).

Stravinsky's complex response is rooted in a recognition of both realities. Though he meets "the traditional demands" tonally, Stravinsky's "unity and integration" is

137 not Wagner's. Rather than projecting die selfs inner landscape, Stravinsky's music expresses the self in contemplation of a world of which it is a part, but for which it is also estranged. In this sense, Stravinsky's objectivity is not expressionless, but expressive of something odier. It creates, as does Stevens, an aesthetic fiction that seeks to reconcile the "fiagmentation of modem existence."

Stravinsky's tonal objectivity is largely created by his use of dissonance.

By the tum-of-the-centuiy, dissonance—as has been discussed in chapter three—no longer carried the same musical meaning it once had. "Having become an entity in itself," Stravinsky says in Poetics o fMusic, "it fi’equently happens that dissonance neither prepares nor anticipates anything Dissonance is thus no more an agent of disorder than consonance is a guarantee of security" (350). As was seen in Deb­ ussy, the new dissonance did not evolve out of the old diatonic system, but was part of a new "axis " that recognized what Stravinsky called "poles of attraction."

He outlines this notion later in Poetics: "Diatonic tonality^ is only one means of orienting music towards these poles. The fimction of tonality is completely sub­ ordinated to the force of attraction of the pole of sonority. All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge towards a definite point of repose" (35). Rather than the old system of diatonic relationships, Stravinsky argues for tonal centers—"the pole of sonority"—arrived at by other means. As a consequence, sonorities that used to be called dissonant are now free to be employed in other ways.“*

138 Perhaps the most well-known of these new dissonances is found in the

practice of polytonality—which, simply enough, is the use of two or more tonalities

at the same time. The most often cited example o f a polychord is found in

Petrouchka. Though it is a single sonority, the Petrouchka chord consists of two

triads, C major and F# major (figure 4.1).

C m a jo r

trito n c m a jo r

Figure 4.1 Petrouchka chord

Even in this simple example, the characteristics of the practice are evident. The interval, for instance, C major and F#, is once again a tritone. As in Faun, the tritone creates instability, in this case uniting two simple, stable triads in a diatonically unstable relationship. This contradiction within the sonority of the chord suggests the duality of the Petrouchka himself^ both puppet and human. The dissonance creates an ambiguity expressive of obliquity rather than direcmess.

A more complicated—but no means the most complicated—instance of polytonality is demonstrated in the opening of Le Sacre du printemps (figure 4.2).

Here the polychords help to evoke the music's primitivism. The piece begins with

139 a bitonal chord in the strings. The violins play an Eb dominant-seventh chord, the

cellos and based an Fb chord (enhaimonically E major). Separately the chords are common, tonal sonorities; together, related by only a half step, they register as sharp dissonance. The bitonality also exists in the comets, which punctuate the rhythm with a chord that unites Bb dominant-seven and Ab, an especially inter­ esting combination given the Eb7/Fb chord in the strings. Finally, at rehearsal number 14 where the English horns enter, there are three simultaneous tonalities:

Eb dominant-seventh in the horns, C major in the bassoons, and E major in the cellos. Elsewhere polytonality involves a more intricate networic of tonal families.

Nevertheless it is clear from this example that dissonance is part o f the music's structure, not simply ornamentation.

140 Igor Stravinsky(/5S2-/97/) Le Sacre du printemps (.1913): Danses 143 des adolescentes

Tempo f ivito. « : ••

pO f tttlto. é M

Figure 4 2 Sirevinsky. le Sacre duprinlenps (1913)

Figure continued

141 Figure 4.2 continued Stravinsky,Saere du printemps

fW L#.

142 Even more notorious than the tonal layering in Le Sacre, is its riiythmic

layering. In this example (figure 4.3) the layering evolves out the placement of two contrasting sets of riiythm within the music's 6/4 meter. The first set, which takes place in the horns, superimposes groupings of four and eight. As indicated, the four grouping occurs in the motive carried by the tubas and reinforced by the trumpets. Beneath this the horns play a counterpoint line in groupings of eight.

What is most significant here is that the groupings transgress the bar line (no matter how the 6/4 is counted). In contrast to this, set two, which occurs in the percussion section, is organized in groupings of twos and fours. Thus they operate within the 6/4 meter, without transgressing the measure. The timpani beats steady eighth-notes, but with an accent on every third note. Since the grouping of three eighth-notes takes place within a 6/4 meter, it sets up a counter rhythm (four against six). These groupings are reinforced by the bass drum and tam-tam, and also with the guiro, which reinforces the four accents per bar, but sounds eight times a measure against the 6/4 meter. Beyond the polyrhythms within this set, there is of course the first set, creating an effect of ambiguity that is nevertheless precise.

143 «o r # Y~|&y-4J . ^ —:i-—».k* ^ ftf». > - % V ^ k ^ y , % —■ 9 > k

t.4.

C ar w |t ' P - -r f ------C WifW< fic a ■■ -:■------r: -. = ------»- — T CW -S«bi

f.*. 1

Figure 4 3, ie Sacre du printemps (1913)

Figure continued

144 Figure 4.3 continued

. rymp^* ( i

^ Cm-

#mm#'

145 In the examples of polytonality and polyrhythm, Stravinsky's layering

creates an objective aesthetics through displacement. By asserting tonal sonorities

related in nondiatonic ways there is a sense of skewed familiarity. The tonal

tradition is in place, but at a remove. Debussy's symbolism, of course, is a central

source in both instances. As has been described at some length, Debussy's

thwarting of the forward progress of functional harmony, his assertion of structural

poles other than tonic and dominant, and his preference for "stasis " over

"development, " paved the way for Stravinsky's innovations. A brief example of

one of Debussy's common techniques provides a useful comparison to those of

Stravinsky (figure 4.4). This excerpt from La Cathédrale engloutie, the tenth

prelude from the two volumes he wrote for piano, demonstrates an innovation

referred to as planing—the use of parallel chord motion. Though all the chords in

measures 28-41 are triads, their quality changes depending on their position in the

scale (in measure 25, for instance, a C major triad becomes a D minor triad).

Different scales—a pentatonic scales instead of the diatonic scale shown here, for example—produce different chord constructions. This harmonic movement is held together by the pedal point in the bass (low C), a technique that isn't new, but that gains new significance in Debussy. There is, then, a strong sense of motion, but it is not that of functional harmony; sonority and phrase structure replace chord function as organizing principles.

146 Ti:::

~r::s I I« If «C %e .

L

:25 I \

\ Q «Ï«0

TIM

,/ 14 \ (< ) « 'fit»

Figure 4.4 Debussy, La Cathédrale engloutie (1910) Figure continued

147 Figure 4.4 continued

l i P p 1i 1 1 y

Q, .liji' a 11* • 1 T -a.

