3

Mallarmé and the edge of language

Breathing

In 1913, nearly twenty years after composing the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Debussy returned to the poetry of Mallarmé in search of song texts. All three of the poems he chose, for the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, have to do with the nothingness of thin air.¹ Each one hinges on the rhythmic movement of air – the breathing in and breathing out of a sigh (Soupir), the waving back and forth of a fan (Éventail) and, in the middle of the triptych, the words of a lover who knows their futility even as he speaks them (Placet futile). Not only do these poems take the movement of air as their topic, each draws attention to itself as an object made of air, a sequence of words carried on the breath of the speaker that, once spoken, disappears into the ether – a poetic idea to which Debussy responds with music that foregrounds its own evanescence. In this way, Debussy’s late settings of Mallarmé’s poetry reflect upon aesthetic principles that shape his music as a whole. In doing so, these songs offer, in exemplary and exquisite miniature, a musical counterpart to Mallarmé’s poetry as acts of saying that draw attention to the ‘nothing’ of which they speak so eloquently.

Mallarmé’s Soupir consists of a single sentence, rising and falling like the inhalation and exhalation of breath that it evokes. It is shaped around a central axis, a transformative moment of reversal marked by the repetition of the phrase ‘vers l’Azur’, which ends the first half of the poem and begins the second. This key moment is reinforced by the punctuation (an exclamation mark followed by a dash) which both introduces a hiatus and, at the same time, carries one half of the poem into the next, an elision confirmed by the rhyme scheme that requires line 6 to complete line 5. The highpoint of the poem’s trajectory is thus marked by a momentary silence and suspension of motion, before tipping over into the second half of the rhyming couplet and the second half of the poem.³ The reflective symmetry of Mallarmé’s poetic arc is manifest at both a structural and semantic level. The rhythm and enjambement of each half, flowing towards and away from this central point of repetition, reinforces the poetic imagery itself, which hinges on the idea of rising (the key verb, ‘monte’, is delayed until the start of line 4) and falling (the trailing of the sun in the cold furrow of the water, line 10). The upward trajectory of the fountain’s jet of water is mirrored by the languor of the pool into which it falls. The sense of the second half as a reflection of the first is further enhanced by the complex play of acoustic and semantic transformations, half-heard echoes of sounds and images: hence ‘automne jonché’ (line 2) and ‘Octobre pâle et pur’ (line 6); ‘un blanc jet d’eau’ (line 5) and ‘l’eau morte’ (line 8); ‘errant’ (line 3) and ‘erre au vent’ (line 9).⁴ The structure of the poem is thus quite literally its content – a rise upwards that fails to achieve the object it moves towards (her face, the sky), before falling back into the cold water of the pool, with its autumn leaves and weak reflection of the sun.

How does Debussy’s music respond to this contour of a sigh, the architecture of a single moment? In the first instance, it follows Mallarmé’s mirror form, making a clear structural division at an intuitive halfway point of this 31-bar song (between b. 17 and b. 18), and finding a transformed echo of the opening of the first half (bb. 1–6) in the closing of the second (bb. 30–31). Such symmetries in Mallarmé’s poetic form anticipate what was to become a hallmark of Debussy’s musical style – the elaboration of internal movement contained within a single space, experienced as the prolongation of a single moment. The fountain moves, but within a scene that is static; the azure of the sky is timeless, while the autumn leaves mark the passage of time. Debussy’s melodic lines, unfolding through the animation of rhythm and pitch contour, are similarly contained within the pentatonic set they outline. These are familiar poetic and musical conceits and Debussy’s musical language, as has often been shown, plays constantly with the simultaneity of these two perspectives.

But Debussy’s symmetries, like Mallarmé’s, are always slightly asymmetric, as if to emphasise the jointed gap between what otherwise seems to move in parallel. It is in Debussy’s control of harmonic space that this offset symmetry is played out in its most sophisticated form. The pentatonic containment is clear enough, elaborated by the piano in the opening and closing bars of the song. But between these stable bookends the song hinges on the gentle dissonance between a harmonic space elaborated from E♭ and a counterpoised one centred on E♮. Thus, the ascent from E♭ by which the voice delivers the first two lines of Mallarmé’s poem (bb. 7–10) is followed by a descent from E♮. The ascent traverses a ‘♭’ scale up the octave, the descending octave outlines a ‘♯’ scale; the ascent culminates on the upper neighbour note F, which is repeated to become the first note of the descent – a musical chiasmus that pre-empts the central repetition of the word ‘l’Azur’, which Debussy carefully marks with a comma above the vocal line in b. 10 (see Example 3.1).

Example 3.1 Claude Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 1–12

Throughout the song, the E♮ space suggests an alternative to that of the E♭ space – proximate, sharing a border, yet two quite different realms. Having been set out successively by the voice, the piano then presents them simultaneously: in bb. 13–14 the left hand sets out the E♭ space while the right hand elaborates the E♮ space by means of the octave triplet motif carried over from bb. 9–10. In bb. 15–16 the simultaneity of these two harmonic spaces is heightened by harmonising the E♮ with its ‘own’ triad, juxtaposed with the one against which it clashes – hence the repeated progression of a C major to A♭ major triad in the left hand, over which the E♮ ostinato continues in the right (neatly alluding to the fountain’s motion-within-stasis that pervades the whole song). A new middle voice, rhythmically separated from the triplet ostinato by its duple rhythm, gently accentuates further the insistence of the E♮ (see Example 3.2). At the highpoint of the poem, the registral brightness of the right hand and the harmonic possibility of the E♮ similarly suggest a move towards the bright azure, while still trailing a root in the dark containment of the A♭ tonic.⁵

Example 3.2 Claude Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 13–15

In Mallarmé’s poem, the upward arc of the fountain/lover’s gaze does not reach the pure azure to which it aspires, but falls back into the cold pallor of the autumnal pool. The final ambivalent image is of the ray of sunshine reflected in the water – not the full presence of the sun in the azure sky, but only its reflection as a cold furrow across the surface of the water. Debussy’s parallel musical text is less chilly but works in a similar way. The upward arc of the music from the gravitational pull of A♭/E♭ reaches towards the brightness of E♮ (harmonised as E major/C major) but does not realise it. Its ‘image’ resounds in the closing section of the song, which ultimately returns to the very opening bars – not a definitive annulment or negation of the new harmonic space, but a return to the frame, a closing of the book within which this image of another space has been made. The oscillation between two chords in the final bars (one harmonising E♮, the other E♭) suspends the final movement to A♭. The harmonic irresolution, like Mallarmé’s metaphor of reflection, points to the unresolved term as an absent centre, to the nothing that is said, while the new pulsing rhythm that animates the piano chords, like the faintest of heartbeats, implies the trace of presence.

