Word and Music Studies: The Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The comparison of text to music is perhaps one of the most enduring metaphors of our critical practice, and, as Steven Paul Scher observed in an essay of 1972, its many variants are among the terms most often abused and misused in literary criticism. Musical techniques such as counterpoint, melody, harmony and rhythm abound in analyses of both verse and prose, and critics frequently resort to a musical metaphor when discussing textual effects or processes which seem to transcend the denotative, representative realm of language and enter the domain of the properly literary. While the ‘terminological chaos’ against which Scher rails may frustrate a musically literate reader, scholars are not entirely to blame for the irresistible attraction that musical metaphors exert, for it is a commonplace among poets themselves to trace the relationship between poetry and music back to Antiquity and the myth of Orpheus, in whose song both word and lyre accompaniment formed an indivisible whole. Moreover, as Ardis Butterfield demonstrates in Poetry and Music in Medieval France, text and music were joined in a single practice during the Middle Ages, in the performances of chansonniers and troubadours. The essays in Poetry and Music in the French Renaissance explore how this close relationship is maintained by Pierre de Ronsard and the Pleiade poets, Louise Labe, and composers of lute-song. Ronsard’s Abbrege de l’art poetique francois (1565) appears as a key text, highlighting the common aims of poetry and music; indeed, only five years later the Academie de poesie et de musique was founded by Jean-Antoine de Baif and Thibault de Courville to promote the kinship between the two arts. In the nineteenth century, however, poetry and music emerge as separate cultural artefacts. Whereas they had historically been conceptualized as complementary parts of the same art form, the surge in interest, post-Beethoven, in instrumental concerts, along with the rapid rise of a mass print culture and an educated, wealthy middle class, made the printed book, rather than oral performance, the home of a new, exciting Romantic poetry: Alphonse de