ABSTRACT
By the time Stéphane Mallarmé made a contribution to Edouard Dujardin’s journal La revue wagnérienne in 1885, Richard Wagner was well established among the Parisian esthetic elite, even though anti-German sentiment had escalated in France and the Master’s Gesamtkunstwerke were for the most part banned from the French stage.1 Gone were the days when Baudelaire needed to write feverishly to defend Wagner against the jeering crowds; gone too, for that matter, was Wagner, who had died in 1883. Richard Wagner continued to live on among the French intellectual and cultural elite through the dissemination of his ideas by Dujardin and his contributors. In other words, by 1885, Richard Wagner had become a text. This chapter outlines the ways in which theoretical engagement with notions of music, begun in the 1860s and taken up once more in the 1880s and 1890s, was crucial to the development of Mallarmé’s poetry and poetics. I begin by considering two texts, “Le Démon de l’analogie” and “Sainte,” dating from the 1860s, before moving on to demonstrate how Mallarmé establishes, in the 1880s, rhetorical distance between his own esthetic project and Wagner’s, clearing the way for a renewed sense of performativity in his poetics. I provide readings of Mallarmé’s Richard Wagner, Rêverie d’un poète français (1885) and of La Musique et les Lettres (1894) before turning to several poems, notably, “Prose (pour des Esseintes),” “Hommage (à Wagner),” and “La chevelure vol d’une fl amme” in its original context within the prose poem “La Déclaration foraine.”2
