Boulez and Mallarme A Study in Poetic Influence

9781859281208

1859281206

This study looks at the influence of the 19th-century French poet Stephane Mallarmé on the music of the 20th-century composer Pierre Boulez and demonstrates the significance of this relationship, not only in music and poetry, but in the history of intellectual and aesthetic thought.The author examines Mallarmé's fascination with music and the complex ways in which he approached it in relation to his own writing. By close analysis of Un coup de dés (reproduced here in facsimile), Breatnach illustrates the poet's creation of a new poetic language. Half a century later Boulez found in Mallarmé the inspiration to create a new musical language that was as innovative and expressive of the modernist aesthetic as Mallarmé's poetic language was. The author's illumination of this creative relationship focuses on Boulez's cycle Pli selon pli.Finally, by tracing a line from Beethoven, through Wagner to Boulez, Mary Breatnach reveals the crucial place this interaction of musical and literary ideals has in the development of 20th-century western thought. As a result, her research has important theoretical and practical implications both for musicology and for contemporary literary criticism.