Text and publication
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863, 18632, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. In both the earliest and latest text, H proof and 1888, the turnovers are further to the left, so that l. 2, for example, instead of reading:
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf
and blind;
reads, in H proof:
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf
and blind;
See also headnote to Up at a Villa, III 144.
Composition and date
The last words of the poem appear at the top of the MS leaf which contains the draft of A Woman’s Last Word (see Appendix C, p. 888), in the form ‘I feel chilly & grown old’, underneath which is the date ‘Florence, Jan 15, ’53.’ As Michael Meredith argues (BSN xxvi [May 2000] 51) the notebook from which this leaf was torn probably contained drafts of poems on which B. was working, and the composition of A Toccata may therefore be dated with reasonable confidence to Jan. 1853. Its genesis, however, as with many of B.’s poems, may be earlier: there is a suggestive passage in a letter of EBB.’s written during the Brownings’ stay in Venice in May–June 1851, when they rented rooms in a Palazzo on the Grand Canal. Although it was EBB.’s first visit to the city, B. had stayed there before in 1838 during the writing of Sordello. Writing to her sister Arabella EBB. describes her rapture at being in a city she had dreamt of visiting: ‘I could be content to live out my life here. I never saw a place which I could be so glad to live a life in. It fitted my desires in a moment … Robert & I were sitting outside the caffé in the piazza of St Mark last night at nearly ten, taking our coffee & listening to music, & watching the soundless crowd drift backwards & forwards through that grand square, as if swept by the airs they were listening to. I say “soundless”—for the absence of carriage or horse removed all ordinary noises. You heard nothing but the music. It was a phantom-sight altogether’ (16 May 1851, EBB to Arabella i 376).
Sources and contexts
A letter from B. to EBB. of 7 Mar. 1846 suggests that one of the key associations of ideas in the poem, the playing of ‘old music’ with a feeling of melancholy, pre-dates the composition of the poem by several years: ‘For music, I made myself melancholy just now with some “Concertos for the Harpsichord by Mr Handel”—brought home by my father the day before yesterday:—what were light, modern things once!’ (Correspondence xii 137; see also Last Ride Together 83–7n., III 289–90). Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85) was a Venetian composer and keyboard player, famous in his day; he worked in London and at the court of Catherine II in Russia. He was a versatile musician, producing comic operas with Goldoni and sacred music in his position as choirmaster at St Mark’s Cathedral. The toccata is defined by the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as originally ‘a purely decorative, improvisatory keyboard piece’ related to the fugue. In a letter to Henry G. Spaulding dated 30 June 1887 (also cited in Master Hugues, p. 389), B. claims that he once possessed ‘two huge manuscript volumes almost exclusively made up of [Galuppi’s] “Toccata-pieces”—apparently a slighter form of the Sonata to be “touched” lightly off ’ (PMLA lxii [1947] 1099). In the light of B.’s claim, noted by Oxford, that he ‘had only a general fancy of the character of Galuppi’s music floating in [his] head’ and not a ‘particular piece’ when he wrote the poem (see Checklist 80:34), it is probably futile to attempt to identify the ‘toccata’ in question. Charles van den Borren, however, tentatively puts forward the D minor Sonata contained in ‘the eight MS. pieces for harpsichord by Galuppi in the Library of the Brussels Conservatoire’ as a possible candidate (‘Round About “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” ’, The Musical Times lxiv [1923] 314).
In another letter to Arabella from Venice EBB. makes fun of the city’s reputation for ‘dissipation’: ‘You have heard perhaps that dissipation is the way of a Venice life—Robert & I have therefore been dissipated, not to disgrace the poets who came before us—In this month I have been twice to the opera & the play’ (5–6 June 1851, EBB to Arabella i 379). In referring to ‘the poets who came before us’ EBB. clearly has Byron in mind; in the same letter she mentions ‘the Lido, where poor Lord Byron used to ride, and … the Armenian convent where he studied Armenian’ (ibid. 380). Byron’s poetry (and his legendary personal exploits) consolidated the city’s long-standing reputation for hedonism in the eyes of its British visitors; see e.g. the portrait of Venetian husbands in Beppo 142–4: ‘When weary of the matrimonial tether / His head for such a wife no mortal bothers, / But takes at once another, or another’s’. The poem’s confrontation between the moralizing Anglo-Saxon consciousness of the speaker and the imagined sensuality of Venice is prefigured in Alfred Domett’s Venice (1839). Domett, a close friend of B. at the time of the poem’s publication (see headnotes to Waring, p. 185 and Guardian-Angel, III 13), attempts to read a moral lesson into the decline of the ‘[fair] Magdalene of faded Cities! gay / And guilty once as sad, yet lovely now! (ii 11–12):
To hide thy crimes, thou hast but to display
That sorrowful sweet brow!