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148 What is important about the examples of particular techniques reviewed

here is that Stravinsky and Debussy create displacement in similar ways. For both

there is tonal grounding, but an absence of traditional harmonic tension. Stravin­

sky's layering of tonalities and liiythm, and Debussy's chord planing are only

examples of how a different structural logic is created through a recombination of

traditional elements. One of the outcomes of this is the feeling of a kind of motion

in stasis. Without the forward momentum of functional harmony, new ways of

creating movement had to be developed. The point here isn't to enumerate these

different methods, but rather to point out, by selective illustration, their implica­

tions. Stravinsky and Debussy's displacement led to a discontinuous writing—

writing that is static, removed. Instead of the direcmess of the old "poles, " there is

the indirection of the new.

For Adorno, these elements—objectivity, lack of development, "music about

music"—are precisely what made Stravinsky regressive. As suggested before, the

neoclassic works that followed Le Sacre exhibited these characteristics to an even

greater degree. Gilbert Amy's characterization of Stravinsky's religious music

makes clear why Adomo objected to Stravinsky's neo-classic works generally, and

Symphony o f Psalms in particular":

The Stravinsky family, in true Russian fashion, chose to live surrounded by icons and pious images. But finding any evidence of a sentimental

149 attitude toward the sacred in Igor Fyodorovitch's religious music would be difQcult. On the contrary, this music is characterized by the starkness of its content and the sharp clarity of its lines, the absence of pathos or bombast but not of eloquence Economy, clarity, objectivity, and exclusion of personal' emotion are the hallmarks o f Igor Stravinsky's style. The nature and function of his religious and liturgical music in no way invalidates them. It enhances and exalts them. The religious aspects of Stravinsky's art are essentially nonrepresentational, but not by any means abstract—far from it. In his religious music, Stravinsky re-establishes links with a distant past and at the same time breaks new ground. (195)

Adorno's assessment of the objective/non-developmental aspect of Stravinsky's displacement depends heavily on identifying developmental music with develop­ mental variations. Though they aren't a part of the musical dynamics as they are in

Schoenberg, variation is very much a part of Stravinsky's writing. Adomo later refined his view, but continued to insist that Stravinsky's music is static "since it is made of repetitions" ( "Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait" 152). Many have commented on the narrowness of this criteria, among them Carl Dahlhaus, who argued: "No-one would deny Adorno's premise that an engagement with time [la relazione con il tempo] is essential for Stravinsky's music, as for all music

However, the consequence, that developing variation is the only legitimate way to fulfil the formal law of music as temporal art, is dogmatic" (47-8).*^ Moreover,

Adomo inaccurately assesses the nature of Stravinky's repetition. As will be seen in—for instance—the coda of the last movement of Symphony o f Psalms, there are always subtle changes in the repetition whose effect is more than the "illusion" of

150 movement.

Underlying Adorno's critique is not only his belief that the temporal aspect

of music is bound with what he calls "transcendence," but that there is no sense of

"becoming." "[The] apparent progressions," Adomo argues, "in every one of

Stravinsky's movements are not real, but instead are dammed up to create the

illusion of a static timelessness. " His concern is that the impUcation is "that they

have abrogated time and achieved a status of pure being " ("Stravinsky: A

Dialectical Portrait" 152, 153). Ironically, the absence of a sense of "becoming" is

what Stravinsky shares with Stevens, but not with Eliot. Though Stravinsky's

stasis is more than "the illusion o f static timelessness, " Adomo is right in that it

clearly doesn't "become" along the developmental lines that he outlines. Earlier the Romantic notion of transcendence was distinguished from the symbolist's notion of a Platonic ideé, both of which have lineage with Stravinsky and Stevens.

While Eliot’s sense of time is historical, Stevens not only doesn't "become" aesthetically, but neither does he "become " psychologically. The action in Stevens isn't progressive in the sense that he wishes to transcend his current state; rather it is always regressive (or negative), in the sense that he wishes to "abstract" what is false. The difference is critical in that the progression, from a psychological point o f view, involves moving from the known to the known. The idée to which one wishes to transcend is always a projection of desire and thus not an honest search for ontological reality, but the illusion of subjective romanticism. In Notes Toward

151 a Supreme Fiction and Symphony o fPsalms, the negative aesthetics are similar in that they not only lead to a new realization of the subject/object relation, but a change in the subject and object themselves.

m Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and Stravinsky's Symphony o f Psalms

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is composed of thirty, seven-stanza cantos, arranged in three sections (ten cantos in each). An epigraph begins the piece and a final canto, beyond the third section, concludes it. As many have commented, the fragmentary nature of Notes is suggested in the title. "Notes" and

"Toward" register hesitancy and incompletion, while the label "Supreme Fiction " make apparent the impossibility of the project itself—the paradox of trying to capture something ephemeral in a definitive statement. A central poem in Stevens' oeuvre. Notes demonstrates the relationship between his objectivity and the imagination/reality ontology. Each of the poems' three sections posits the condition for his metaphysics; "It Must be Abstract," "It Must Change," "It Must

Give Pleasure."

Cantos I and II introduce the problems of "abstraction " and "change. "

Addressed to the ephebe, Stevens draws an analogy between the apprenticeship of a young man into the citizeniy of ancient Greece and the apprenticeship of the

152 poet into "this invented world." Everyone is the poet’s apprentice, however, in the

sense that all share in "the celestial ennui of apartments? That send us back to the

Erst idea" (I,ii). Thus one of the first lessons is that the poetic "idea" caimot be

bestowed, but must be seen for oneself.

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world. The inconceivable idea of the sun.

You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it (I,i)

"Idea" in Stevens sense is neither the "ideal" of Plato or the "idée" of the

Baudelaire and Mallarmé. It is, in fact, antithetical to these notions in that they (at

least by Stevens' view), like religion, are a projection of desire, rather than an

order emerging fi-om the structure of reality.'^ Instead the ephebe is instructed not

to apprehend the world through his conception of it (the "invented world"), but to perceive the reality of it directly (to "see the sun again with an ignorant eye").

"The inconceivable idea" of the third line is offset against "see it clearly" in the sixth. One doesn't apprehend reality through thought, but sees it with the inner eye. The ephebe must become "an ignorant man again" because only an ignorant man, without image, without bias, can see the sun as it is, rather than in its conception.

