Review of Heath Lees. 2007. Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language . Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing

Abstract

Heath Lees's book Mallarme and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language offers a relatively straightforward revisionist claim: that Mallarme's familiarity with (and agonistic response to) the challenge of Wagnerian music drama cannot be solely attributed-as it sometimes has been-to a Damascene "conver­ sion" contemporaneous with the "second wave" of French wagnerisme in the mid-1880s. The true roots of this central strand of the poet's thought, Lees argues, extend much deeper than this, even as far back as his formative years as a Lyceen during the late 1850s. Reappraised in this light, Mallarme's "quest to re-appropriate music on behalf of poetry" (xv) must be seen as a crucial determinant not only of his few, explicit late responses to Wagner (notably the essay-cum-prose poem Richard Wagner. Reverie d'un poete fram;ais and the sonnet "Hommage a Richard Wagner"), but of most of his major works starting from his first publications in the 1860s. Several background chapters lay the groundwork for the defense of Lees's thesis. In chapter I, questioning a tenacious cliche about the poet's "awakening" to Wagner at the Concerts Lamoureux in 1885, Lees offers evidence of Mallarme's "informed awareness of musical events" (18) in the years before. Telling points of reference include his ongoing contacts with such leading musical figures as Augusta Holmes and the musical minutiae noted in La Derniere Mode, the magazine about fashion and current events Mallarme himself edited for a short while in 1874. An informative overview of the spread of Wagnerian music and ideas into French culture during the 1860s and 1870s (in spite of the catastrophic public reception of the 1860 Paris production of Tannhiiuser) leads into chapter 2, "Music and Mallarme's Generation," which opens a window onto the revolutionary developments in musical education that prepared a whole generation to become a new kind of audience for such distinctive nineteenth-century institutions as the Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire and Jules Pasdeloup's Concerts populaires. A particularly valuable point of reference here is the Manuel musical of Bocquillon Wilhelm, whose presentation of the Guidonian basis of solfege Lees discusses at some length; the same chapter also touches briefly on the rise of scientific acoustics and the attendant belief that the Western tonal system could be seen as a "progressive elaboration of acoustic processes that were inherent in nature itself" (30). Finally, Lees provides