Dr. Maryam Moshaver
Associate Professor of Music Theory
University of Alberta
Location: Humanities 2411
In a conversation a propos of Pelléas et Melisande, Debussy spoke of seeking a poet who, saying things only in part, “would permit me to graft my dream upon his… who would not despotically impose a ‘scene to be carried out,’ but would leave me free, here and there, to have more art than he, and to complete (parachever) his work.” Though this statement hardly comes as a surprise in view of Debussy’s work, particularly with regard to his setting of Maeterlinck’s sparse text, yet it might lead one to speculate as to the precise kind of interaction between music and text Debussy might have had in mind. Especially intriguing from this standpoint is the collection of songs set in the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire (1887-89), written shortly before the publication of Pelléas, in which the dense insularity of the poetic forms would seem almost to forbid musical intrusion. Taking as its interpretive point of departure the theoretical and journalistic writings on poetry, music, and art of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, this paper is an exploration of the aesthetics of the mélodie as expressed in Debussy’s musical engagement with Baudelaire’s poetry.
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