Seeing reality stripped of illusions does not, however, throw the ephebe into

153 existential dread. Rather it is necessary for true freedom. It is, in fact, the

"celestial eimui" of a concept driven life "[t]hat sends us back to the first idea. "

Nevertheless the ephebe's task is difficult:

There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold fiourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be. (I,i)

As Stevens repeats throughout "It Must Change," perception is fi'agile in that it quickly turns to conception. While aesthetic objectivity cleanses the lens through which one views the sun, keeping it clean requires constant vigilance. Once perception is registered as experience it is a product of thought, no longer the living flame of the sun but a fixed image. "[T]he first idea," warns Stevens,

"becomes/ The hermit in a poet's metaphors " (I,ii). "Idea" becomes a "hermit" because as "metaphor," no longer that which "bear[s] no name," it is separate fi’om reality. Moreover, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that the ephebe's apprenticeship is as a poet—one whose craft is the making of metaphor. The paradox is recognized in the passage above. No sooner has the poet warned that the sun "[mjust bear no name, " than he names it—"gold fiourisher "

A key element of "abstraction"—and the one that links it to "change "—is its central assumption: that the self creates illusions from which reality needs to be abstracted. Helen Vendler has written that: "In spite of the severe impersonahty of

Stevens" style, in spite even of his (often transparent) personae, it is himself of

154 whom he writes. He has been too little read as a poet of human misery” {Wallace

Stevens: Words Chosen out o f Desire 11).*'* Just as Stravinsky’s statement about

music being "expressionless" is not to be understood literally, Stevens' objectivity

might best be regarded not as unexpressive, but simply as not expressive of the

self. Vendler's observation suggests something more, however. The need to

abstract is itself a sign of deep disillusionment with the "invented world." This

disillusionment with the objects of projection causes Stevens to consider the

desires that placed them there.

The monastic man is an artist. The philosopher Appoints man's place in music, say, today. But the priest desires. The philosopher desires.

And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle. It is desire at the end of winter, when

It observes the effortless weather turning blue And sees the myositis on its bush. Being virile, it hears the calendar hymn.

It knows that what it has is what is not And throws it away like a thing of another time. As morning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep. (I, ii)

It is worth recalling that the issue of desire, resulting in an objective aesthetics, is deeply imbedded in the musical and literary symbolist imagination.

As has been discussed, Schopenhauer considered the tyranny of desire, which he

155 thought best reflected in music, as the source o f human sorrow. When Vendler

speaks of Stevens "as a poet of human misery," she is speaking not just of the

disappointment of seeing through the falseness of human endeavor, but the pain of

desire itself. More so than the symbolists, however, Stevens shares an afihnity

with Schopenhauer because of his interest in working out a metaphysics. In a

passage on the difficulty of clear perception, Frank Doggett quotes Schopenhauer

with regard to Stevens to illustrate how he ”resemble[s] Stevens’ characteristic

phrasing; 'It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun

and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the

world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something

else, the consciousness, which is himself."'^ Like the symbolist poets—those most

often associated with Schopenhauer—Stevens removes the personal, contemplating

desire as a subject apart from the self (neither use the lyrical voice). Nevertheless

it is Stevens, rather than Baudelaire, Mallarmé or Valéry, who attempts to discern

an ontological structure of the imagination.

For Stevens, the "ancient cycle" of desire is responsible for the misery of

the "invented world." However the "romantic tenements" of desire are not only

sexual; "priests" and "philosophers" desire as well. While the objects of desire

differ, the desire/illusion mechanism is the same. Priests desire religious belief, philosophers desire systems of reason, lovers desire romantic union. What is important for the ephebe to understand is that poets are as susceptible to illusion as

156 the others. A poet's desire for truth, the ephebe is warned, can cause the death of

truth itself ("Of this invention; and yet so poisonous/ Are the ravishments of truth,

so fatal to / The truth itself [I,ii]). When Stevens says "[t]he death of one god is

the death of all" (I,i), it is a recognition that ending the process of ideation, as

opposed to the particulars of a single image, clears the entire field of illusions

What is distinctive about Stevens' objectivity is that it focuses on die actual,

rather than the ideal. While Wagner seeks immediate catharsis, and Mallarmé

escapes desire through the musical image, Stevens observes, not the objects of

desire, but the corrupting influence of desire itself. An idealized notion of truth is

no different fi'om any other kind of idealization. Desire operates by creating an

image in opposition to what is actual; however this is always a false fiction in that

it is an order of the mind rather than reality; by beginning with what is actual,

Stevens sets himself apart fi’om the cycle of desire. This aspect of his poetry is

perhaps more revolutionary than is sometimes understood. One might consider,

for example, Keats' famous Truth/Beauty equation, which asserts not only an ideal truth, but a belief in transcendence. While Keats seeks truth as an escape fiom sorrow, Stevens stays with "present weather, " dissolving the actual by seeing through it.'®

This action is at the heart of Stevens' objectivity. Rather than a

"progressive" aesthetics, Stevens proceeds negatively. Stevens' concern is to come upon a new order by denying that which is false.

157 My house has changed a little in the sun. The fragrance of the magnolias comes close. False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

It must be visible or invisible. Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye. (I,vi)

As mentioned, there is a paradox between seeing the sun in its idea and the creation of metaphor. Earlier Stevens asks if there can "be an ennui of the first idea?" Clearly there is in much of his early poetry—as in Depression Before

Spring where "The cock crow/But no queen rises," or in Disillusionment o f Ten

O ’clo ck when "[t]o dream of baboons and periwinkles./ Only, here and there, an old sailor,/ Drunk and asleep in his boots,/ Catches tigers/ In red weather." In spite of Notes early emphasis on decreation, the first idea remains "an imagined thing"

(I, viii). Otherwise consciousness is empty and, like the animals, there is only reality with no imagination, the world of object with no subject.

The lion roars at the enraging desert. Reddens the sand with his re-colored noise. Defies red emptiness to evolve his match, (I,v)

”[T]he difficulty of what it is to be" lies in discerning both the truth and falseness of metaphor. It is consciousness cleansed so that apprehension of the first idea is not a mirror-like reflection of reality, but a reimagining of it. However

158 this comes about not through a secondaiy act of projection, but by dismantling of the images of the imagination (the self), as well as those of reality. The "seeing and unseeing in the eye" takes place in an imagination that is no longer the self before the first idea Poetic abstraction changes both subject and object, leading to a imaginative rediscovering inconceivable to the unchanged eye. It is an order that comes uninvited, only after false forms of thought have been removed—a new integration o f mind and reality, ”[a]n elixir, an excitation, a pure power" (I, iii).*’

The problem of double perspective links Stevens' objectivity with Stravin­ sky's. As has been suggested, Stravinsky's tendency toward musical incongruity

(polytonality, polyrhythm) creates a kind of dramatic austerity. In Symphony o f

Psalms, incongruity is not only evident in the use of particular compositional techniques, but also in its religious vision. This paradox is embedded in the very conception of the music. While Symphony o fPsalms is generally regarded as a model of neoclassic impersonality, it is also a statement of intense personal faith.

Evidence of this dualism—as will be seen—abound throughout the music, but

Stravinsky's own awareness of it is implicit in a conunent he made as he was finishing its writing: "It is not a symphony in which I have included Psalms to be sung. On the contrary, it is the singing of the Psalms that I am symphonizing"

{Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents 297). Though Symphony o f Psalms clearly asserts an article of personal belief Stravinsky continued to stand by his statements on the autonomy of musical form. For Stravinsky, religious fervor and

159 neoclassic aestheticism were wholly compatible.

