Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Figures and Music examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaches to Word–Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century
- 1 Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie's Music and Poetry do for Each Other
- 2 Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera
- 3 New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800–1860
- 4 The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past
- 5 Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 6 Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality
- 7 E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
- 8 Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner
- 9 Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song
- 10 Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
- 11 The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet
- Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Figures and Music examples
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Approaches to Word–Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century
- 1 Losing Sense, Making Music: What Erik Satie's Music and Poetry do for Each Other
- 2 Not Listening in Paris: Critical and Fictional Lapses of Attention at the Opera
- 3 New Expectations: How to Listen to Sonata Form, 1800–1860
- 4 The Science of Musical Memory: Vernon Lee and the Remembrance of Sounds Past
- 5 Musical Listening in The Mysteries of Udolpho
- 6 Katherine Mansfield and Nineteenth-Century Musicality
- 7 E.T.A. Hoffmann beyond the ‘Paradigm shift’: Music and Irony in the Novellas 1815–1819
- 8 Fiction as Musical Critique: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out and the Case of Wagner
- 9 Théodore de Banville and the Mysteries of Song
- 10 Performing Poetry as Music: How Composers Accept Baudelaire's Invitation to Song
- 11 The Grit in the Oyster, or How to Quarrel with a Poet
- Afterword: Wording Notes: Musical Marginalia in the Guise of an Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The poetry of Charles Baudelaire has always posed a particular challenge to composers who choose to set him to music. According to Katherine Bergeron, composer Henri Duparc was ‘the first composer to make a successful setting’ of his work. Why Baudelaire seems to present an especial difficulty for composers, however, has rarely been addressed by critical scholarship. This essay sets out to explore what it is that presents such a compositional challenge, and the ways in which composers are able to accept Baudelaire's invitation. By taking two settings of Baudelaire's ‘L'Invitation au voyage’ as its primary focus, this essay analyses the status of performance in Baudelaire's aesthetic (whether the performance of poetry, or the performance of song) and the importance of ‘sentiment’ within this aesthetic, in order to uncover something of what is at stake in the relationship between words and notes during the nineteenth century in France. As we focus on differences in approaches to the poem through music, a key question arises: can the relationship between words and notes be a reciprocal one, or does poetry suffer in the process of becoming song?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century , pp. 183 - 204Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013