Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text

by Elizabeth McCombie

This book examines afresh the web of similarities and differences between music and poetry using works by Mallarmé and Debussy as case studies. It challenges the easy metaphorical impressionism that has characterized much of the scholarly literature to date. Analyzing Mallarmé's vision of a shared musico-poetic aesthetic, Elizabeth McCombie derives a set of performative structural motifs, analytical tools that express our experience of the two arts and their middle ground.

Hardcover

First published March 25, 2004