Unlike Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Symphony o f Psalms asserts God's

presence, rather than his absence. As Stravinsky's personal record of the music's

composition makes clear, however, the piece is not "a confident assertion of

symphonic and divine order .. . but more a record of doubt, searching and

prayer.'"* Moreover, Stravinsky vehemently disavowed W ^^efs conception of

religious art. (Referring to a performance of Parsifal he heard at Bayreuth in

1912, Stravinsky called Wagnerian religious drama an "unseemly and sacreligious

conception of art as religion and the theatre as a temple " [Chronicle o f My Life

69].) This isn't to minimize the issue of belief, but to suggest—once again—that the

subject/object relationship is similar. For Stravinsky, the subject (the composer/

writer) drops out as a clearly heard proponent of belief; the object (God/reality) is

seen, to use Stevens' phrase, "as if with ignorant eyes"; thus it isn't Wagner's God

that Stravinsky searches for, but a contemporary God, "one that will sufiSce" in the

modem era.

The personal in Symphony o f Psalms is evident in the music's Russian

character. Stravinsky initially tried setting Psalms in Slavonic, the language of the

Russian Orthodox church, before switching to the Vulgate Psalms in Latin (a decision indicative of Stravinsky's concern with objective displacement).

Nevertheless the instinct toward earlier idioms of the sacred is still clear. In the first movement, for instance, there is the employment of brief melodic figures,

160 characteristic of his early "Russian period,” that contribute to the sense of

homophonie chant, as well as the structural use of minor thirds (figure 4.5). Also evident in the first movement is the dark Phrygian mode, in which Stravinsky emphasizes the descending minor second interval (F to E). Finally, there is the voicing and instrumentation, which reflect more traditional expressions of Russian

Orthodoxy. Though the female voices generally sing the upper parts, they are, in fact, marked for children's voices. The absence of violins and violas sharpens the contrast between voice and instrument. Wind instruments predominate, supported by lower strings, two pianos and a harp. The texture, Paul Griffiths suggests,

"may suggest a super-organ" with the pianos and harp evoking beUs (104).

161 MNIiAli/nc JUIWt Vn^^W IIVil

Orchestre U Flûtes 4 Cors en fa 1 Petite Flûte (5* grde. Flûte) 1 Petite Trompette en re 4 Hautbois 4 Trompettes en ut 1 Cor Anglais 2 Trombones 3 Bassons 1 Trombone bas 1 Contrebasson 1 Tuba Timpani Grosse Caisse Harpe 2 Pianos Violoncelles Contrebasses Choeur mixte.*

Remarques Les trois parties de cette symphonie se jouent sans interruption. Le texte des Psaumes, qui est celui de la Vulgate, se chantera toujours en latin . Ces Psaumes sont : les versets 13 et 14 du XXXVIII* pour la I'* partie ; les versets 2, 3 et 4 du XXXIX* pour la II* partie ; le CL* Psaume entier pour la III* partie

* Les choeurs comprenant des voix d'enfants, à défaut de celles-ci on peut les remplacer par des voix de femmes (soprano et alto).

Observations The three parts of this symphony are to b: played w ithout a break. The words of the Psalms are those of the Vulgata and should be sung in L atin . The Psalms are : Verses 13 and 14 of No. 38 for Part I Verses 2. 3 and 4 of No. 39 for Part II The complete Psalm No. ISO for Part III * The choir should contain children's voices, which may be replaced by female voices (soprano and alto) if a children's choir is not available.

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165 Nevertheless Symphony o f Psalms is a quintessentialiy neoclassic work.’’

The first movement is tonally inert. As has been discussed, some of the devices

Stravinsky uses for maintaining musical interest without harmonic progression were pioneered by Debussy In addition to the Phrygian mode, for instance, the first movement uses the symmetrical octatonic scale. Stravinsky also shares with

Debussy the use of rhythmic activity, in lieu of harmonic movement, which, in the opening movement, is grounded by pedal tones, descending ostinato figures and a stabbing E minor chord. However, the incongruity of Stravinsky's setting is different from not only the Schubert-Wagner tradition, but Debussy as well. This is evident from the beginning, in the instrumental introduction. The Psalm

Stravinsky sets in the first movement is No. 101; Exaudi orationem meam. Domine

(Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplication). Instead of supplication, however, it begins with a startling E minor triad, which repeatedly interrupts the sixteenth note rhythmic motion o f the broken Bb-seventh chord (a tritone above

E). Thus from the very beginning polytonality creates a kind of double perspective, an estrangement arising from the conflict between the personal and objective.

Like Notes, Symphony o f Psalms is in three sections.^ These sections, however, follow each other without breaks, and have no relationship to the conventions of sonata-form (the traditional form for the classical symphony).

166 Rather, the first movement is a Prelude, the second a Double Fugue for voices and

instruments, and the third an Alleluia, a kind of Hymn of Praise. Various

commentators have suggested different labels to identify the mood of these movement (as Walsh suggested earlier, for instance, "doubt" in the Prelude,

"search" the Double Fugue, ending in "praise").’* The Psalms themselves, however, may be as good a guide as any to the thematic progress of the movements:

Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; Hold not Thy peace at my tear. For 1 am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner as all my father were. 0 spare me, that 1 may recover strength before I go hence, and be no more (Psalm 39, vs 12-13)

1 waited patiently for the Lord: and he inclined to me. And he heard my cry, and brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay. And he set my foot upon a rock, and established my goings. He hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our god. And many shall see it and fear: and shall trust in the Lord. (Psalm 40, vs 1-3)

Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in His Sanctuary: praise Him in the firmament of His power. Praise Him for His mighty acts: praise Him according to His excellent greamess. Praise Him with the sound

167 of the trumpet: praise Him with the psaltery and the harp. Praise Him with the timbrel and dance: praise Him with stringed instruments and organs. Praise Him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals. Let everything that hath breath, praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord. (Psalm 150)

What might be considered in the setting of these texts are the same issues of tonality and cadence—points of structure—that were considered in discussions of

Wagner and Debussy and which, in the case of Stravinsky, are relevant to his technical incongruity and aesthetic double perspective. As already noted, the first movement does not develop tonally; it might also be noted, however, that the last chord of the Prelude is G major, a chord relevant to the first movement only because of the G in the recurring E minor chord (this, however, is emphasized by the unusual voicing of the chord—not only by its odd spacing, but also by the fact that there are more Gs than Es in the chord). Its greater significance lies in its rela-tionship to the second movement in C minor; G major is thus a point of cadence to the Double Fugue. A similar movement takes place at the end of the second movement. The choir sings in unison on E flat, which then becomes a plagal cadence in the third movement (fi'om IV-I, the traditional "amen" cadence).

However this is not a secure cadence because B flat, which seems to fight with C minor, is not a stable tonal center. The note E flat is, instead, the mediant of C minor. An ambiguity is thus created in the relationships between these chords.

168 The first "Alleluia” in the third movement repeats C to E flat (the minor third is a

structuring device throughout the piece), reinforcing this relationship. Moreover,

it is from this that the critical C major cadence on the word "Dominum” evolves.