In Mallarmé’s poetic metaphor, the rise and fall of the lover’s sigh is also that of the fountain’s arc. The latter is a familiar image, found in countless poetic evocations of the enclosed space of the garden and frequently taken up by composers for musical treatment. But, according to Vladimir Jankélévitch, there is something very distinct about Debussy’s musical fountains. They have, he insists, nothing of the ‘hydraulic fireworks’ of the musical fountains heard in Liszt and Ravel, in works whose textural and harmonic continuities ‘represent the relative stability of the unstable’. In contrast, Jankélévitch suggests, Debussy is preoccupied with collapse. In ‘Le jet d’eau’, the third of the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, ‘the Debussyan fountain soars upwards and bends, hesitates, wavers and finally falls back down without having reached its goal’.⁶ Arthur Wenk hears something similar, suggesting that, throughout the song, ‘Debussy emphasises not the upward flight of the water but the fall’.⁷ If the end of the Baudelaire song, with its descending sequence of spread chords, is indeed ‘a kind of sliding towards the silence of non-being’ (Jankélévitch),⁸ the same may certainly be said of Soupir, a poem Debussy must have chosen with an instinctive sense of the characteristic declinations of his own music.

But – and this difference is critical – Debussy’s treatment of the vocal line suggests something that moves in a quite different direction. The second half of the song at first appears to follows the sense of descent projected by the poem, with the autumnal leaves and the ‘dead water’ moving towards the definitively falling phrase of ‘creuse un froid sillon’ in b. 25. But the sudden shift of harmonic space contradicts the poetic idea: the sideways step to the brightness of a C major space and its foregrounding of E♮ links back to the upward aspiration of the first half of the poem. The setting of the last line begins ambivalently, rocking between ascent and descent, and between the C major space and a flatwards move. But the voice resolves this ambiguity with a striking ascent for the final three syllables of the poem (‘long rayon’) to end on a sustained upper E♭, beneath which the piano (ppp, diminuendo, and très retenu) traces out an echo of its opening ascending figure from the first two bars of the song (see Example 3.3). It is not just that Debussy thereby finds a musical corollary for the central conceit of the poem (the simultaneity of ascent and descent, inhalation and exhalation, aspiration and failure); while the whole of the vocal line, necessarily, oscillates between the signifying function of the words it carries and its own sensuous sonority, the final sustained E♭ is almost wholly concerned with the latter. As the poem closes with an image of emptiness, the music closes with the richest aural image of the entire song, with the sonic fullness of the voice, freed from any constraint of syllabic declamation, held in the containment of the piano’s pentatonic plenitude.

Example 3.3 Claude Debussy, ‘Soupir’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 23–31

A reader unsympathetic to Debussy’s music might conclude it had somehow betrayed Mallarmé’s poem by so fulsomely realising what in the poem is necessarily only glimpsed. But perhaps that would be to misread and mishear the way in which song amplifies the interference pattern between the absence conferred by words and the presence conferred by music. In ‘Soupir’ that interference pattern arises from some careful misalignments of voice and piano.⁹ Thus, after the opening alternation of solo piano and unaccompanied voice, they join on the last word of a line not the first (‘soeur’); when they join up again, after the unaccompanied third line, the piano is delayed until after the first word of the fourth line (‘Monte’). A sense of constantly oscillating between two things is heard in several ways – in Debussy’s hallmark figure of rocking between two parallel chords (as in bb. 9–10 and 13–17), in the juxtaposition of clear metrical patterning with free, unmeasured passages, in alternating between declamatory and melodic uses of the voice (for example, bb. 13–14 as compared to b. 15), and in the contrast between the apparent absence of harmonic direction with moments of fulsome tonal presence.

A definitive misalignment is found at the centre of the song. It is not that Debussy is insensitive to Mallarmé’s syntax or poetic structure; indeed, a number of commentators have drawn attention to how Debussy’s setting makes clearer the complex structure of the poem.¹⁰ It is, rather, that the music seems to take a different direction from the poem. Thus, from b. 18, the music takes off with new energy, conferred by the clear tonal function of the harmony, the burgeoning texture of the piano writing and a slightly faster tempo. Not only does the music have a sense of direction and substance that has eluded it thus far, it thereby promises an arrival, a moment of appearance. All well and good, except that this is the very moment in Mallarmé’s poem when ascent turns into descent and the aspiration towards presence falls away. It is a striking misalignment but not a misreading; it is, rather, a playing out of the divergent tendencies of music and words. In doing so, Debussy’s song opens up the space between the two rather than closing down one into the other.

Debussy’s settings of Mallarmé’s ‘air’ poems surely come close to Mallarmé’s idea of art as a ‘dispersion volatile’. In a wonderful account, from 1876, of a painting by his friend Édouard Manet (Le Linge, 1875), Mallarmé underlined how the painting dissolves solid objects into air and light:

[Le Linge is] deluged with air. Everywhere the luminous and transparent atmosphere struggles with the figures, and the foliage, and seems to take to itself some of their substance and solidity; whilst their contours, consumed by the hidden sun and watered by space, tremble, melt and evaporate into the surrounding atmosphere, which plunders reality from the figures, yet seems to do so in order to preserve their truthful aspect. Air reigns supreme and real, as if it held an enchanted life conferred by the witchery of art; a life neither personal nor sentient.¹¹

Mallarmé’s striking anticipation of what Impressionism was about to accomplish in painting is, at the same time, a manifesto for what poetry might also do. In his much later lecture of 1893, titled simply ‘Music and Letters’,¹² Mallarmé set out his vision of the relationship between the two arts. Poetry, he wrote, is a setting free (‘from a handful of dust or reality’) ‘the spirit which has nothing to do with anything except for the musicality of everything’.¹³ Poetry liberates the world from itself, from its enclosure in the thingness of the world, its reduction to a world of things. It does so by means of its ‘dispersion volatile’, an evanescent dissipation of the boundaries of things which everyday language creates but which poetic language dissolves. The principal mover of poetry is thus, in Mallarmé’s terms, a ‘nothing at all’ but which is also everything. Since the world is divided into separate ‘things’ by everyday language, when poetic language dissolves these boundaries it steps momentarily out of a world of separate things into a kind of totality.¹⁴ For Mallarmé, this ‘game of language’ thus opposes the everyday world and ‘the boredom we feel for things when they establish themselves as solid and preponderant’; poetry detaches them and thus replenishes what is otherwise the void (vide) of mere things. Nothingness, in Mallarmé’s construction, is thus a condition of ‘no-thing-ness’, determined not by the constrictive division of the world into things, but rather of the infinite richness of the connection between things – the constellation he calls the ‘musicality of everything’.

