Debussy's "Soupir": An Experiment in Permutational Analysis.(Critical Essay)

I

What attracted me in Mallarme, at the stage I had reached at that time, was the extraordinary formal density of his poems. Not only was the content truly extraordinary...but never has the French language been taken so far in the matter of syntax. ...

What interested me was the idea of finding a musical equivalent, both poetic and formal, to Mallarme's poetry...this enabled me to transcribe into musical terms forms that I had never thought of and which are derived from the literary forms he himself used. (1)

OF THE LITERARY FORMS that inspired Boulez, perhaps the most influential was the one used by Mallarme in his last published work, Un coup de des (A throw of the dice). The most innovative aspect of Un coup de des--and the one that provided a point of reference for Boulez's creation of variable forms and the composition of his Piano Sonata Number 3 in particular--was its experiments with permutation and chance. While the title and content of the poem overtly address notions of chance, reading and interpreting the poem also involve chance as a result of typographical eccentricities, which vary the placement, type-face, size, and amount of text on each of the twenty-one pages of the poem. Some pages present several configurations of text, while others present only a single word. Certain words and phrases attract the reader's attention with capital letters, bold face, larger fonts, or any of these in combination (Example 1). Because of its unorthodox presentation, Un coup de des permits several reading possibilities: as there is no single linear route through the poem, each reading varies depending on the path the eye traces across the page .

It is this availability of multiple readings in Mallarme's poem that inspired Boulez to find a musical equivalent. Yet Mallarme was not Boulez's sole point of departure; he also cited Debussy's influence in the development of new musical forms:

Varese and Webern were the first to learn the lesson of Debussy's last works and to "think forms," not--in Debussy's words--as "sonata boxes" but as arising from a process that is primarily spatial and rhythmic, linking "a succession of alternative, contrasting or correlated states"--that is to say, intrinsic to the object but at the same time in complete control of it. (2)

This article examines Debussy's late work "Soupir" (the first song of Debussy's Trois Poemes de Stephane Mallarme, 1913) from a Boulezian perspective, drawing specifically on Boulez's preoccupation with the permutational possibilities of Un coup de des.