To uncover the interfusion of literature and music in the late nine-
teenth century is not only to trace the mutual Zeitgeist shared by art-
ists who worked in different media but also to examine technical
parallels and influences in specific works of art. If one artist did
dominate both the musical and literary scenes, it was Wagner, but
he was often misunderstood by those who admired him most and
he eventually inspired hostility in those who understood him best.
Actually, the true progress of musico-literary interrelationships
was paradoxical and contradictory. Wagner instilled a canon of
asymmetrical freedom and ambiguity in French posts, literary the-
orists, and musicians, yet Baudelaire, who was one of the first to
praise Wagner in the 1860s, was a practitioner of formalized classi-
cal symmetry in his poetry. Mallarmé, on the other hand, who
probably understood Wagner less adequately than Baudelaire, did
loosen the old syntactic and semantic ties of poetry and generated
an entirely fresh series of developments in the arts. Debussy,
finally, grasped both Wagner and Mallarmé with extraordinary
perspicacity. Debussy, building upon Wagner's innovations, was
also able to turn to Mallarmé as a model for a fresh, anti-Romantic
sensibility.

Mallarmé was thus a common source of an antisentimental at-
titude that called for the cleansing of the sign systems of both music
and poetry. Although Wagner had already loosened the old sign
systems, his excessively didactic manner of constructing meanings
proved to be unattractive to French taste in both the literary and
musical arts. Thus, Mallarmé was the key. Without his influence,
Debussy might have been an entirely different composer. Perhaps
the most mysterious aspect of this deeply penetrating interrela-
tionship between the arts of poetry and music is that Debussy's re-
sponse to the Mallarméan aesthetic was clearly formed at the same
time or even before major poets -- poets like Hofmannsthal, Rilke,
Yeats, or Maeterlinck -- had realized the intrinsic value of Mal-
larmé's thought.

Mallarmé played against the logical ordering of actions and

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