Made of the same materials as the everyday language it opposes, poetic language, for Mallarmé, creates a different logic of sense, a ‘silent melodic figuration’ (chiffration mélodique tue). His formulation points to something that is mute not because it cannot speak, but because it keeps silent (se taire), and a kind of calculation or encoding that is also a figuring, a finding of figures, a sensible and sensuous making that has its own sensual logic in the face of the abstract signifier. The dialogue of music and language is thus, for Mallarmé, something internal to poetry itself where it takes place between the sonic, sensuous and ‘musical’ aspects of words and the grammatical, semantic, and signifying aspects of language. For that reason, poetry has no need of the noisy art of music itself. Music may have the same ambition as poetry but it comes to nothing if ‘language, through the reforging and the purifying flight of song, does not confer a meaning on it’. Without being related to language, Mallarmé insists, musical worlds ‘remain blind to their own splendour, latent or without issue’.¹⁵ In order for the mind to find its home it must return from the noisy adventures of music to the silence of the word and of thought.

Composers ‘after Debussy’ have often sided with Mallarmé, abandoning song in a traditional sense and allowing music and poetry to inhabit their own worlds without mixing. Tristan Murail, for example, has suggested that we are far better off simply reading poetry aloud since ‘in general music destroys poetry, moreover one cannot hear it’.¹⁶ In his choral work, Les Sept Paroles du Christ en croix (1987–89) the words of Christ indicated by the title are never spoken; instead, ‘the choir is used more for the acoustic and emotive quality of the human voice than as a vehicle for a message’.¹⁷ In the work of Kaija Saariaho, however, we find a different response to the problem. Although there are examples of what one might call ‘songs’ among Saariaho’s works, more often words are deployed in otherwise instrumental works which ask players to vocalise in various ways. Words appear in this repertoire but in order for their bodily and vocal aspects to be amplified and transformed, not to signify in any conventional linguistic way. In Nymphéa (1987) for string quartet and electronics, the string players whisper a text (a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky), mixing their vocalisations with their instrumental sounds and the projected electronic transformations.

Lonh (1996), for soprano and electronics, uses both a lyrical singing voice as well as spoken and whispered sounds within the electronic part. The reconfiguring of music and words here is explored through the ancient and lost language of Occitan of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel (explored further in the opera, L’amour de loin). In this way, Saariaho finds a way to blend the contemporary with something ancient, looking back but also forward to a more musical language in which music and words, speech and song, might not be so fractured and definitively divided. Anni Oskala discusses Saariaho’s Nuits, adieux (1991) in the context of dreams and dream theory.¹⁸ The voice here is plural and fragmented, broken into a polyphony of different modes of voice, from noise through to speech. Words break down into phonemes, tones struggle to become words – a fluid tide, moving in and out of focused forms of speech, a dream logic of music forming and dissolving.¹⁹

Fold upon fold

‘Éventail’, the third of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes is no less concerned with the symmetrical movement of air than ‘Soupir’, but explores the idea in terms of the waving back and forth of a fan. The poem set by Debussy here is ‘Autre Éventail’, written in 1884 as a gift from Mallarmé to his twenty-year old daughter Geneviève.²⁰ It is one of many poems that Mallarmé wrote quite literally on a fan. By his own account, there were some eighteen of these vers de circonstance, some more substantial than others, some published, others not.²¹ One recurrent metaphor draws them together – that of the fan as a wing, beating the air, made of nothing but folds of paper yet, in its movement, summoning an evanescent presence. In this, the fan is like the poem Mallarmé has written upon it – a mere movement of the air (as breath) but with the capacity to draw in the presence of distant scents/sense. With each in-stroke the fan brings cool air towards its holder, and with each out-stroke it delicately pushes away the horizon, like an extension of the inhaling and exhaling of the sigh. Mallarmé’s fan poems thus draw attention to the physicality of writing (on the folded paper of the fan as much as that of the book), but also to spoken words as a mere disturbance of the air.

Where Soupir has at its centre the idealised totality of the blue sky (L’Azur), Éventail hinges on the quivering of the air itself, ‘comme un grand baiser’, a quasi-sexual intoxication that ‘ne peut jaillir ni s’apaiser’. And just as the chiasmic repetition of ‘L’Azur’ frames a moment of motionless silence at the apogee of Soupir, so the centre of Éventail (the third stanza of five) is marked by a moment of shudder, the vertiginous vibration of space: ‘Vertige! voici que frissonne l’espace’. The sensual, if not sexual thrill is vertiginous, in part because it is without object, ungraspable, and entirely of and in the moment. The poet, like the Faun in L’Après-midi d’un faune, seeks ‘to perpetuate’²³ this moment of presence, as brief as the flick of a fan, or the fleeting smile it hides, and Debussy’s setting of the poem is similarly characterised as the flight of an instant. The opening piano figure acts as a musical corollary both for the flicking open of the fan (stanzas 1 and 2, bb. 1–3 and bb. 12–14) and also its closing (stanza 5, bb. 47–49). The first vocal stanza is breathless, spoken rather than sung, and highly chromatic. Its rapid syllabic patter, marked by only occasional longer durations to emphasise certain words (‘reveuse’, ‘sache’) is only faintly melodic. Taken together, all these elements make for a vocal beginning that is elusive, insubstantial, and hard to grasp (see Example 3.4).

Example 3.4 Claude Debussy, ‘Éventail’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 1–3

While the second stanza, by contrast, is grounded in a far clearer sense of metre with alternating chords imitating the to-and-fro movement of the fan, the third is far more mercurial, beginning with a cry in the voice (‘Vertige!’, bb. 25–26) as the solid ground falls away to reveal an aerial passage in which the rapid pianissimo figures of the accompaniment buzz and whirr like electrical static (bb. 27–35), the quivering of the air of which the singer tells. The fifth and final stanza will round out the song with the flicking shut of the fan (bb. 47–49) but not before the fourth takes a harmonic detour occasioned by ‘le paradis farouche’, to which Debussy responds with a pentatonic ‘wash’, based first on F (bb. 40–41) and then E♭ (bb. 42–43), drawing out the sensual rhyme on ‘bouche’ (see Example 3.5).

Example 3.5 Claude Debussy, ‘Éventail’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 25–31

Taken as a whole, Mallarmé’s poetic distillation of the fullness of the moment in Éventail is matched by the evanescent quality of Debussy’s music – improvisatory, skittish, and unmeasured. The final song of Debussy’s triptych, it quite literally vanishes into thin air in its closing bars: the closing of the fan is the closing of the poem, and with it the world (‘doux et lointain’, b. 50) that it had momentarily opened. But this saying nothing is hardly inconsequential; the absence of ‘weight’ is no light matter. On the contrary, the ‘art poétique’ of Debussy as of Mallarmé brings the reader to the vertiginous edge of language: thrilling and terrifying at the same time. In terms of its constant oscillation between sonority and grammar, sense and signification, ‘Éventail’ is perhaps the most uncompromising of Debussy’s Mallarmé songs because it ‘has so little music’ (as Edmond Stoullig might have said). It begins with neither poetry nor music having the upper hand – a kind of nervous stand-off from which the voice only gradually moves towards a lyrical tone with the repeated and drawn out falling third (C to G♯) for ‘Sache’ (know) and ‘(men)songe’ (deceit) – a wonderful musical rhyme which draws attention to the paradox that the kind of ‘knowing’ that the poem makes available is only possible through the ‘deceit’ of its artifice.

