Musico-Poetic Synthesis in Nineteenth Century Melodies

Abstract

It strikes one indeed as noteworthy that the periods of greatest achievements in French lyric poetry should coincide with the periods of high development in the French chanson. In the sixteenth century the inspired lyricism of the Pleiade was paralleled by a lovely flowering of song in France and Renaissance poets such as Ronsard and du Bellay saw their works set to music by the most able composers of their time such as de la Grotte and Tessier. The nineteenth century, too, beginning with the highly personal poems of the romantics and ending in the charming vagueness of the symbolists, witnessed a similar blending of poetry and music, with the works of such distinguished poets as Gautier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarme used as texts by the greatest composers of the period. Without attempting to speculate as to the reasons for these simultaneous flowerings and blendings of two art forms, I propose in this paper to examine the second and most recent -- that blend of poetry and music known as the rnelodie in nineteenth century France, to analyze in turn verse by three representative poets of that period, and to illustrate how the best-known composers of melodies in that timespan set them to music. The lines of literary history in nineteenth-century France, for this study begin with Romanticism. Lamartine's Les Meditations (1820}, the success of Hugo's Hernani (1830), and the failure of his Burgraves (1840) are used to conveniently define chronologically the span of Romanticism, although many traces of it are found in earlier and later works. [From introductory section]