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DEBUSSY'S"SOUPIR":
AN EXPERIMENT IN
PERMUTATIONALANALYSIS
LL7fl
MARIANNEWHEELDON
I
What attracted me in Mallarme, at the stage I had reached at that
time, was the extraordinary formal density of his poems. Not only
was the content truly extraordinary . . . but never has the French
language been taken so far in the matter of syntax....
What interested me was the idea of finding a musical equivalent,
both poetic and formal, to Mallarme's poetry ... this enabled me to
transcribe into musical terms forms that I had never thought of and
which are derived from the literary forms he himself used.1
O Finfluential
THE LITERARY
was
FORMS that inspired Boulez, perhaps the most
the one used by Mallarme in his last published work,
Debussy's "Soupir" 135
Varese and Webern were the first to learn the lesson of Debussy's last
works and to "think forms," not-in Debussy's words-as "sonata
boxes" but as arising from a process that is primarily spatial and
rhythmic, linking "a succession of alternative, contrasting or corre-
lated states"-that is to say, intrinsic to the object but at the same
time in complete control of it.2
This article examines Debussy's late work "Soupir" (the first song of
Debussy's Trois Poemes de Stephane Mallarme, 1913) from a Boulezian
perspective, drawing specifically on Boulez's preoccupation with the per-
mutational possibilities of Un coup de des.
In fact, Mallarme's Un coup de des presents visually what was already
inherent in much of his earlier poetry, including "Soupir" (1864).
Despite their traditional appearance, Mallarme's earlier poems often
introduce such fragmented syntax that an understanding of the text is
predicated upon a comparable nonlinear reading. In moments of syntac-
tic ambiguity the reader must cast forward and back for possible associa-
tions in meaning and syntax, which often requires rereading previous
material in light of these newly acquired associations. Whereas the non-
linear presentation of the text in Un coup de des makes explicit the
nonlinear reading, in the more traditional forms of Mallarme's earlier
poems the same result is achieved by studiously fragmented syntax. In
136 Perspectivesof New Music
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Debussy's "Soupir" 137
"Soupir," for example, the poem's syntax disrupts its metrical organiza-
tion.
Soupir
Sigh
The interpolation-"on the dead water where the tawny agony of leaves
wanders in the wind and hollows a cold furrow"-twice interrupts the
flow of "Soupir"'s conclusion: the first interruption occurs after "laisse"
with the beginning of the interpolated clause, and the second with the
resumption of the original sentence after its two line delay. The displace-
ment of "se trainer" from "laisse" frames the interpolation, which
embeds a smaller complete sentence within the larger sentence.
Another-and more dramatic-example of verb displacement creates
the incomplete syntactic patterns of the opening lines. "Soupir" begins
with a subject "My soul," accumulates prepositional phrases beginning
with "toward" (toward your brow, toward the wandering sky of your
angelic eye, toward the Azure), yet does not immediately present a verb
of motion to join the two together. By delaying a verb, which should fol-
low the poem's opening subject, Mallarme immediately creates syntactic
confusion. As John Porter Houston writes, with reference to Mallarme's
Herodiade:
My soul
toward your brow where dreams
o calm sister
an autumn strewn with freckles
And toward the wandering sky of your angelic eye
Rises
as in a melancholy garden
Debussy's "Soupir" 139
faithful
a white jet of water sighs toward the Azure.
the moving back and forth among images that these readings entail cre-
ate an important part of Mallarme's poetic substance:
II
In his setting of "Soupir," Debussy presents a succession of musical ideas
that bears little resemblance to traditional tonal forms. As shown by the
annotated score (Example 2), changes of tempo and texture and, in the
vocal writing, changes of tessitura and contour clearly articulate each idea
on the musical surface. These musical ideas do not repeat, develop, or
aim toward a climax or resolution, but they proceed with no one idea
hierarchicallymore significant than another. Each section of "Soupir" is
equally intensive, musically autonomous, and nonteleological, so that the
sections do not contribute to an overall contour or dynamic shape, but
are more modular in their arrangement. This is especially noticeable in
the vocal line where each new melodic idea is initiated, completed, and
then relinquished, resulting in a succession of minute arabesques rather
than one over-arching motion. Consequently, the vocal line rarely runs
smoothly between consecutive sections, since each section produces a
breakwith its predecessor with a shift of tessitura and a new melodic con-
tour. Since these sections do not connect smoothly or contribute to a
larger dynamic shape, it would appear that melodic continuity or
Debussy's "Soupir" 141
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Debussy, Trois Poemes de Stephane Mallarme, "Soupir." Copyright ? 1913 Durand S.A. Editions
Musicales. Used by permission. Sole Agent U.S.A., Theodore Presser Company
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EXAMPLE 2 (CONT.)