This ‘frissonne’ is also a place of desire: Debussy follows Mallarmé’s words about a desire ‘born for nobody’, which can neither abstain nor find release, with a thinly veiled reference to the Tristan motif (bb. 36–39). ‘Sens-tu le paradis farouche?’ asks the poem, finding its trace in the hint of a laugh, hidden in the corner of the mouth and buried in the folds of the fan. But the music exceeds this idea, sidestepping to a pentatonic plenitude (bb. 40–43) whose sense of contained fulfilment is highly arresting in the context of this song, but which relates back to the closing bars of ‘Soupir’. Once again, the music embodies, for a moment, what appears by means of the folds of the fan, the oscillation between sonority and grammar in the poem, and between words and musical tones in the song – a palpable and audible articulation of différance. Debussy’s song plays out the articulate gap between music and language, a concrete exploration of what, in the Grammatology, Derrida refers to as ‘The Hinge’ (La Brisure). He begins his account of this idea with a passage from a letter from Roger Laporte (the words in square brackets are additions of the translator in this edition):

You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance in Robert[‘s Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate its double meaning. This word is brisure [joint, break] – ‘broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault, split, fragment, [brèche, cassure, fracture, faille, fente, fragment.] – Hinged articulation of two parts of wood- or metal-work. The hinge, the brisure [folding-joint] of a shutter. Cf. joint.²⁴

One might set in motion a similar kind of play with the word ‘Éventail’. The name of the fan derives clearly enough from its function: the reflexive verb ‘s’éventer’ means to fan oneself, from ‘vent’ (wind), but the fan’s name also contains within it the ‘aile’ (wing) that becomes such a key image for Mallarmé. It is the same wing that one hears in the close phonic cousin of the fan – ‘vantail’, the movable wing or leaf of a table, of a pair of gates or doors. The French ‘battant’ is a synonym, while also being the present participle of the verb ‘battre’, to beat. So when Mallarmé talks of the ‘battement’ (beating) of the wing (‘aile’) of the fan (‘Éventail’) he plays, sonically, with beating (‘battant’) on the hinged panel of a double-door (‘vantail’/‘battant’).²⁵

Derrida warns us that ‘the hinge [brisure] marks the impossibility that a sign, the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the plenitude of a present and an absolute presence. That is why there is no full speech, however much one might wish to restore it.’²⁶ But music, we want to retort, surely promises just this restoration – no less a writer than Proust powerfully affirms as much at key moments of his magnum opus.²⁷ The tension between the two positions is that between words and music in song, a particularly acute form of the ‘hinge’ on which all art is articulated, that between absence and revoked presence. Every song is a hinge, the articulated joint of a double-door, a ‘double session’ of two juxtaposed texts, a mise-en-abîme in which the non-identical reflection of the words in the music, and the music in the words, sets up a dynamic process without end. Debussy’s Mallarmé songs are not unique in this respect, but they foreground the idea in particularly acute ways, playing with the vertiginous groundlessness they reveal at the edges of poetic and musical language.

The vertige they draw out is precisely the gentle dislocation of the linguistic mind occasioned by opening up a non-identity between words and music, a dynamic space created by the cross-currents of signification and sense. It makes for a kind of dizziness, a cognitive dissonance provoked by the precarious rapture experienced at the cliff-edge of sense. But by delineating the gap, of words and music, sens and son, both poet and composer occasion a spark that momentarily bridges it – experience as a moment of ‘vertige’ or ‘shudder’. Jankélévitch talks of ‘le surgissement de l’instant’, a sudden foregrounding of the moment that leaps out of the temporal continuity of music. It can do so, he suggests, only by means of the gaps – the tears and fractures in the musical surface – which is to say that it needs silence in order to appear.²⁸ And the silence, conversely, needs the framing of words/sounds in order to appear. To borrow a resonant phrase from Merleau-Ponty, in this delicate play between the two, ‘the force of being is supported by the frailty of the nothingness which is its accomplice’.²⁹

If Debussy’s settings of Mallarmé offer, in highly condensed form, the larger play between absence and presence that defines modern music and art, it is perhaps no surprise that the poetry of Mallarmé played a central role for composers ‘after Debussy’ – most obviously in the case of Pierre Boulez. His Pli selon pli – portrait de Mallarmé (composed in 1957–62 but extensively revised in 1983), comprises five movements, each one related to a different poem by Mallarmé, though the title comes from yet another, ‘Remémoration d’amis belges’.³⁰ On one level, Mallarmé’s poem remembers the Bruges literary group for which it was written; on another, it is about poetry itself. Swans glide down the dead canals of Bruges, but it is poets ‘who trace another flight’ and ‘light the mind’ with the wing of poetry. Poetry is itself a kind of divestment, a stripping away, ‘pli selon pli’, of the outward appearance of things.³¹ By the same token, Boulez’s Pli selon pli is no more ‘a portrait of Mallarmé’ than La mer is a portrait of the sea. Or, at least, both distance themselves from representation in favour of inward process, movement, dynamic form. Just as Debussy does in his Mallarmé songs, Boulez amplifies the gap between words and music, representation and poetry. The three ‘Improvisations sur Mallarmé’ that form the central movements are, according to the composer, ‘modelled strictly on sonnet form’, a link which can be clearly heard in the way each one marks the central division of the sonnet.³² All three of the poems drawn on by Boulez are Petrarchan sonnets with the form of two quatrains (or one octave) followed by two tercets (or one sestet), and the rhyme scheme: abba | abba | ccd | ede.³³ Roger Pearson underlines how this makes for a structure that itself embodies Mallarmé’s poetics: ‘The desire for a poem which folds back on itself in a binary structure and thereby sets up all manner of internal reflection is well served by the division of octave and sestet hinging or pivoting on a volta (the traditional “turn” which takes place between lines 8 and 9).’³⁴ The sonnet form is thus based on a definitive and transformative break – ascent/descent, outward/inward, solidity/flight; as in ‘Soupir’, the centre of the poem is both a break and a transformative axis, a gap and a hinge, the articulated joint between the two wings of the poem.³⁵

We might remember this when reading Boulez’s comments on how Mallarmé’s poetry is both the centre and the absence of his musical work.³⁶ This is generally understood to refer to the fact that, even where the words are largely or completely absent in the music, the structure of the poem still underlies that of the music. But we might also consider it in Mallarmé’s sense that poetry exercises its function by delineating a central absence, using one mode of language to point to its musicalised other. Even the layout of the title of Boulez’s 1962 lecture suggests the same structural scheme: ‘Poetry—Centre and Absence—Music’. In short form, here is a structure of the relation between words and music. It is odd how often the importance of poetry for Boulez’s development has been ignored. The one-sided caricature of the composer as a very unpoetic mathematician behind the extremes of integral serialism have not only misrepresented both Boulez himself and his musical works, but thereby distorted a central moment in the history of music after Debussy.

