Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire’s Legacy to Composers by Helen Abbott

Abstract

Society and Culture edited by Frederick Toner Abbott, Helen. Parisian Intersections: Baudelaire’s Legacy to Composers. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0805-2. Pp. 215. 8 musical scores. $64.95. Abbott investigates how poetry is transformed when it encounters music. She appropriately selects the latter half of the nineteenth century in France as a particularly fecund period for cross-pollination among the arts. Within that vast domain, she focuses on the clash between the artistic expectations raised when the popular intermingles with the formal. Using the Microcosm approach, she studies Baudelaire’s “La mort des amants”(first published in his eleven-verse Limbes of 1851), five musical settings of that poem for voice and piano by contemporary composers, and an obscene parody by two of the Vilains Bonshommes, Paul Verlaine and Léon Valade. Focusing on time, place, and performance (including reading aloud as well as singing and accompanying ), Abbott shows how poets and musicians struggled to define and to embody “musicality” in words, and lyricism in music. She writes elegantly and clearly, knows the mélodie (art song) and chanson (popular song) traditions well, and has conducted thorough research into recent scholarship about Baudelaire. Of particular interest are Abbott’s discussions of how sounds, rhythms, and images in poetry can reflect a struggle between routine and innovation (9). She demonstrates how Berlioz’s music does the same with Gautier’s verse (21–22). Note also her survey of Villiers’ relationship to Baudelaire’s work, which led to the former’s abandoning poetry (14–17). Her analysis of how “La mort des amants” itself resists closure is valuable (22–29). She keenly observes that a poem about dying can become transformed into a resurrection when it is set to music, and even more so when that music is performed (41). Nothing innovative here, of course—dirges, requiem masses, Gibbons’s“The Silver Swan,”arias such as Gluck’s“Che faró senza Euridice”demonstrate abundantly that the mournful effervescence of Symbolism merely revives an ancient tradition, as do the “Farewell Tours” of many popular musical groups today. Chapter 3, on “Musical Theories,” is weak, confusing sound with spelling when characterizing rhymes, missing many patterns of sound repetition while arbitrarily privileging others, and unfortunately succumbing to the Pathetic Fallacy when saying “the intensity of these sounds” (61), where “density” would have been much better (moreover, “intensity” is a technical musical term for“loudness”). Chapter 4,“Song,”begins with an interesting discussion of word history (65–67). In what follows, no account is taken of many prominent rhythmic features: internal divisions such as coupes secondaires in alexandrine verse, of free divisions (ranging from 1+7 to 7+1) in the octosyllable, of the expressive effects of vers impairs, of melisma and ornament in vocal lines, or of the ad lib treatment of the e caduc (better called “weak” than “mute” e) in popular songs. We never come to understand why the five settings for “La mort des Amants” are of musical interest 246 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 247 (even Debussy’s, superior to the others, dates from his early period, and harmonically depends mainly on the Circle of Fifths). The final two chapters, however, on“Parody” and “Legacy,” are perceptive, and reveal Abbott as a promising cultural historian. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar Laurence M. Porter Binet, Laurent. Rien ne se passe comme prévu. Paris: Grasset, 2012. ISBN 978-2246 -79933-7. Pp. 308. 17 a. Binet continues a tradition of “embedded journalism”in a presidential campaign started by Yasmina Reza, who shadowed Sarkozy in 2007, as chronicled in L’aube le soir ou la nuit (Flammarion, 2007). For this book, Binet shadowed François Hollande during the 2012 campaign. Reza had a subject who provided her with amusing details in 2007; she described Sarkozy in his Ray-Ban sunglasses as “Joe Pesci dans une ruelle de Palerme.” Sarkozy’s pronunciation of “joint-venture” came out as “John Ventura.” Binet’s subject is much less colorful, providing fewer anecdotes, more impénétrable than Sarkozy, plus lisse. The title of the book is taken from a statement that Hollande made, captured in a Canal+ documentary, following Strauss-Kahn’s...