Verlaine

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani returns above all to the "Art poétique", which he reads as the manifesto of symbolism and of modern poetry: "Music before all else", an almost immaterial art, "with nothing in it that weighs or poses", which erases the visual12. He takes from it the preference for the odd-numbered line, more musical because it escapes the symmetry of gravity3, and the nuance that betroths "the flute to the horn", which he reads as a way of thinking about timbre4. He points out that joining the vague to the precise does not mean giving up all structure5. He links this verse to Wagner and to Carmen, and places Verlaine in the line of Baudelaire, as the starting point of symbolist fluidity. He also reads "Charleroi" as a poem of the industrial revolution, and quotes "Il pleure dans mon cœur" on sorrow without cause and "Clair de lune" on victorious love sung in the minor mode. He speaks of a calculated naivety6 and mentions the harsh portrait Rimbaud gives of him in "A Season in Hell".

1. 1Chateaubriand26 Mar 2019 · 1:36:08
2. 2Debussy27 Mar 2020 · 32:56
3. 3Musicosophie 18. Ce qui est musical dans la musique25 Mar 2021 · 1:03:01
4. 4Musicosophie 8. Bonheur et malheur en musique11 Jan 2021 · 1:21:42
5. 5Flagrandélices27 May 2025 · 13:33
6. 6Musicosophie 2. De Lévi-Strauss à Nerval à propos de la musique3 Dec 2020 · 1:42:05

Summary produced automatically from 55 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.