The unclassical sense of cadence is a characteristic feature of Stravinsky's

neoclassicism, creating a ruptured sense of tonal relationships. Also indicative of

Stravinsky's tonality is the part writing of the Double Fugue. The logic of fugue

form itself is grounded in tonality. While the voices of this fugue suggest tonality,

the harmonies don't progress as they would in Bach. As in the other movements,

there are stretches of harmonic stasis offset by continual motion. The second

movement is a true and complex double fugue with two distinct subjects (for

instrument and voice). It begins with flutes and oboes in C minor; twenty-six

measures later the choir enters—in, as mentioned, E flat—with the second subject.

The main, four-note subject derives from the linked minor third motive from the

Prelude (figure 4.6). However it doesn't spar with an answer in the dominant, but evolves by means of a kind of rotating repetition of the four-note subject (an evolution that many have tried to analyze). When the correct dominant answer does arrive, it isn't modified chromatically to allow for a return to the subject, but, conversely, moves away from the original key center. The answer is, in fact, extended for two measure, without ever working out conventional modulation back to the subject. Nevertheless the fugue is tonal, though it doesn't follow classical patterns of cadential relationships. Actually the tension between the instruments C

169 minor and the voices E flat minor are never resolved with in the Fugue itself.

Rather it dissolves into, as stated, the C major finale with its sustained ostinato.

II

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Figure 4.6 Stravinsky, Symphony o f Psalms (1930), 2nd movement Figure continued

170 Figure 4.6 continued

171 This is to point to just a couple of places where Stravinsky's incongruency

creates aesthetic estrangement. Stravinsky's tonality is distinctive in that tonal

progress is not just thwarted, as it is in Debussy's circular relationships, but an

altogether different kind of ambiguity is created—an ambiguity arising from

mismatched components, leading to a sometimes severe, angular aesthetic. What

is remarkable—and what links Symphony o f Psalms to Stevens—is not the practice

of mismatched components (which do indeed resemble Eliot), but the organic

unity of these contrasting combinations. Synthesis is a particularly notable aspect

of Symphony o f Psalms. While warring styles distinguish some of Stravinsky's

earlier works (such as Rite o fSpring), Symphony o fPsalms exhibits a harmonious

integration of incongruous elements. Thus the levels of tonal interest, as well as

other compositional features, suggest simultaneous perspectives and planes of

meaning, rather than primal conflict or allusive irony.

As in Notes, unity of vision is most apparent in the last section. Here doubt

and search give way to praise. Synthesis is achieved in the integration of the

musical inconguencies, as well as in the progress of the movements toward the

Alleluia. Stevens' Notes evolves similarly. Thesis and antithesis, in sections I and

II, are unified in section III as "a constant sacrament of praise " {Peter Quince and the Clavier). Having cleansed the lens of imaginative perception and entered into the flux of change, integration is possible with a "seeing and an un seeing in the

172 eye" (I, vi). Stevens' double perspective is not the praise of heaven or hell, but the

sacred pleasure of earth; "As when the sun comes rising, when the/ sea/ Clears

deeply, when the moon hangs on/ the wall/ O f heaven-haven. These are not things

transformed./ Yet we are shaken by them as if they were./ We reason about them

with a later reason" (XU, i).

Stevens' "seeing and un-seeing, " his metaphoric "false flick," are personified in the blue woman and red man of cantos H and III.^ They are the antithesis of each other, the extreme poles that the double perspective reconciles.

The blue woman, linked and lacquered, at her win­ dow Did not desire that feathery argentines Should be cold silver, neither that frothy clouds

Should foam, be foamy waves, should move like them. Nor that the sexual blossoms should repose Without their fierce addictions, nor that the heat

O f summer, growing fragrant in the night. Should strengthen her abortive dreams and take In sleep its natural form. It was enough (III, ii)

Having seen things in their decreated state, the blue woman is free of the psycho­ logy of desire. Not only does she not project meaning onto the argentines or clouds, but neither does she arrest the beauty of the flowers' ritual of fertilization

(which contrasts the romantic instincts of a poet like Keats in Ode on a Grecian

173 Um), or make the shimmering heat of summer part of her fantasies (which

contrasts the visions of Mallarmé's faun). However the ability to abstract does not

in and of itself reconcile the woman in her estrangement from reality. Desire, as

many of Stevens' poems suggest, can create experience through projection, but it

might also be a product of the reality of which it is a part. A true reconciliation

with reality requires freedom from both the "intrusions" of the eye, and the

barrenness of a mind without imaginative resonance. The final lines of the canto

acknowledge the problem: "The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,/ Cold,

coldy delineating, being real,/ Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion. "

The exception is important. The observer cannot be taken out of the equation.

The red man of canto 111 personifies the other extreme. His is a fossilized

image, experience as conception, the absence of change.

A lasting visage in a lasting bush, A face of stone in an unending red. Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate.

An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair. The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red And weathered and the ruby-water-wom.

The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips. The frown like serpents basking on the brow. The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself, (III,iii)

The "lasting visage" is a dead god, one who is no longer useful, who has become fixed. But he is also a god is the sense that any "stone" image becomes a god in

174 that it shapes all one's experience. Here the face is weatiiered, rather than changed. Whether or not it was ever an abstraction of the sun, its unresponsiveness has rendered it meaningless. Thus the extremes represented in the two cantos suggest the need for a "mystic marriage": a union between the sterile imagination of the blue woman and the encrusted inscriptions of the red man. Stevens tries to arrange such a marriage in canto IV, but even before this a synthesis is suggested in the figure of Orpheus.

Too venerably used. That might have been. It might and might have been. But as it was, A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords fi'om hell

And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said. Children in love with them brought early flowers And scattered them about, no two alike.

Orpheus, of course, brings the gift of music, an order that is responsive to time.

Jung and Rilke, among others, have represented Orpheus as a figure with the power of synthesis (for Jung he was an archetypal figure that collapsed the

Apollinian/Dionysian dichotomy; for Rilke he embodied the sentiment firom the famous line in Sonnets to Orpheus, "Singing is being"). Like Mallarmé's nymphs,

Orpheus not only breathes life into his flute, but into existence itself. The genuine vitality of children and flowers contrast the coldness of the blue woman and the monotony of the red man. In this third section, Stevens' praise is the poetry of

175 "seeing and un seeing" that exists between fact and mythology.

Michael Sexson observes that the god represented by the red man is "the

Old Testament God in particular and all past male deities in general" (136). It is hard to imagine a more "weathered" Old Testament God than that represented in the Psalms of the Vulgate. Stravinsky was aware of this, as suggested in his recollection that he "chose Psalm 150 in part for its popularity, though another and equally compelling reason was my eagerness to counter the many composers who had abused these magisterial verses as pegs for their own lyrico-sendmental

feeling.'"^ Though the aesthetic object is different (an issue that will be addressed later), the criticism of romantic tradition is similar. Art as subjective

"feeling " reduces it to the field of desire; rather than discovering what is, one sees what one projects. Moreover, it can be seen that using art as "pegs" for " feelings'" is the same imaginative movement as projecting "[a] face of stone in an unending red." What is true for the artist is true for the seeker. Aesthetic inquiry duplicates the movement o f metaphysical inquiry.

