Sound and Sense: Arnold Whittall appraises a new study of the influence of Wagner on Mallarmé

Even if you pride yourself on your familiarity with the highways and byways of Wagner’s literary works, you may well have missed his Quatres poèmes d’opéras précedés d’une lettre sur la musique à M. Frédéric Villot, first published in Paris in 1861. Heath Lees doesn’t spell out the precise status of this text, and the title he gives appears to be that of a 1941 reprint rather than of the original. Nor does he make clear the degree of relationship between it and the much more familiar ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (Leipzig, 1861), of which the ‘lettre’ would seem to be a translation. But his primary concern is to explore the demonstrable familiarity of Mallarmé and other French men of letters with this material, and to develop the argument that Mallarmé was a more positive and sophisticated interpreter of Wagner’s ideas about the relation between words and music than has generally been allowed.