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Hans Rudolf Zeller attempts to find the sources of the serialism in Mallarmé's Le Livre, especially in connection with the Third Piano Sonata by Boulez. Mallarmé's idea, however, also left the traces in some of Boulez's theoretical concepts concerning the author's anonymity and withdrawal ofall auctorial traces from the work/composition.
Keywords: literature and music / French poetry / Mallarmé, Stéphane: Le livre / Zeller, Hans Rudolf / Barthes, Roland / Boulez, Pierre / serialism / open form / work-in-progress
Hans Rudolf Zeller's text was originally published in German in 1960 and in English translation by Margaret Shenfield in 1964.' Zeller is not especially known as the theoretician of serial music. He edited the famous book by Dieter Schnebel (1972) and also wrote about John Cage (1978). It is obviously his interest in Stéphane Mallarmé, i. e. in his Le Livre-project that motivated him to look for the roots of serialism in Mallarmé's thought.
We cannot present in details the essence of Mallarmé's Le Livre-project but here are some comments on it that would help to understand the liai-son between it and Zeller's notion of serialisam. First, the announcement for Klaus Scherubel's presentation of this "book", published in 2004 by Printed Matter in New York:
For more than thirty years, French poet Stephane Mallarmé (1842 - 1898) was engaged with a highly ambitious project that he called, simply, Le Livre (The Book). He envisioned The Book as a cosmic text-architecture: an extremely flexible structure that would reveal nothing short of "all existing relations between everything." This "Grand Oeuvre," wholly freed from the subjectivity of its author and con- taining the sum of all books was, for Mallarmé, the essence of all literature and at the same time a "very ordinär}'" book. The realization of this "pure" work that he planned to publish in an edition of precisely 480,000 copies never progressed beyond its conception and a detailed analysis of structural and material questions relating to publication and presentation. Yet to Mallarmé, The Book, which was to found the "true cult of the modern era," was by no means a failure. "It happens on its own," he explained of The Book's unique action in one of his final statements. (http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/mallarme-thed300k/; 19. 12. 2014)
And here is...