This volume investigates how the musical setting of Charles Baudelaire's poetry functions as an assemblage, transforming the original text through the medium of song. Helen Abbott, a scholar of French literature and music, utilizes a corpus of European song sets composed between 1880 and 1930 to analyze the intersection of poetic structure and musical composition. By examining the works of composers such as Maurice Rollinat and Alban Berg, the author establishes a framework for understanding how text-setting parameters evolve within the context of live performance.

Scholars and musicologists recognize this work as a rigorous contribution to the study of word-music relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose and the precision of the author's analytical methodology.