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Eglé is in love with his boss, Theseus, who suggests holding Him captive at the office
As his sage advice.
Thus merrily we row Along through deadly seas That seem to us a paradise.
—Peter Halstead
The poem “En bateau” is based on a painting in the Louvre
by Watteau, L’embarquement pour Cythère (Cythère being the island of Aphrodite). Such conflicted islands exist everywhere, in writers’ colonies, in the cloakrooms of museums, in supposed utopias. Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance was about such a colony, where the protagonist was expelled for falling in love (or so he claimed). Verlaine felt, as did Proust, that love was finally about captivity and power, not affection. For Verlaine, a dream, a mirage, was an escape, an exodus, a refuge from pain. His lifelong struggle was with the gap between the gritty reality which he had experienced and what he felt was the illusion of an artificial paradise which awaits us. The poetic circle he frequented in his youth was called the Parnassians. A fête galante was a metaphor for death, love being a danse macabre leading to a fatal destination, similar to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.
As Gretchen Schultz states (in La Petite musique de Verlaine: Romances sans paroles, 1982, “Lyric Itineraries”), “Verlaine abandoned the search for meaning in words and gave himself free rein to explore the most musical aspects of poetry, sound and rhythm.”
Debussy was attracted to Verlaine because of the music of
his poetry; Debussy’s own idyllic music turns its dark inspi- ration upside down, a theme which Harold Bloom describes in A Map of Misreading, where literature (and thus society) advances through misreadings of each preceding age. Debussy used only the titles of the poems, not their sense, for his own happier myths, but he was aware (who in France wasn’t?)
of the darkness of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and
Verlaine, using their somber cachet for his own credibili-
ty, while turning it to his own uses. Robert Frost’s benign poems about trees, flowers, and meadows weren’t respected until critics decided that he was secretly writing about death. Death is the key to immortality.
Verlaine was the ideal poet to translate into music, as Verlaine himself in 1873 had published Romances sans paroles (Songs without Words), inspired by Mendelssohn’s miniature musical pieces.
Cortège: This gorgeous march was inspired by another Verlaine poem about an aristocrat who travels with a pet monkey and a dwarf, both of whom desire her. However,
She coyly ascends the stair, To the chibbering appeals Of her familiar animals Immune, or maybe unaware.
The nonchalance of the music echoes the charming insou- ciance of Madame. Verlaine may be subtly critical of his ménage, but Debussy is totally taken up with the elegance of its surreal parade.
Menuet: People criticize the Petite suite for being Debussy before he became Debussy, and possibly imitative of other French composers, such as Massenet’s Manon (1884) or in this piece, Rameau. The Spanish influence of Bizet’s Carmen (1875) is evident in the muted lilting flamenco seguidilla rhythm, mixed in with the more rigid Bach template of
the minuet. But the fact is that never has a minuet been so unique, brilliant, humorous, coy, or beguiling.
Ballet: The finale is a syncopated grand march where the two pianists split the cakewalk rhythm. The midsection
becomes a waltz, before the Creole two-step returns. Debussy later used this syncopation in the “Serenade for the Doll” in his Children’s Corner Suite of 1908, contradicting the critics who would say it is derivative. The New Orleans strut was later introduced (in 1910) to the Champs-Élysées by
the American clown Edward Lavine. Debussy used it in his
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