The distinction between an abstract aesthetics and a subjective one, as

Stevens says in the critical moment of section QI, is the difference between discovering and imposing, inquiry and statement:

But to impose is not To discover. To discover and order as of A season, to discover summer and know it.

176 To discover winter and know it well, to find. Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all. Out of nothing to have come on major weather.

It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will fi’om its crude compoundings come.

Seeming, at first, a beat disgorged, unlike, armed by a desperate milk. To find the real. To be stripped of every fiction except one.

The fiction of an Absolute—Angel Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear The luminous melody of proper sound. (Ill, vii)

What has been suggested in other parts of the poem is reinforced here. Discovery demands that all fictions but one be collapsed. The final fiction is the supreme fiction; yet it isn't the Absolute that is final, but "[t]he fiction of an Absolute. " The double perspective of the subject/object relationship must be precise. For while reality must resonate within the imagination, this resonance cannot be that of conception. Both "Praise" and "Pleasure" manifest aesthetic material

(metaphor/chords), but act firom the insight of perception.

Once again the aesthetic middle ground in Stravinsky is evident in its conditional ambiguity. This third movement begins by returning to the Laudate in unison above a pedal bass moving firom C to G (figure 4.7). The sense of stasis, carried over fi’om the first two movements, is extended and even deepened.

Rhythmically, the ostinato in the bass (recalling the first movement), as the choir

177 expands into three part harmony, revealing itself to be in Aeolian mode. As this

harmonic layering unfolds, the ostinato in the bass adds an discordant major third

(E), foreshadowing the work's final chord. Thus fi’om the simple unison

beginning, a concentric expansion of independent, yet vertically significant voices

begin to evolve. Moreover, while the upper and lower voices increase in

complexity, the horns recall the lamentation theme ( G, Ab)—uniting the first and third movement. This is one of the simpler examples of Stravinsky's suspension of harmonic and rhythmic development, but it suggests not only the subtlety of his writing, but how this aspect of his music is organic to the music's conception.

178 I III Tam^e n.r rur

Cr. I«,L

C

C«r. It f*

fv-fet

• ftta

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(r.C T--mno JsU (M ■ >

ftltl

fat

t.O III

C 'ltlM

Figure 4.7 Stravinsky, Symphony o f Psalms (1930), 3rd movement

Figure continued

179 Figure 4.7 continued

r ir T r f n ^

BB . mi.wm

Figure continued

180 Figure 4.7 continued

n i r ;

? T - ^ — - •t------T p--- TT------

ff k# , « = P ------± , — ih - 1 — -1

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181 To frame this in terms of W ^ner and Debussy's periodicity, it might be useful to briefly consider the third movement's famous coda at rehearsal number

22 (figure 4.8). Harmonically, the ostinato in the bass is built on a pattern of fourths (Eb, Bb, F, Bb); the angular ambiguity of the of the chord is not only created by the avoidance of tertian harmony (thus the absence of major/minor sonority), but by the movement back and four between a perfect fourth and an augmented fourth (the tritone). Above this, the vocal movement is mostly restricted to half-steps and wholes steps. The soprano voice, for instance, spell out the diatonic notes of minor third interval on C (C, D, Eb). What contributes greatly to the objectivity and harmonic double perspective of this setting, is its polyrhthmic groupings. Though the meter is 3/2, the periodic unit of the ostinato in the bass made up of four beats; in contrast, the soprano voice is measured in periodic units of three, grouped into phrases of six bars. Nevertheless the conflict between these two independent periods is only partial. Vertically, the return of Eb in the base, for instance, coincides with harmonic sonorities in the voice.

Rhythmically, too, there are complicated "coincidences" of upbeat/ downbeat synchronicities—as well as other fragmentary rhythmic ahgnments—that create as sense of motion within stasis, tonal grounding within harmonic discord.^'*

1 8 2 : 3 2 rvàa H U M H M M , J .TZ

?'f r f

. j I ^ r ^ IjJr Ir^j IJ r ^

«itfC &;

Figure 4.8 Stravinsky, Symphony o f Psalms (1930), 3rd movement (coda)

Figure continued

18: Figure 4.8 continued

a. 7 ^ 7 ‘f

Figure continued

184 Figure 4.8 continued

y t y y « .Ï •' A (?5 '

t... j-j u j i r IJ j J I r ^ j

ir OO.aiNUH U« 4*

185 This, in effect, is Stravinsky's "false flick," his collapsing of subject and object onto a new plane of aesthetic perception. Though the object is represented differently (Stevens asserts the sun—in opposition to winter-but would never, as

Stravinsky does, give it the face of God), the aesthetic field (objective sight) in which subject and object vie is similar. For both, dissolving the boundary between the blue woman and the red man not only changes the relationship between subject and object, but alters the subject and object themselves. Interestingly enough,

Stravinsky's comment on Psalm 150 (quoted earlier), distinguishes between the

"magisterial verses" and the "lyrico-sentimental feelingfs]'" of the composers who set them. Yet the Psalm is quite conventional in its efiusiveness, its subjective directness. Stravinsky is certainly aware of this. In setting the text of the coda,

"Praise Him upon the loud cymbals; praise him upon the height sounding cymbals," there is nothing even remotely resembling a cymbal. The evidence of his music suggests that Stravinsky search is for the "idea" of God in the same sense that Stevens' search is for the "idea" of reality. Rather than Wagnerian projection, or Old Testament dogma, Stravinsky is more closely aligned with

Stevens' austere introspection.

Like the coda in Symphony o f Psalms, the climax of Notes exists as a moment out of time, a stasis resulting fi'om aesthetic double perspective.

186 What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud. Serenely gazing at the violent abyss. Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal gloiy.

Leaps downward through evening's revelations, and On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space. Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny.

Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight. Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied? Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

Is it he or is it I that experience this? Is it I then that keep saying there is an hour Filled with expressible bliss, in which 1 have

No need, am happy forget need's golden hand. Am satisfied without solacing majesty. And if there is an hour there is a day.

There is a month, a year, there is a time In which majesty is a mirror of the self: I have not but I am and as I am, I am.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections, the escapades of death, Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof? (HI, viii)

While the hypothetical proposition recalls the poem's earlier stipulations, these have mostly been worked out in the first two sections. Cantos viii follows the insistence in canto vii that it is possible to discover. In contrast to the scientific mode of section I, section III proceeds largely by way of fable. The emotional, imaginative intensity of the poem increase, making possible the breakthrough in tone and revelation of canto vii, and the discovery of "an order as ofi A season" in

187 canto viii. Despite the introduction of the first person, the austerity o f the

perception remains. The angel "gaz[es]" at "the violent abyss,"and in the face of

this chaos ”[p]Iucks" strings to "abysmal glory." The image itself is of

timelessness, but it is reinforced by more prosaic references to "motionless

motion" and "nothing but deep/ space."

