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Wagner Society in NSW Inc
Many of us will be familiar with Professor Lees from his talks to the Wagner Society of NSW and his participation in the intellectual milieu of the two Adelaide Ring Cycles. However, given his appearance at the September meeting, members might be interested in knowing a little more of Professor Lees' career. We know him primarily as President of the Wagner Society of New Zealand, which he and his wife founded in 1994. However, Professor Heath Lees' academic position is Professor: Music Studies, Music and Literature; Associate Head: Postgraduate Studies, School of Music at the University of Auckland . His qualifications and professional associations include: Master of Arts, University of Glasgow , 1962; Bachelor of Music, University of Glasgow , 1965; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Auckland , 2006; Fellow of Trinity College of Music, London , 1966. According to the University of Auckland website: Professor Lees is presently researching the impact of Wagner in Fran ce and the effect that Wagner's music had on 19th century writers, particularly on the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and his circle. “His recent book "Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poet Language" (2007) overturns the traditional view that Mallarmé was ‘converted' to both music and Wagner at a concert in 1885. Instead, the book claims that Mallarmé's awareness of music and of Wagner's music in particular, had begun early in his life….Indeed, it seems highly probable that Mallarmé's "poétique" was built on a sustained attempt to ‘musicalise' his poetry along the lines of the Wagnerian music-drama, and that this came to successful fruition in the poet's ‘Wagnerian' period from 1885 to the end of his life.” One of the reviews of Professor Lees' book captures what many in his Australian audiences already know: “ To hear Heath Lees talk about Mallarmé is a revelation: where many commentaries appear to lead into mists of complication, he clarifies in simple language how a brilliant mind like Mallarmé's could consciously turn language into music while letting it tell its own story. Professor Lees's great strength lies in combining the skills of practical musician (including composer), musical scholar and expert literary commentator.” This comment is also true of his explorations of Meistersingers and The Ring Cycle. As if his existing qualifications and achievements were not enough, according to the Auckland University News, Professor Lees went further, stimulated by his love of the Symbolist poets: “Heath, who was first appointed Professor of Music in 1983, graduated…with a PhD in French Literature, which he completed in an unusually brief amount of time, having enrolled for it in 2003. Heath registered for the PhD as he had concluded that commercial publishers wouldn't be interested in his research on the influence of the German composer, Richard Wagner, on the work of Stephané [sic] Mallarmé…. Through a study of Mallarmé's life, correspondence, musical education and work, Heath has argued that what Mallarmé called his "re-possession of music" started from when he first started writing, rather than consequent to a particularly moving Wagnerian concert in 1885, as is often believed.” [Editor] Symbolism and Music and MallarméIf you, like me, know little about Stéphane Mallarmé, you may be interested in a little background. He lived from 1842 to 1898 in Paris , his real name was Étienne Mallarmé and he was a French poet and critic who earned a living from teaching English. His earlier work owes a great deal to the style established by Charles Baudelaire. His fin-de-siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page was explored According to Wikipedia.com, a “good example of this play of sound appears in Roger Pearson's book 'Unfolding Mallarmé', in his analysis of the Sonnet en '-yx' . The poem opens with the phrase 'ses purs ongles' ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words 'c'est pur son' ('it's pure sound'). This use of homophony, along with the relationships and layers of meanings it results in, is simply impossible to capture accurately through translation.” His works include: L'après-midi d'un faune 1876, Les Mots anglais 1878, Les Dieux antiques 1879, Divagations 1897, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard 1897, Poésies 1899 (posthumous), but most importantly for us Wagnerians, his essay Richard Wagner, rêveries d'un poète français published in La revue wagnérienne August 1885 of which it has been suggested that it was “more the idea of Wagner that inspired his reverie rather than any specific work”. From 1885 to 1888 one of Mallarmé's disciples, Édouard Dujardin, published a symbolist journal, La revue wagnérienne, devoted to Wagnerism. Its aim was to promote Wagner not only as a composer but also as a poet and the creator of a new form of art. The journal included translations of his essays and libretti, studies of him, book reviews, poems, press clippings, occasional lithographs by painters Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon and also a bulletin of performances of Wagner's works throughout Europe . Many poets associated with symbolism were extremely interested in the German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883). The French interest in Wagner went back to the 1860s, when Baudelaire had admired and written about him…. Wagner imagined his music-dramas as Gesamtkunstwerke (total works of art) in which all the arts would be combined in a single work to transcend the possibilities of individual media. While some critics emphasized the naturalist tendencies of Wagner's music, French interpreters of Wagner imagined the orchestrator of the total work of art as a secular priest and the work itself as a means to provide a transcendent experience. Baudelaire described his experience of Wagner's music-drama Lohengrin (1848) as ecstatic, instigating an involuntary dreamlike state…. In the aftermath of the Fran co-Prussian War of 1870, the performance of Wagner's operas had been banned in Fran ce . Many French literary figures, however, visited the festivals at Bayreuth , and by the mid-1880s there was a veritable cult of Wagner in Fran ce . Many symbolists share the notion that all art should aspire to the condition of music [a notion that Wagner also lifted from Schopenhauer - Editor], which was thought to be the most emotionally direct aesthetic medium. In "Art poétique" (1884), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) famously instructed poets on the importance of "music before all else." This musicality was achieved in much symbolist poetry through rhyming, alliteration, assonance, and other rhetorical flourishes. Indeed, Mallarmé's conception of his poems as a kind of music is brought out in an anecdote. When Debussy asked permission to set Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun" (1876) to music, Mallarmé responded: "But I thought I had already done that!" (Sieburth, in Hollier, p. 796). I am indebted for this potted overview of Wagner, Mallarmé and the French Symbolist poets to a range of online sources including A French Connection , Bet Briggs (at Bikwil http://www.bikwil.com/Vintage10/Revue-Wagnerienne.html ), Symbolism and Music (at http://science.jrank.org/pages/11377/Symbolism-Symbolism-Music.html ) and Wikipedia (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Mallarm%C3%A9 ). [Editor]
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