ABSTRACT
In the Revue wagnérienne, Stéphane Mallarmé describes Wagner’s music-dramas as follows:
Now, indeed, a music which … expresses above all the irresolute and the intuitive, intermingles the characters’ colors and lines with timbres and themes in an atmosphere richer in Reverie than all the air here below, deity costumed in the invisible folds of a fabric of chords; or which is on the verge of carrying Drama away on its wave of Passion, with an outburst too vast for a lone man, hurling him, twisting him: and shielding him from a knowledge of it, lost within this superhuman afflux, to make it grasp him once again when all will be subdued with song, burst forth with the wrench of inspiring thought. 1