Before his turn to Mallarmé, Boulez wrote three major works centred on the work of another poet, René Char: Le soleil des eaux (1948), Le visage nuptial (1946, revised in 1951 and again 1988–89), and Le marteau sans maître (1955). Le marteau, Boulez insisted, was not a setting of Char’s poetry but ‘a work containing nine pieces connected to three poems of René Char’.³⁷ The solo voice appears in only four of its nine movements, which are arranged as three interlocking cycles, a complex interleaving that builds a musical labyrinth for which the key, Boulez suggested, lies in the final movement. His idea of poetry being both at the centre of the musical work but often absent from it, is played out in several ways. The vocal setting of ‘l’Artisanat furieux’ (movement 3) is preceded and later followed by purely instrumental movements related to it – ‘avant l’Artisanat furieux’ (movement 1) and ‘après l’Artisanat furieux’ (movement 7). Similarly, the vocal setting of ‘Bourreaux de solitude’ (movement 6) has no less than three ‘Commentaires’, two that precede it (movements 2 and 4) and one that comes after it (movement 6). The central movement of the work, a vocal setting of ‘Bel edifice et les pressentiments’ (movement 5) is mirrored at the end of the cycle by its ‘Double’ (movement 9). Boulez describes how, in this final movement, the voice moves from language to wordless vocalise:

once the last words of the poem have been pronounced, the voice – now humming – merges into the instrumental ensemble, giving up its own particular endowment: the capacity to articulate words; it withdraws into anonymity, whilst the flute, on the other hand [ . . . ] comes to the fore and takes on the vocal role, so to speak [ . . . ] the poem is the centre of the music, but it is absent from the music.³⁸

The word ‘anonymity’ will readily confirm the prejudice that aesthetic modernism has to do with a de-humanised kind of expression, a displacement if not a destruction of the subject. It is true that we are confronted here with an un-writing of a certain kind of subjectivity since the language through which the latter is constructed is here deconstructed. But ‘anonymous’ might perhaps be better understood as ‘a-nominative’. One of the consequences of Boulez’s atonal, athematic, and arhythmic music is its refusal of names. It is not the voice that is silenced here – indeed, it goes on outlining a melodic fullness long after it gives up on words – but the insistence that the voice should signify through language. The refusal of the voice to be the servant of language is, at the same time, an embrace of what is musical in the voice outside of language. As Boulez points out in his note, the (alto) flute, which had hitherto turned arabesques around the (alto) voice like an aerial mime artist, now comes to the fore.

This music thus makes explicit the constitutive gap/overlap of sens and son. When the voice sings ‘bouche fermée’ in the closing section of the final movement, it is hard not to hear an echo of the wordless voices of Debussy’s Sirènes. Just as in Debussy, this appears less as a pre-linguistic voice than one that emerges after language. Divested of words, this is not a voice that cannot speak, but one that chooses to keep silent, to shed its veils of poetic language and hold itself in mute nudity. It is like a reversal of the Faun’s decision to throw away his flute; having let words go, the composer of Le marteau takes up the flute once more. The sense of a newly found acoustic space is underpinned by the introduction, for the first time in the piece, of the long low resonance of deep tam-tam and gongs (from b. 100) – a sound world that massively exceeds the chamber-size ensemble heard thus far and opens up a kind of sonic abyss above which the solo flute, in the closing bars of the entire work, turns its solitary but self-sufficient arabesques (see Example 3.6).

Example 3.6 Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans maître, Movement 9, ‘Bel édifice et les pressentiments’, Double, bb. 157–67. © Copyright 1957 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE34133

An exploration of the same constitutive tension defines Pli selon pli. Its first movement, Don, opens with a massive but momentary orchestral hit (fff). In the resonance that follows, the soprano delivers a single line from Mallarmé’s Don du poème, ‘I bring you the child of an Idumean night’ (Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée!). After this annunciation, the music falls into a kind of wordless abyss of instrumental textures in which four different orchestral groups operate without precise temporal alignment with each other. Boulez drew here on Mallarmé’s idea of the mobile book, in which the order of unbound pages remained undetermined, but the result is also close to that of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, with its idea of shipwreck and drowning played out in syntactical structure. All the precision and technological brilliance of the modern symphony orchestra is here dissolved, like a ship slowly breaking apart as it sinks to the bottom of the sea; the opening fortissimo hit, in retrospect, thus seems like the snapping of the ship’s mast.

It is, however, in the three ‘Improvisations sur Mallarmé’, which form the central movements of the work, that we might hear the echo of Debussy most closely. The first is a setting of ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd-hui’, a poem that explores the agony of the blank white page, of failing to speak, of not having brought to presence, not having sung, by means of its central image of the swan imprisoned on a frozen lake. It presents a wintry landscape of inarticulation, a haunted wasteland ‘of flights that never flew’, captured by the image of the swan’s feathers frozen into the ice. While the memory of a lost plenitude persists, the poem is unable to break free any more than the swan, and so must remain in ‘the useless exile of the swan’ (‘Que vêt parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne’); the closing line draws once again on the acoustic pun of cygne/signe (swan/sign). Boulez sets Mallarmé’s text in a relatively straightforward linear fashion but with the voice constantly decorated and registrally disjunct, never far from the ecstatic vocalise of the nightingale in Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol. The resonating sounds of the original instrumentation (soprano, harp, vibraphone, bells, and four percussionists) is preserved in the later orchestral expansion.

The transformative axis of the sonnet form is audibly expanded through a much slower tempo after the volta. The axis of the poetic form here is a hinge between what was sung and what is left unsung, just as Mallarmé’s Eventail hinges on the axis of the visible and invisible. Boulez marks this relation of words and wordlessness by the way in which the voice relates to the vibraphone, just as, in the final movement of Le Marteau, the wordless (alto) flute takes off from the alto voice, which then falls into wordless vocalise. In ‘Le vierge’ the verse structure is clearly marked by instrumental interludes after each verse, but the vibraphone here seems to play the role of the voice’s instrumental double, momentarily quitting the largely percussive/resonant function of the instrumental group to outline long melodic arches. In the second of the instrumental interludes, which marks the volta, the melodic line is shared between vibraphone, harp, and bells. The re-entry of the soprano for the first tercet is again followed by the wordless melodic response of the vibraphone (more agitated now) before the second tercet begins with the frozen and muted quality of the ‘fantôme’. As the voice now becomes more angular, the vibraphone for the first time ‘sings’ in counterpoint with it, a slow melodic ‘ghost’ of the soprano that picks out its key notes (see Example 3.7).

