Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

Abstract

Abstract Debussy's Prélude à Vaprès-midi d'un faune has so far been thought to relate only obliquely to Mallarmé's poem L'Après-midi d'un faune. The actual sophistication of Debussy's reading of Mallarmé becomes apparent through a newly precise formal analysis of the poem, and a new analytical emphasis on the orchestration of the prelude. In adapting the conventions of classical pastoral, notably the quasi-dramatic textual presentation of both Virgil's Eclogues and Theocritus's Idylls, Mallarmé focuses his text on an irresolvable moment of conflict between sensuous speech and literary writing. The faun, the poem's main "character," comes to symbolize the reader's divided experience of a text composed on the cusp of a loss of Romantic lyricism to modernist impersonality. In Debussy's reading, a recurring contrast between strings and winds audibly tracks Mallarmé's poetic template and also, more subtly, signals an esoteric layer of puns on Wagnerian leitmotifs in its syntax. A division between hearing and analytical reading is created, which encapsulates a historical moment in which the Romantic orchestral poetics exemplified in Berlioz's influential treatise is losing its immediacy, and the Romantic harmony that attained an expressive limit in Wagner's music dramas is being broken up by systematic analysis.