One of the correlations in this canto is between desire and time. The

"inexpressible bliss" of this moment of timelessness is contrasted with "I have/ No

need, am happy, forget need's golden hand." When Stevens asks: "Am I that

imagine this angel less satisfied? ", it recalls his recurrent question: "What will suffice?" The answer to this, as well as to "What am I to believe?" is resolved in the leap fi-om the imagined angel who "needs nothing but deep/ space," to the assertion that "1 have not but 1 am and as 1 am, 1 am." Recalling Exodus as well

Coleridge, Stevens comes upon an order that is not of the mind, but is echoed in the mind. Desire as time—movement away fi'om the actual, toward the ideal—has been negated in the imaginative process of abstraction; a fixed metaphor is denied by the condition of change; praise thus arrives as an order outside the false projections of the mind, but dependent upon the aesthetic for reconciliation. The resulting order, "as 1 am, 1 am," is not self-sufficiency (for the "self' is no longer the same entity that desires and projects), but sufficiency unto itself (the order of reality that acts through consciousness).

As can be seen firom the arduous progress of the poem, perception of this

188 revelation has been a struggle hard fought. Mallarmé's faun deals with desire less methodically. Absent are the formalized conditions, the artillery of rhetorical modes, the deliberate working out of ontological structure. Nevertheless the paradox of sleep and wakefulness into which the nymph disappears suggests the radical nature of the changed perception. Like Stevens' angel and Mallarmé's nymphs, Stravinsky's coda exists outside the self-generated projections of the unabstracted mind. And yet, as Stravinsky points out, the unabstracted mind will always find genuine order obscure.

People will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not there. The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses and what the author had in mind when he com­ posed it. They never seem to understand that music is an entity of its own apart from anything it may suggest to them. In other words, music interests them in so far as it touches on elements outside it while evoking sensations with which they are familiar. Most people like music because it gives them certain emotions, such a joy, grief, sadness, an image of nature, a subject for day­ dreams, or—still better—oblivion firom 'everyday life.' They want a drug—dope.' It matters little whether this way of thinking of music is expressed directly or is wrapped up in a veil of artificial circumlocutions. Music would not worth much if it were reduced to such an end. When people have learned to love music for itself, when they listen with other ears, their en­ joyment will be of a far higher and more potent order, and they will be able to judge it on a higher plane and realize its intrinsic value.... All ttiese consideration were evoked by my Symphony o f Psalms because, both by the public and the press, the attitude I have just describe was specially manifested in regard to that work. Notwithstanding the interest aroused by the composition, I noticed a certain perplexity caused, not by the music as such, but by the inability of listeners to understand the reason which had led me to compose a symphony in a spirit which found no

189 echo in their mentality.

Like the reconciliation of subject and object itself, aesthetic autonomy asserts is its

own value. To know this value, however, to touch "abysmal glory'—not intellect­

ually through ideation, but actually through directly perception—one must deny the

"dope " of projected pleasures. Stravinsky’s "other ears" function as Stevens'

"seeing and un-seeing eye." The "far higher and more potent order," the "higher

plane" of imaginative synthesis, comes about only after the false structures of the

mind have been collapsed. Only then can order as "an entity of its own " enter the

"deep space" of the imagination.

In comparing Oedipus-Rex to Symphony o f Psalms, Griffiths points to the metaphoric significance of the choir: "This would be its [Symphony o f Psalms\ difference fi^om Oedipus Rex: not dead men hearing the dictates of dead gods, but living people in search—the living people whom the singers represent, as those in the opera-oratorio represent the citizens of Thebes. As Ansermet put it, the work

"expresses the religiosity of others—of the imaginary choir of which the actual singing choir is an analgon'” (104). The union of these two choirs depends as much on aesthetic rendering as symbolic reference. While the symbolic choir moves through doubt, search, and praise, there is also the real choir resurrecting the "idea" of God not only in its reference to the imagined choir, but in an aesthetics that is musically outside of time. Like Stevens, this is arrived at by a

190 negation of the false (the "lyrico-sentimental "’feelings'"). Stevens did much of the

work of abstraction in his early writing, but Notes moves beyond the bareness of

these explorations. The final dying results in an Orphic reconciliation of subject and object that is lifted, luminous—"the difQculty of what it is to be" finally made simple:

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the soldier dies. If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech. {CP 408)

191 NOTES

1. See ButteL xi-xii. 2. In his opening chapter on Stevens' life, Kennode recapitulates the influence of French symbolism on American modernism.

That he was affected by French poetry is certain and not at all unexpected. In May 1920 John Gould Metcher, introducing Stevens to English readers, said of Stevens that his work recalls Mallarmé or Villiers de l isle Adam, and in some ageless drama like Axel or Hérodiade he might be most at home ' This is overstated; but the comparison with Mallarmé's poem at least is accurate, at any rate for the earlier period, when a controlled decadence' of language is part of Stevens's method. Indeed it remained so. There is no reason to dispute the general opinion that Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Laforgue were assimilated by Stevens and powerfully affected Harmonium. The influence of Valéry, who was almost Stevens's contemporary, became more powerful later. There is nothing out of the way in this preoccupation with French poetry; indeed it was practically inescapable. The avant-garde interests of the period, in America as well as in England, were to a great extend absorbed by French culture; painting, dancing, music and poetry. A Symbolist aesthetic, in itself a specialization of its Romantic forebear, dominated all the arts; the Imagism of Pound and Williams was, despite disclaimers, only a local version of it. (Kennode, 9-10) 3. Benamou frames the nature of the symbolist/Stevens lineage in the Introduction of his book on the subject.

Symbolic, Symbolist, and Symboliste are not, as Edward Engelberg has remarked, synonymous words. Ms introduction to The Symbolist Poem makes the point quite clearly A Symbolist poem can exist rqwt from a symbolic system because it is usually a short lyric expressing in self-suflBcient terms a private sensibility. Thus to Engelberg Yeats was a symbolic poet, Swinburne was a true Symbolist, and Stevens "a direct descendant of the French Symbolistes” by which he meant Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Laforgue. Possibly, we should adopt 'symbolist(e)” as a temporary compromise, to include the double lineage< American and French, which ends in Stevens. The spelling would draw attention to the parenthetical nature of the French influence, and invite a question about the very idea of literary

192 genealogies, (xi) 4. In keeping with this, Benamou observes the vast difference in tone between Mallarmé and Stevens: "But Stevens, even at his wintriest, never followed Mallarmé's rarities, and kept something of his original gaiety and bigness of diction" (51). 5. For an excellent discussion of Adorno, Stravinsky and the issue of non-development, see the concluding chapter in Cross, The Stravinsiy Legacy. 6. See Druskin, 78-79.