Example 3.7 Pierre Boulez, Pli selon pli (Portrait de Mallarmé) for Soprano and Orchestra. ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, bb. 64–70. © Copyright 1977 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE31747

The soprano delivers the penultimate word of the text (‘inutile’) with violent force (fff) before disappearing on ‘cygne’, a word that is all but inaudible and lost against the fortissimo chord in the vibraphone and harp. Not only is the voice piano but the second syllable is written merely as a grace-note stem without any note-head – a notational ploy that marks the sign disappearing into silence (see Example 3.8). The movement ends with the low harp and tam-tam disappearing into indistinguishable quiet noise, except for the briefest and faintest of melodic laments in the bells (the falling third, B-G♯, pianissimo, sounds like a quotation from Webern).

Example 3.8 Pierre Boulez, Pli selon pli (Portrait de Mallarmé) for Soprano and Orchestra. ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’, bb. 71–77. © Copyright 1977 by Universal Edition (London) Ltd., London/UE31747

The second ‘Improvisation sur Mallarmé’ is based on ‘Une dentelle s’abolit’, another poem about poetry,³⁹ and the manner in which the merely visible material object disappears in the ‘supreme game’ (jeu supreme) of poetry. Just like Mallarmé’s oft-quoted line about ‘the absence of all flowers’, here we have ‘the eternal absence of a bed’ dissolved by the ‘unanimous white affray’ of the lace tracery of poetic writing. Here the volta leads to the poet who, ‘gilded by his dreams’, a ‘musician of nothingness’, gives birth to poetry from music alone, from the belly of the ‘sleeping mandolin’. Boulez follows Mallarmé in his play with asymmetrical forms and sounds – witness the resonance created through internal rhymes: the guilding (se dore) of the poet in dreams resonates with the same sound as the sleeping (dort) of the mandolin (mandore). Such are the sonic games of this ‘musician of nothingness’.

Boulez foregrounds the gap between words and music to parallel the poem’s own play between reality and poetic transformation, and between mere words and what appears through their constellation. While the solo soprano delivers the lines of the poem in slow lyrical lines, always restrained, though sometimes taking off in delicate, lace-like melismas (such as ‘se dore’ and ‘musicien’), the instrumental music is characterised by patterns of attack and resonant decay, to make an endlessly turning kaleidoscopic background of the same group of resonant instruments (piano, vibraphone, glockenspiel, crotales, tubular bells, harp, maracas). The long, slow lines of the voice flatten out the rhythm of the poem and divest it of the attack of consonants, a function which here seems to pass to the instrumental ensemble. The vocal lines become enlaced with the instrumental resonance that makes gaps between them, and the whole moves so slowly that it becomes a pattern without forward motion; it doubles back on itself like lace-making, a mere ‘stitching in the air’.⁴⁰

As Pearson puts it:

There is a silent world of matter, and there is an alphabet [ . . . ] Literature is actually just letters, the letters with which we ‘accomplish’ our world – that is to say, etymologically, with which we ‘fill’ our world and ‘fulfil’ our role as conscious human beings. And at the heart of this ‘accomplissement’ is the ‘pli’: the fold of dark lace that is writing.⁴¹

A tracery that traces its own disappearance is an apt image for both poem and musical work. Full-bodied tones disappear into mere grace notes in ‘Une dentelle’, just like the ending of ‘Le vierge’. Beneath the soprano’s thread-like lines, the instrumental group produces a constant rolling texture of grace-note roulades, spread chords and trills. One can hear a similar effect at the end of a Boulez work written 25 years later – Répons (1981–84) – but perhaps the effect is also not so different to the rolling waves of piano accompaniment found in countless Fauré mélodies more than half a century earlier. As so often in Mallarmé’s poems, ‘La dentelle’ reflects on both writing and the writer – the solitude of writing and the delirium of the creative imagination, but also the impossible and recurrent task of transposing the immediacy of experience into language, the gap between a childlike purity of vision and the merely imitative work of the grown man, between ‘the pure eyes’ and ‘the habitable head’ which must contain and articulate their vision.

Boulez often underlined that he learned more from writers, particularly those who ‘worked on language itself’, rather than other composers. In addition to René Char, he cites Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Joyce.⁴² These are writers who, like ‘L’artisanat furieux’ (Char), are makers of language, hammering out language and re-forging it in acts of hard manual labour. But of course, this remaking is achieved by a hammer without a master (sans maître) and without metre (sans mètre),⁴³ that is to say, without the ordering rule of inherited grammars. This creative re-forging is without a master in the same way that the ship of language, sunk in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, is without a master. In Mallarmé a shipwreck, in Char ‘Le poème pulvérisé’,⁴⁴ a term Boulez often used for his own musical language. And the constellation which this shipwreck of language makes visible might recall René Char’s image of poetry as La parole en archipel: words as a patterning in the infinity of the ocean like the tiny islands of some vast archipelago, or the pinpricks of light that form a constellation in the night sky.

Empty words

‘Placet Futile’, the middle song of Debussy’s Trois Poèmes, differs from the two outer songs in its ironic treatment of historically-distanced stylistic materials.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, it too has to do with the movement of air and offers a fascinating reflection on the wider theme of the set. Mallarmé’s poem can be read not merely as the futile petition of the lover who speaks without hope of success, but also as a meditation on the petition of language to ‘la Musique’ (Mallarmé’s capitalised form refers to his ideal of the silent musicality of everything).⁴⁶ Debussy’s song takes up this petition but reframed in the context of ‘la musique’ (the actual, sonorous kind). Mallarmé’s mute and untouchable ‘Princesse’ is distanced by means of archaic imagery and a highly stylised poetic language, to which Debussy responds with an eighteenth-century menuet (doux et gracieux) whose harmonic language inclines to a pre-modern modality. ‘La Musique’/la Princesse keeps her silence: her gaze is closed to the petitioning poet (‘sur moi je sais ton regard clos tombé’) – a self-containment reflected in passages of parallel chords that merely circle around themselves. The built-in intensification of the sonnet form is underlined here by each tercet beginning with the imperative ‘Nommez nous . . .’; Debussy’s music responds (bb. 20–23) by taking the vocal part to the peak of its intensity and urgency, rising from a low D to a threefold repetition of a high G to F (see Example 3.9). This is underpinned with a crescendo, and a slight acceleration in tempo, with the whole tercet delivered without a break to create an expression of desire, in and of language, to reach across the gap that separates it from its object. If that sounds very much like the figure of the Faun in Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune, the reference is further underlined by what happens next.

