‘Ordre et beauté’

The British composer Jonathan Harvey is generally associated with Eastern sacred texts rather than the secular Western literary canon. However, evidence from works composed over several decades suggests that Charles Baudelaire was a significant if subterranean influence upon his music. This article considers these works in detail. ‘L’Horloge’ [‘The Clock’] (1963) is a remarkable interpretation of Baudelaire’s text which reveals in it parallels with Harvey’s own contemporary preoccupations with the nature of musical time. Correspondances (1975) is a sequence of settings from Les Fleurs du mal and interludes and ‘fragments’ for piano which may be arranged in numerous orders at the discretion of the performers. Finally, the instrumental works Hidden Voice (1996) and Hidden Voice II (1999) demonstrate that the poet’s ideas remained an inspiration to Harvey well into his compositional maturity. Particularly striking is the variety and originality of these musical responses. Baudelaire’s real significance for Harvey was perhaps as an exemplar of aesthetic ideals - of ‘order and beauty’ - rather than merely as a source of musically suggestive images and phrases.

Henri Dutilleux, haunted by Baudelaire

One of the leading French composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) set only one text by Baudelaire, though he said that the poet was the artist in any medium who had the strongest impact on him; indeed, he said that ‘Baudelaire continues to haunt me.’ This article explores how this ‘haunting’ affected Dutilleux’s oeuvre, from his cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… [‘A Far Distant World’] (1967-1970) whose five movements are each preceded by a Baudelaire epigraph, through to his final completed work, the song cycle Le Temps l’horloge [‘Time the Clock’] (2006-2009) which concludes with a setting of Baudelaire’s prose poem Enivrez-vous [‘Be Intoxicated’]. Le Temps l’horloge also features settings of poems by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, and Baudelaire’s poetry and art criticism were centrally important to both these writers. The multiple interrelationships between Baudelaire, Tardieu, Desnos, and Dutilleux are traced in this article, and analysis of ‘Enivrez-vous’ shows it to be the summation of Dutilleux’s output.

Two artists and two mélodies

André Caplet (1878-1925) set just two of Baudelaire’s poems: La Cloche fêlée [‘The Cracked Bell’] and La Mort des pauvres [‘The Death of the Poor’]. These mélodies were composed in 1922, just three years before the artist’s death. For a composer with a tendency to shy away from setting poetry of the French giants of literature, the questions of how and why Caplet chose to translate Baudelaire’s poetry into the mélodie are intriguing. This exploration of La Cloche fêlée and La Mort des pauvres considers the ways in which Caplet reflects the poetic imagery of Baudelaire’s texts within musical structures. Caplet’s compositional language is distinctive, and his artistic approach to musically illuminating poetic meaning is perceptive and sensitive. Through viewing the creative intersection of these two artists, this article offers an interpretation that presents a perspective on Caplet’s musical character and reveals insight into his connection to Baudelaire’s poetic language.

Composing Baudelaire for contemporary times

Sustained interactions with a poet’s work by musicians produce interpretative gaps. Through analysis of contemporary settings of five Baudelaire poems by Nicolas Chevereau, this article proposes a ‘thick method’ of song analysis which accounts for words and music as a conjoined ‘work’ and as a song ‘event’, using a systematic approach underpinned by digital tools including Excel, Sonic Visualiser, and Voyant. A consistent framework for song analysis enables us to rove around inside songs, and to draw in materials from outside the song. A highly individualized response to Baudelaire poems that are less commonly set to music, as in the case of Chevereau’s 2016 Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, reveals significant common ground in terms of multi-perspective approaches that are now possible with intermedial works. Chevereau’s settings of Baudelaire shine important light on a series of complex sensory events which open up the poetic landscape to fresh interrogation and new interpretations.

When the poet becomes the muse

Women are ubiquitous in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, presented either as ideal, unattainable figures, or as earthly, abominable creatures. Instead of examining the gaze of the poet on women, it is interesting to reverse the roles and to explore the gaze of women on Baudelaire, or more precisely what women hear in Baudelaire’s poetry: what happens when the poet becomes the muse? While the most famous musical settings of Baudelaire’s poems have been composed by men (Duparc, Fauré, Debussy), this article aims to uncover musical settings of Baudelaire’s poetry by twentieth-century female composers. In a first instance, this article offers an overview of twentieth-century songs by female composers; from the mélodies of Marie Jaëll to the contemporary settings of Camille Pépin, what do song settings of Baudelaire tell us about the visibility of female composers? Secondly, the article provides a detailed analysis of L’Albatros (1987), a music-theatre piece by Adrienne Clostre. By deconstructing Baudelaire’s poems, Clostre offers a reflection on creativity that cannot be separated from a general understanding of the place of female composers in society.

Duplicity and posthegemony in Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa and Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa

This article employs the concepts of duplicity and posthegemony to analyse intimate and social interactions in Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa [The Holy Girl] (2004) and Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa (2005), focusing in particular on the personal and social development of each film’s female protagonist. By viewing the films through the psychoanalytic concepts of duplicity as defined by Harold Kelman and posthegemony as defined by Jon Beasley-Murray, we distinguish how each female protagonist strives toward posthegemonic status while adopting opposite approaches to duplicity. This is to say that Amalia entirely eschews duplicity while Madeinusa plays upon the liminalities of moral doubleness. In elaborating this argument, we will also demonstrate that both films represent a feminist critique of hegemony in which the emergent and emancipative subject liberates herself from the patriarchal apparatuses of the family, religion and community.