Parisian Intersections

Helen Abbott is Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield. She specialises in relationships between poetry and music in nineteenth-century France and has published widely on Baudelaire, Debussy, Mallarmé and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. She also promotes performance of French mélodie through regular collaboration with professional pianists and singers.

• Contents: Parisian Intersections – Liebestod – Musical Theories – Song – Parody – Legacy.

«This will prove an interesting and useful book for performers of French ‘mélodie’, and for those who work on the endlessly challenging and ambivalent intersection between the musical and poetic French cultural production.» (Claire Launchbury, French Studies 67, 2013)«This book is welcome as a truly analytical contribution to the literature about the interface – the ‘loving and risky pact’ (p. 41) – between poems and music. It has the added virtue of illuminating one fruitful facet of the arts: the interrelations between the highbrow and lowbrow, in both literature and song.» (Peter Low, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 34, 2013/2)