Abstract/Summary

Charles Baudelaire’s poetry has been set to music from the end of the nineteenth century until nowadays, in different languages, and in different musical genres. However, Henri Duparc’s « L’invitation au voyage » remains one of the most cited musical settings. Conversely, Gabriel Fauré’s three Baudelaire settings are often seen as unaccomplished. Can we objectively measure the quality of a song setting? The Baudelaire Song Project, based at the University of Birmingham, has developed a digitally-enabled methodology to collate, analyse, and understand the song settings of Baudelaire’s poetry. Through the digital analysis of Fauré’s settings, this article aims to offer new ways of understanding the cohesion between poem and music in order to shed a new light in the relations between language and music.