Repackaging Baudelaire

Beginning with a survey of known Baudelaire settings, this chapter analyses the extent of reworkings of Baudelaire’s poetry, including those made by the poet himself, through the different editions of Les Fleurs du mal, and translations of his work beyond France. The rationale for the selected corpus of song settings is then outlined (focus on an important time period for transmission of Baudelaire’s poetry across Europe; analysis of groups of Baudelaire poems set to music by a given composer; focus on scores which converge around the mélodie genre). It explores definitions of a ‘song set’ as: (a) a looser grouping than the ‘song cycle’ of the German Lied tradition; and (b) shaped by both aesthetic and commercial concerns. These concerns influence the analysis which seeks to balance ‘quantifiable’ features of song settings against the challenges of evaluating songs which emerge from a given historical and cultural context.