Example 3.9 Claude Debussy, ‘Placet futile’, Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, bb. 19–28

Debussy cuts off the urgency of the singing voice with a sudden ritardando and diminuendo (marked with an arresting double slash in the score) before returning, equally abruptly, to the calm of the opening material, now slipped a semitone into G^♭ (b. 24), for the setting of the second tercet. Where the first tercet was given, breathlessly, in a mere four bars, for the second Debussy takes an expansive ten bars (five of them at a slower tempo). The second line provokes two extraordinary bars, the like of which have not been heard in this song before – a contained pentatonic space on G♭, built over an open fifth in the bass, complete with ‘flute’ trills and ending with a rapid, evanescent upward gesture that literally disappears into silence. In Mallarmé’s L’après-midi d’un faune the flute is music, and here too it provides a sonic correlate of the poet’s dream of the intimacy with ‘la Princesse’ for which he petitions. Momentarily, the wasted breath of his futile words becomes the fulfilled breath of the flute’s musical plenitude (signalled by the appearance of pentatonic harmony here). By means of this threshold, the song reaches the final line of the poem. Once again, Debussy’s music exceeds the cultivated absence of the words: the vocal line rises to a long upper E♮ (pp) for the middle syllable of the final word (sourires) – recalling the sustained E♭ with which the voice closes ‘Soupir’ – and thus delivers an aural image of the presence for which the words petition. The piano, meanwhile, echoes the voice’s pentatonic ascent in a series of grace-note figures (pp, rapide et léger), anticipating the figure which begins the next song and underlining musically the poetic link between ‘Amour ailé d’un éventail’ in the last tercet of Placet Futile and the setting of Éventail which follows.

Preoccupied with thin air and cultivating the edges of silence, Debussy’s Mallarmé songs offer intriguing examples of the capacity of music ‘to say nothing’. In this, they are clearly part of a wider movement, explored so acutely by Katherine Bergeron as the ‘unsinging of the mélodie française’⁴⁷ in Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and Reynaldo Hahn, ‘a repertoire that appeared to have almost nothing to say’.⁴⁸ If poetry was liberated by music, it is equally clear that music was liberated by the poetry it had itself set free. In one sense, as Bergeron shows, this was manifest in a retreat from traditional expressive ‘content’ in song – not just a paring down of heated emotional lines to a cool, simple and declamatory style, but thereby a kind of emptying out of the voice itself to something quieter, less demonstrative, purer in tone; in short, as Bergeron has it, a music presque sans voix.⁴⁹ Paradoxically, as poetry became more musical, the vocal line of the French mélodie became more like speech.

This is a very particular version of the aesthetic of ‘saying nothing’, and one that appears to run counter to the increasing emphasis on sonority, colour and gesture in instrumental music. But the simplicity of the pared down voice is not a renunciation of the melodic and the musical in favour of speech and language, a renunciation of singing in favour of saying; it is, rather, the singing voice’s complement to the new poetry’s manner of framing a plenitude by pointing beyond itself. The pared down voice does not foreground the signifying function of the words, it highlights what they do not say – the saying nothing which they perform. Expressive reticence, as Jankélévitch suggests, was a way out of the noisy attempt to make music say something, the better to foreground the act of saying itself. One of Fauré’s earliest songs offers a version of such a ‘Placet futile’. His setting of Gautier’s ‘Serenade Toscana’ (Op. 3, no. 2) narrates a scene in which a lover awakes his mistress to serenade her from the street below, but the song he sings is all about his muteness, the lack of a voice with which to sing to her. In ‘Le parfum impérrissable’ (1897), Bergeron finds a deliberate refusal of songfulness as ‘a sign of the “not saying” that defined Fauré’s mute subject’, in the same way that, in Fauré’s later cycle, La chanson d’Ève, Eve’s ‘dying wish was also to be silenced, to reclaim the bliss of a wordless Paradise’.⁵⁰ The relays are complex here. It was Symbolist poetry, after all, that enabled music to break through to a new attitude to its own soundworld, but earlier it was music that had inspired poetry to free itself from its own conventions: as Bergeron notes, in Verlaine’s manifesto, ‘De la musique avant toute chose’ (the first line of his Art poétique of 1874), poetry was ‘liberated by music to say nothing at all’.⁵¹ And what was it in music that Verlaine sought for poetry? Above all, something that disappears into thin air, something ‘plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air/ sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose’.⁵²

The ideal of a literature that could free itself from representation – and, in that sense, be about nothing – has a long provenance. In 1852, Flaubert dreamed of writing ‘a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air – a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible’.⁵³ Nearly a century later, Paul Valéry echoes something of Flaubert’s sentiments when, writing about Mallarmé, he asks what it is that poems tell us: ‘They tell us, perhaps, that they have nothing to tell us; that, by the very means which usually tell us something, they are exercising a quite different function. They act on us like a chord of music.’⁵⁴ The so-called musicalisation of language at the heart of Symbolist poetry involved a radical repurposing of language, a disruption within literature of the function of everyday words in order to make them say something different by revealing their own edges, but the relation between a musicalised poetry and actual music was complex.

If such poetry already moves to the edge of language, what is the result of it being brought into contact with music as song? What happens when the poetry of Baudelaire, Banville, Verlaine, and Mallarmé is set by a composer like Debussy who, in parallel to the literary project of Symbolism, sought ways to set music against itself, to loosen the grammar in order to recapture the sense? Susan Youens has pointed to ‘Debussy’s increasing doubt that any composer could set poetry to music without a perceptible gulf between the two worlds of ordered word and ordered sound’.⁵⁵ On this she cites a comment by Paul Dukas: ‘Do not fool yourself, poems cannot be set to music [ . . . ] Poetry and music do not mix; they never merge.’⁵⁶ We might both agree and disagree; the fact that words and music do not merge is surely key to the value of song. In Debussy’s hands, certainly, song shows itself as ‘as a means of deconstruction’, as in Lawrence Kramer’s remark about the German Lied, that it ‘seeks to differ from the text by continually deferring a full resemblance to it’.⁵⁷

Debussy’s Mallarmé songs thus give us occasion to reapproach the relationship between words and music and to address a problem Elizabeth McCombie lamented some years ago, that ‘in both disciplines, writing about the meetings of text and music has largely been beset by a naïve mimetic model of the inter-art relationship’.⁵⁸ They provoke a rethinking about how, rather than one art confirming the substance of the other (music expressing, accompanying, heightening the sense of the words) quite the opposite occurs – that song stages a dynamism between words and music in which the apparent postulation of meaning is continually refracted by the other in an infinite displacement of signification. Peter Dayan, in his discussion of the relation between Mallarmé’s poetry and Debussy’s music, sums it up thus:

Crudely put, from the poet’s point of view, art is not meaning, therefore it must be music. But music without meaning would be unarticulated; therefore it could not be written. What is needed is a dynamic that allows for the constant articulated vanishing of meaning. For that, both music and poetry are necessary, so that each can look toward the other and project thither that vanishing.⁵⁹

For Dayan, the critique of representation in both poetry and music underlines the essentially fictive nature of art – witness Debussy’s famous statement that ‘art is the most beautiful deception’.⁶⁰ But art does not reveal itself as fiction as a kind of salutary moral. Neither music nor poetry is merely a wilful lie, but rather the wise lie of a self-aware and ironic art. Both are fictions (aesthetic lies) in order to delineate the boundaries of all making and speaking. By opening up gaps within itself, art makes its own inadequacy a kind of springboard into what is not articulated. The ‘nothing’ that is said is thus neither content nor the absence of content, but a threshold, a margin which is itself vividly articulate of the unsaid.

