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COPYRIGHT 2000 University of Washington
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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.
In fact, Mallarme's Un coup de des presents visually what was already inherent in much of his earlier poetry, including "Soupir" (1864). Despite their traditional appearance, Mallarme's earlier poems often introduce such fragmented syntax that an understanding of the text is predicated upon a comparable nonlinear reading. In moments of syntactic ambiguity the reader must cast forward and back for possible associations in meaning and syntax, which often requires rereading previous material in light of these newly acquired associations. Whereas the nonlinear presentation of the text in Un coup de des makes explicit the nonlinear reading, in the more traditional forms of Mallarme's earlier poems the same result is achieved by studiously fragmented syntax. In "Soupir," for example, the poem's syntax disrupts its metrical organization.
Soupir
Mon ame vers ton front ou reve, o calme soeur,
Un automne jonche de taches de rousseur,
Et vers le ciel errant de ton oeil angelique
Monte, comme dans un jardin melancolique,
Fidele, un blanc jet d' eau soupire vers l' Azur!
--Vers l' Azur attendri d' Octobre pale et pur
Qui mire aux grand bassins sa langueur infinie
Et laisse, sur l'eau morte ou la fauve agonie
Des feuilles erre au vent et creuse un froid sillon,
Se trainer le soleil jaune d' un long rayon.
Sigh
My soul toward your brow where dreams, o calm sister,
An autumn strewn with freckles,
And toward the wandering sky of your angelic eye
Rises, as in a melancholy garden,
Faithful, a white jet of water sighs toward the Azure!
--Toward the tender Azure of pale and pure October
Which mirrors in great pools its infinite languor
And lets, on the dead water where the tawny agony
Of leaves wanders in the wind and hollows a cold furrow,
The yellow sun drag itself out in a long ray. (3)
The metrical pattern of "Soupir" is very regular: ten Alexandrines (a line of twelve syllables) are grouped in five rhyming couplets that alternate accented and unaccented rhyme. Yet the syllabic regularity of the Alexandrine and the aural unity of the rhyme are obscured by the fact that "Soupir" is a single sentence, which proceeds with minimal punctuation and run-on lines. That is, the enjambment of lines 3, 6, 7, and 8 directs the reader's focus away from the end of the line and into the beginning of the next, thereby concealing the regular pacing of the Alexandrines and the aural stability usually provided by end-rhyme.
Instances of verb displacement in "Soupir" produce the nonlinear reading strategies outlined above. By placing verbs in positions contrary to the ones dictated by normal syntax, the reader is forced to consider "Soupir" in sequences other than the one given. One example occurs with the interpolation of lines 8 and 9, which separates the verb "laisse" from its reflexive infinitive complement "se trainer." Without these lines, the conclusion of "Soupir" would read:
--Toward the tender Azure of pale and pure October
Which mirrors in great pools its infinite languor
And lets the yellow sun drag itself out in a long ray.
The interpolation"--on the dead water where the tawny agony of leaves wanders in the wind and hollows a cold furrow"--twice interrupts the flow of "Soupir"'s conclusion: the first interruption occurs after "laisse" with the beginning of the interpolated clause, and the second with the resumption of the original sentence after its two line delay. The displacement of "se trainer" from "laisse" frames the interpolation, which embeds a smaller complete sentence within the larger sentence.
Another--and more dramatic--example of verb displacement creates the incomplete syntactic patterns of the opening lines. "Soupir" begins with a subject "My soul," accumulates prepositional phases beginning with "toward" (toward your brow, toward the wandering sky of your angelic eye, toward the Azure), yet does not...
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