Debussy's "Soupir" 143
Section 3
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EXAMPLE 2 (CONT.)
144 Perspectivesof New Music
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146 Perspectivesof New Music
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and octatonic collection I; and the final section moves from a harmony
drawn from octatonic collection III, through two sonorities foreign to
the octatonic harmony, which introduce AL and F respectively, to return
to the opening pentatonic configuration with its prominent Al and F
outer voices.
With harmonies that are slow-moving, repetitious, and nonteleologi-
cal, the piano accompaniment of "Soupir" also presents opportunities for
permutation, though for entirely different reasons. The lack of an overall
linear coherence between sections permits a potential reordering of the
vocal line, whereas potential permutability between the sections of the
piano accompaniment is due, in large part, to the fact that none of the
harmonies are goal-oriented and each nonfunctional harmony merely
alternates with its neighbor before moving to the next harmonic unit.
Paradoxically,it is the harmonic stasis of the accompaniment that lends
itself to the mobility of permutation.
The song's repetitive and nonteleological harmonies perhaps imitate
the freely associating, nonlinear strategies of Mallarme's "Soupir." In
fact, this suggests that one might treat the form of "Soupir" in a manner
analogous to Boulez's Piano Sonata Number 3, which exploits the more
overt permutational practices of Un coup de des. To this end, Example 5
presents an experiment in permutational analysis, with the sections of
"Soupir" arranged in constellation to imitate Boulez's Piano Sonata
Number 3 (Example 5a). The six sections of "Soupir," when presented
Debussy's "Soupir" 147
A II I L A Li . I I
t4 67
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EXAMPLE 5B: PERMUTATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF DEBUSSY'S
"SOUPIR"
III
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152 Perspectivesof New Music
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triplet in the Plus lent of the final section (see Example 8). In addition,
stepwise voice-leading would occur in the tenor voice, while a common-
tone connection would link the contours of the vocal line.
Thus the modular construction of "Soupir," coupled with the place-
ment of syntacticallyisolated words at the ends of sections, seems to sug-
gest these connections while, in terms of harmony and voice-leading,
they form only one of a number of possible nonconsecutive connections.
Just as in Mallarme's poem-where the reader may cast about for all pos-
sible associations in meaning or syntax-so in the harmonic and linear
fabric of the song connections are multiple, tenuous, and not necessarily
successive.
IV
Both Mallarme's and Debussy's "Soupir" illustrate how poet and com-
poser undermine expectations of consecutiveness in their respective lan-
guages. In Mallarme's single-sentence poem "the effect," as Kenner
states, "is to move our attention as far as may be from the thrust of
subject-verb-object,"13 and Debussy's setting denies the thrust of an
analogous musical syntax, embodied in motion toward a goal, climax,
and resolution.
Yet many musical analyses interpret "Soupir" in terms of a traditional
dynamic shape. Two examples are Roy's assertion that:
Debussy's "Soupir" 155
Debussy chooses to see "Fidele" [m. 15] as the climax and sets it off
with two simple major triads. . . . The greater melodic activity at
"vers l'Azur attendri" . .. then extinguishes itself at "et laisse,"
returning to sighing, hesitating, motion until the end.14
The moments that are isolated as "Soupir"'s musical climax may be local-
ized high points in the individual arabesques of the vocal line, but they
do not represent a culmination of the preceding music nor do they pro-
vide an irrefutable sense of climax. The fact that the two interpretations
cited above differ on the location of "Soupir"'s high point-measure 15
and measures 20-22 respectively-is perhaps an indication that the con-
cept of climax is inappropriateto "Soupir," since a musical climax should
hardly be an ambiguous event. Indeed, Debussy's "Soupir" is devoid of
dramatic elements in general: the piano accompaniment offers only slight
gradations in dynamic between pianissimo and piano; the vocal line
begins piano and from measure 13 onwards, is pianissimo throughout;
and the slight fluctuations of tempo between sections do not indicate any
increased momentum toward a particulargoal.
Concomitant with the absence of climax in "Soupir," is a correspond-
ing absence of resolution. For if "Soupir" proceeds with a series of
equally significant musical ideas, then closure becomes an arbitrary,or at
least an ambiguous event. BarbaraHerrnstein Smith's discussion of clo-
sure and anticlosure in modern poetry and music is especially relevant:
One must experience the whole work to have a grasp of its form,
which is no longer architected, but braided; in other words, there is
no distributive hierarchy in the organization of "sections" (static
sections; themes; dynamic sections, developments) but successive
distributions in the course of which the various constituent elements
take on a greater or lesser functional importance. One can well
understand that this sense of form is bound to run up against the lis-
tening habits formed by three centuries of "architectural"music.22
NOTES