De La Traduction En Musique Chez Baudelaire
Abstract Baudelaire seems, in his essay on Wagner, to affirm that music (or at least, Wagner's music) can translate positive ideas, and that this can be demonstrated by analysis of the similarities between the reactions of different people to a given musical work. However, he also consistently undermines his own demonstration: the implication is always present that perceived translation into and out of music is never independent of extra-musical suggestion; and it is always also possible, thanks to the constant duplicity of Baudelaire's syntax, to interpret the message apparently conveyed by music, not as a positive and specific one, but as the absolutely general idea of art conceived as a universal. In this way, the relationship between music and letters becomes the indescribable but necessary bridge between the positive and the absolute, or between the real and the ideal; and the Baudelairean doctrine of 'correspondances' may be re-interpreted as the means of maintaining that bridge.