Song is articulate, therefore, because of its articulated nature, its jointing of the gap between words and music. In the face of a tradition of song analyses that show how music reinforces the sense of the words, we might listen instead for the gaps that open up between the two – above all, in the oscillation between the absence implied by words and the presence promised by music. This is complex, because it is already a feature of both poetry and music taken separately, as David Code has shown in his analysis of the relation between Mallarmé’s eclogue L’après-midi d’un faune and Debussy’s orchestral Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Mallarmé’s poem is precisely about the (in)capacity of poetic language to (re)capture presence. The faun – half man/half beast, the bifurcation of the sensual and rational – seeks first to grasp the object of his desire through music, only to discard it in favour of speech. But, as Code underlines, the crux of the poem is ‘a singular moment of irresolvable conflict between speech and writing’. The climax of the faun’s desire in and of language is both a moment of maximal material richness and a point of collapse and failure, a moment Code locates, in line 78 of the poem, on the word ‘Tresaille!’ (Quiver!), whose effect is strikingly similar to that of ‘Vertige!’ in Éventail.⁶¹

The tension at the heart of Mallarmé’s Faune resurfaces in other poetic interests pursued by Debussy. The faun’s music is, after all, played on his flute or pan-pipes, the same instrument that appears as the ‘Flûte de Pan’ in the Chansons de Bilitis where it is referred to as a syrinx. Debussy’s piece for solo flute, Syrinx, was written as incidental music in 1913, the same year as the Mallarmé songs. Originally called ‘Flûte de Pan’, it is a piece that foregrounds the same unmeasured freedom heard in the solo flute at the start of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Ovid’s story of the origin of Pan’s flute is apposite here, since it too is a story about desire for what has been lost, about music as a compensation for what cannot be grasped, and about the power of music to revoke absence. The story tells of how the nymph Syrinx, pursued by Pan, is transformed by river nymphs into a stand of water reeds. The frustrated god cuts down the reeds and makes from them a set of pipes. It is a myth about how music compensates for the absent object of (language’s) desire, but which at the same time is sounded only through the absence of the desired presence – the cutting of the reeds means that Syrinx is forever absent. Before the age of recording, the absence of which songs tell (no matter what their words) is countered by the bodily presence of the singer. After the onset of sound recording, a development contemporary with Debussy’s work, this tension is heightened rather than lessened, as the intimacy of recording seems to make present, in the closeness of its aural presence, a (singing) body that is palpably absent. The proximity of the wordless voice of Syrinx and that of the sirène has never been closer.

In ‘Le tombeau des Naiades’, the third and last of the Bilitis songs, the poet (Pierre Louÿs) depicts a wintry scene in which the satyrs and nymphs are long gone and the pond is frozen over. While the music begins by accentuating this emptiness, it also stages a late efflorescence of which the poem gives no hint. At the recollection that the frozen pond is the place where the naiads used to laugh, the music takes a sudden turn to F♯ major and the vocal line reaches its highest point with the only melismatic passage in the whole song: in this way, music recalls the presence of what the poem says is absent. Writing on Debussy’s setting of Verlaine’s ‘Mandoline’ (Fêtes Galantes), Carolyn Abbate points to a very particular case of how singing revokes the absence described in the words: ‘Since the poem alludes to human serenades past and silenced, and since any and all songs produce real human music making in their performance, making a song out of this poem must resurrect the very singing it has dismissed as lost, giving it present life as if time had been run backwards.’⁶² From that perspective, it is perhaps not insignificant that Debussy’s first published song, ‘Nuits d’étoiles’, is a musical response to a poem inspired by a piece of music (Banville’s ‘La dernière pensée de Weber’),⁶³ another song about song, in which the piano accompaniment imitates the strumming chords of the ‘sad lyre’ of the poem.⁶⁴

This is why Debussy’s musical interest, to borrow two phrases from Jankélévitch, lies not only in ‘le pianissimo sonore’ but also in ‘la matière vibrante’.⁶⁵ The difference between Debussy and his younger contemporary Igor Stravinsky is that whereas the latter’s music is defined by the physicality of striking, the percussive articulation of sound and rhythm, Debussy’s interest lies in the afterlife of sounds as resonance – hence the importance of the performance direction laissez vibrer, a listening for presence in absence which joins Debussy to Boulez and Murail. And here too lies an explanation as to why Debussy’s career was marked by such a huge corpus of unfinished and unrealised theatre projects,⁶⁶ because his art is concerned equally with the urge to embody, to make appear, as with its failure – that is to say, with the displacement of the kind of material appearance that the theatre requires. The one opera he did complete is famously about staging ‘nothing’ and its climax is marked by silence, non-event, and absence. His early work on Pelléas overlapped with the completion of the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, a project which, as David Code points out, had its genesis in several layers of failed theatrical versions,⁶⁷ beginning in 1865 with a verse drama on the model of Théodore de Banville’s Diane au Bois, the very same that Debussy was trying to turn into an opera twenty years later – a project he eventually abandoned because, according to Arthur Wenk, he had yet to master a musical language that would match the ‘emptiness’ of Banville’s poem.⁶⁸

If Mallarmé and Debussy both wrestled with the presentation of something characterised by its absence (as nothing, silence, gap, blank space), it is hardly surprising that the language of criticism has struggled to do it justice. The production of presence,⁶⁹ in a medium essentially evanescent like music, confounds the oppositions of language. Witness how Jankélévitch, in his attempt to delineate Debussy’s music, anticipates later French thinkers in his effusive sequence of logical contradictions: ‘by means of the presence of absence, which is present absence, absent presence, the presence of music, a multi-present presence, the presence of presence itself becomes evasive; the fact of presence becomes a glimpse; prose becomes poetry’.⁷⁰

Here, surely, is a philosopher who does listen to music. But he is not alone: in trying to rethink our being-in-the-world as relational and dynamic, a century of philosophers have reached for similar complex formulations – witness the use of multiply-hyphenated composite terms in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Nancy, and Marion. In each case, there is an attempt to use language to point to what escapes language, to break out of the kind of reified, thing-based schema to which language constricts us – in short, to become more musical. It is not coincidental that music becomes of more interest to philosophy as philosophy reaches for a more musical kind of thought and language, which is to say, one more concerned with process and relations, than with fragmentation and atomisation. At the heart of this sea-change is the shift from language as saying and telling, naming and stating, to a use of language which draws attention to the act of appearing.