i. Soupir  
ii. Placet futile 
iii. Eventail 
 

Paris in the late-19th century was a hub of creative innovation. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was a central figure in this experimental scene. At his weekly meetings on Tuesdays at his apartment on the Rue de Rome, Mallarmé held court, speaking for hours about art and politics. Regular attendees included W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Emile Zola, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke… and Claude Debussy.  

Debussy adored poetry, particularly the works of Mallarmé. Indeed, his most-famous composition, the orchestral tone poem Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, is closely based on Mallarmé’s poem (‘The Afternoon of the Faune’). Debussy’s music evokes the languid feeling of the poem, while the work’s structure closely mirrors that of the text: Debussy’s composition has the same number of bars (110) as the poem has lines. 

This reverence for poetry can be seen in Debussy’s setting of three poems by Mallarmé, composed late in the composer’s life in 1913. In her analysis of the first of the three songs – ‘Soupir’ (Sigh) – musicologist Marianne Wheeldon notes that “Debussy’s setting tries to imitate the permutability of Mallarmé’s syntax”. Debussy closely mirrors the poem’s sophisticated form, adapting his music to the text (rather than attempting to make the poem fit a traditional musical structure) so that the poem’s ambiguity is preserved. Just as Mallarmé’s poem is written as a single breathless sentence – “Faithful, a white jet of water sighs toward the Azure / – Toward the tender Azure of pale and pure October” – Debussy imitates the freely flowing and associative form of Mallarmé’s poem in which the poet’s ‘soul’ reaches toward ‘autumn’, ‘freckles’, ‘the sky’, and so on.  

Debussy was not the only composer to set poems by Mallarmé. Famously, Maurice Ravel also composed his own Trois poèmes de Mallarmé. Indeed, it was Ravel who first secured the rights to set Mallarmé’s poetry to music. Both Debussy and Ravel set ‘Soupir’ and ‘Placet futile’, however whereas Ravel chose to end his collection with ‘Surgi de la croupe et du bond’ (‘ Risen from the crupper and leap’), Debussy finishes with ‘Eventail’ (‘Fan’), a setting of Mallarmé’s poem ‘Autre Éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé’.  Subtly erotic, the poem begins: 

O dreamer, so that I
May plunge in that pathless thing,
Pure delight, by a subtle lie
Learn to hold in your hand my wing.