Putting the Emphasis on Music: Baudelaire and the Lohengrin Prelude

This article analyzes a particularly concrete example of relations between music and letters: Baudelaire's distinctive use of italics in his discussion of the Lohengrin Prelude near the beginning of his 1861 essay on Wagner. Framed partly as a response to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's 1991 study of this essay, the article first shows how the italics are apparently intended to translate the dominant musical motif of the Prelude as literally as possible into Baudelaire's text. The article then argues that the italics largely fail in their task. This is because, first, the italics do not share the kind of mobility that characterizes the motif in relation to its musical contexts and, second, the italics paradoxically emphasize a certain type of inflexibility that distances the music of the Prelude from the three narrative programs that Baudelaire cites for it. (MM)