Dialogism and Song: Intertextuality, Heteroglossia and Collaboration in Augusta Holmès’s setting of Catulle Mendès’s 'Chanson'

This article proposes a new methodology for analysing song, underpinned by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. It builds upon the recent current of scholarship which challenges Bakhtin’s hierarchical view of the novel as the dialogic literary mode par excellence and presents the theories of dialogism and heteroglossia as apt for the analysis of lyric poetry. In the article, this Bakhtinian theoretical framework is applied to a little-known song setting of Catulle Mendès’s ‘Chanson’, composed by Augusta Holmès, and published in issue six of Mallarmé’s 1874 fashion magazine La Dernière Mode. The objective of the article is twofold: on the one hand it seeks to situate this collaborative endeavour within a historically and culturally wide-ranging intertextual network and, on the other, it aims to demonstrate that using Bakhtinian theory can be of great value in word and music studies, enhancing our understanding of the processes by which songs are created, performed and received