7. Bernstein's argument that tonality is inherent within music itself let alone the human consciousness, was roundly criticized when it was first presented. For a lucid appraisal twenty years later, see David Schiff "Re-hearing Bernstein," The Atlantic June 1993: 55. 8 For an assessment of the significance of the arts in this poem, see Kinereth Meyer and Sharon Baris, "Reading the Score of "Peter Quince at the Clavier*: Stevens, Music and the Visual Arts," The Wallace Stevens Joumal X51(\9%%y. 56-65. 9. For an assessment of the structural difficulties of this part of the poem, see Stem, 81- 86.

10. For a general overview of Stravinsky's neoclassic techniques (especially with regard to the examples studied here), see Bernstein, 325-425. For a more detailed, but very technical discussion, see Van Den Toom, 252-270. 11. Amy's article is interesting not only as on overview of Stravinsky's religious music, but also an assessment of the relationship between text and music in Symphony o f Psalms. 12. Carl Dahlhaus, "La polemica di Adorno contro Stravinski e il problema della "critica superiore'", in Francesco Dégrada, éd., Stravinski] oggo (ilan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1982). Reproduced and translated in The Stravinsky Legacy, 233. 13. See Fuchs chapter entitled "The Ultimate Plato," 120. 14. This is a beautifiil collection of four essays on the theme of desire. While the austerity of Stevens poetry may be more immediately apparent, Vendler observes desire as dual componet of Stevens writing. It is certainly an aspect that links Stevens to symbolist writing. She writes:

1 have drawn this very broad picture of a very subtle poet because 1 believe it needs to be said, in the broadest way, that Stevens is our great poet of the inexhaustible and exhausting cycle of desire and despair. It should not be necessary to say aloud a truth which seems to me so self-evidem. But it is clearly not self-evident to the worid of readers, since Stevens was a private and reticent

193 man, not a confessional poet. (40) 15. Doggett cites Schopenhauer in reference to Stevens' stanza; "It must be visible or invisible,/ Invisible or visible or both:/ A seeing and unseeing in the eye” (I, vi). Doggett says that "Schopenhauer, in the first page ofThe World as Will anJ Idea, describes the paradox in language and imagery that resemble Stevens' characteristic phrasing" (113). 16. Vendler addresses the relationship of Keats to Stevens with respect to desire in the third chapter of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out o f Desire. 17. Sexson links this idea back to the Orpheus myth: "The first part of the "Notes,' then, appearing initially to be a regression to the debilitating nominalism of Parts of a World,' is actually an extension of the Orphic discovery that metaphor, though literally false, is a 'falseness close to kin' (I, vi) " (126). 18. See Griffiths, 104. 19. See Bernstein, 379-391. 20. For a brief overview of these three sections, see White, 135-139. 21. Based on the Psalms Stravinsky chose, Vlad speculates on the "emotional background" of Symphotty o f Psalms. See Vlad, 157. 22.In On Extettded Wings, Vender offers an extended discussion of the "blue woman," arguing that "the blue woman's apprehension of "reality," after she has resisted the seduction of desire, is in itself radically metaphorical, and Stevens' poem declare itself as more than a simple yea-saying to "the real," whether in memory or in the present prospect" (184).

23. Reprinted in Jonathon D Kramer, Listen to Music (New York: Schirmer, 1988) 756. 24. An account of the coda and its relationship to the fugue is offered in Vlad, 158-160.

194 EPILOGUE

One of the di£Qculties of coming to grips wiA die symbolist music/poetry relationship is diat it is fraught widi paradox. This is true not only in the nature of their influence upon one another, but also with regard to the figures involved.

Though Wagner's contribution to symbolist aesthetics was greater syntactic and semantic freedom, the first French poet to embrace him was Baudelaire, a poet whose writing is characterized by the classical principles of symmetry and balance. While Mallarmé accepted Baudelaire's challenge to model poeny after music, he rejected Wagnerian emotionalism (the very aspect of Wagner diat caused Baudelaire to embrace him) for what Mallarmé believed was the purity of absolute music. Similarly, Wagner’s attempt to create an aesthetics continuous with Schopenhauer's hierarchy of the arts and metaphysics of die will not only failed, but was realized by Debussy, a composer who consciously departed from

Wagnerian aesthetics. Finally, and most fundamentally, Mallarmé's attempt to model poetry after music was structural radier aural. He didn't seek a musical sounding poetry, but a poetry that approximated music's non-representational nature.

195 To clarify this complicated episode of aesAetic history, this dissertation has

attempted to woric on three levels; first, to trace Ae evolution of music as a model

for symbolist poetry; second, to reveal Ae aesAetic correspondences between

musical and literary symbolism; and third, to illuminate Ae experience of key

musical and literary worics. While Ais Assertation charts Ae symbolism lineage

through Stravinsky and Stevens, adAtional consideration should be afforded to

anoAer figure, Rainer Maria Rilke. Like Ae poets m this study, Rilke's poetry

Asplays a secular response to religious crisis. For Rilke, Ae metaphor of music

bisects his career. Through Ae period during which he apprenticed wiA Rodin,

Rilke writes Ae great "seemg" poems (poems very much within Ae symbolism traAtion) of Ae first half of his life; after this, music becomes a metaphor for Ae

"listening" poems, a language that gains m resonance at Ae same time that it departs from Ae hermiticism of symbolism. NeverAeless, Ae symbolist vision endures. At Ae end of his career, Rilke writes two extraordinary series of poems:

Ae Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. As wiA Mallarmé, Ae Orphic image suggests a state of poetic consciousness. One of Ae most famous lines fi’om Ais collection is Ae simple correlation: "Singing is being."

PeAaps Ae most remarkable aspect of Ae music/poetry relationship of Ae symbolism era is not Ae uniqueness of Ae alliance itself^ but Ae depA of its significance. However one measures its influence, Ae ripples o f Ae symbolism stone extend far into modernist waters. On Ae literary side, it informs not only

196 Stevens, but Eliot and the Imagists, and, one might argue, traditions within fiction

as well. In the musical realm, Debussy, oddly enough, is necessary for bodi poles

of twentieth-century music; Stravinsky and his ilk, as well as the atonality of

Schoenberg. More importantly, however, symbolism signals a fimdamental

change in aesthetic perception. Speaking of the reappearance of Orpheus on die

symbolism landscape, McGahey writes: "Just as [Orpheus] was present . . . at the

moment when the Apollonian forms of Western culture were being encoded, so does he appear again at the opposite moment represented by the language-crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, an era that inaugurated the breakup of diose forms" (xiii). What should not be under-appreciated is the change in consciousness that accompanied the new order of language. The Orphic descent is no longer an attempt to recover his beloved, but an attempt to recover a new sense of being altogether. "My thought," says Mallarmé in a letter to Villiers de llsle-

Adam, "has gone so far as to think itself and it no longer has the strength to evoke in a unique nullity the void disseminated in its porousness. 1 had, thanks to a great sensibility, understood the intûnate correlation of Poetry with the Universe"

{Correspondence 259).

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