MUSC 436

Vocal Literature

 

 

Parnassian Movement: This movement heralded the early development of the mlodie.

 

            Sought to return French literature to Parnassus, the sacred mountain in ancient

            Greece where Apollo and the Muses resided (Birkett 152).

 

            Not united in a specific programme, but by a shared hostility to the facile

subjectivity of the poetry of Lamartine and Musset [Romanticism].

 

            Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Thophile Gautier (1811-1872) were the

acceptable face of the Romantic tradition.

           

            Gautier adapted his style to the Parnassians

 

                        Charles Marie Ren Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894): leader of the

Parnassian movement. He said that Poetry could revive itself from the

worn-out subjectivity of Romanticism (Birkett 153) by turning to the

poetry of ancient Greece and India.

 

Sully-Prudhomme (Ren Franois Armand Prudhomme, 1839-1907): Minor Parnassian poet. He won the first Nobel prize in literature.

 

Symbolism: 1857 1930. However, between 1885 and 1895, Symbolism was at its peak symbolist works were published widely in various forms.

 

            Looks to the 18th century

            Freer in form and subject matter than Parnassian poetry.

 

            Rejected realism, tried to suggest ideas, emotions and attitudes by using

symbolic words, figures and objects (Pescal 1).

 

            Art is the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of

the soul. Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)

 

            To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the

poem to suggest it, theres the dream. The perfect use of this mystery constitutes the symbol: to invoke little by little a mood, or, inversely, to choose an object, and to disengge from it a mood, through a series of decipherings. Mallerm 

 

 

 

 

Pre-symbolists:

 

            Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

            Stphane Mallarm (1842-1898)

            Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

            Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1896)

Only wrote poetry between 1870-1875. He would change poetry by means of a long, immense and reasoned deranging of all his senses.

 

Avant-garde

            Guillaume Apollinaire (Wilhelm de Kostrowitsky, 1880-1918)

 

Poems to read; Songs to hear:

 

Baudelaire

            Au lecteur

            Linvitation au voyage (Duparc)

 

Mallarm

            Apparition (Debussy)

 

Rimbaud

            Les assis

 

Verlaine

            Clair de lune (Faur)

 

 

French artsong vocabulary:

 

Synesthesia     

Combining of senses. A sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality.

 

Ennui:

      A feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from a lack of interest.

      Perhaps a better definition is: Boredom of the soul

 

Spleen:

      Ill-humor, melancholy, spite. At one time, it was thought that this organ held

      the humours of these emotions.