It tasks the mind, though stern it be
To dwell on them, yet gaze on thee!
Before thy beautiful distress,
Before thy death-struck loveliness,
We feel awhile our indignation fly,
Our loathing all forgot in lively sympathy!
(ii 13–20)
Domett’s poem also sees music as both an emblem and a poignant reminder of Venice’s former glories:
A queenly beauty in a slow decline,
Too visibly thou witherest day by day;
No hectic mimicry of health is thine
To decorate decay!
For thee,—whose very voice so long
Was Music, all thy converse song,
No sounds of wail need Woe invent,
Thy silence is thy best lament!
And hushed are all thy chaunts—and all the daughters
Of Music are laid low by thy deserted waters!
(i 81–90)
A similarly fraught encounter with the city is enacted in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, the second and third volumes of which appeared in 1853; the Brownings had known Ruskin personally since the early 1850s, and corresponded with him regularly throughout this decade; see Guardian-Angel (III 14) and Old Pictures (p. 404).
Metre
Daniel Karlin argues that there are two consistent and equally plausible ways of reading the poem. It can either be read as a catalectic trochaic octameter (like Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’), consisting of eight trochaic feet with the final unstressed syllable omitted in each line; or it can be read as a four-beat line, with the initial stress on the third syllable of each line. Karlin suggests that this second rhythm imparts a ‘subversive levity’ to the lines, and therefore complicates and undermines the speaker’s confidence in his own reading of Galuppi’s music (Introduction to Robert Browning, ed. A. Roberts [Oxford, 1997], pp. xxv–xxvii). It should be noted, however, that B. himself describes the metre of the poem as ‘purely Trochaic’ in a letter to Furnivall, and glosses the first line accordingly (15 Sept. 1881; Trumpeter 24).
Criticism and Parallels in B.
B. seems to have been a talented amateur musician; he learned cello and violin as well as keyboard instruments in his youth, playing the piano in particular to a high standard, and receiving lessons in composition from John Relfe. He ‘emerged from this long program of musical education with the ability to set songs to music and to speak with some authority on musical matters’ (Maynard 140). This knowledge of the technicalities of music on B.’s part has led some critics to suggest precise correspondences between the toccata and the form of the poem; see e.g. Marc R. Plamondon, ‘ “What do you mean by your mountainous fugues?”, VP xxvii (1999) 309–31 and Stephen H. Ford, ‘The Musical Form of Robert Browning’s “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” ’, SBC xiv (1986) 22–4. The emotional response evoked by music is a frequent topic of B.’s poetry; cp. Master Hugues (III 388), Abt Vogler (p. 759), and Charles Avison (Parleyings, 1887). There are also many other poems and sections of poems dealing with Venice: see e.g. Sordello iii 656 ff (I 570), Fifine at the Fair (1872) 1683 ff., and the late sonnet Goldoni (1883; Penguin ii 963). The parallel with Fifine at the Fair is esp. important because the speaker, Don Juan, has his vision of Venice while playing Schumann’s Carnaval on the piano.
1
Oh, Galuppi, Baldassaro, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I give you credit, ’tis with such a heavy mind!
Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.
5 What, they lived once thus at Venice, where the merchants were the kings,
Where St. Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
3
Ay, because the sea’s the street there; and ’tis arched by … what you call
… Shylock’s bridge with houses on it, where they kept the carnival:
I was never out of England—it’s as if I saw it all!
4
10 Did young people take their pleasure when the sea was warm in May?
Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,
When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow, do you say?
5
Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red,—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
15 O’er the breast’s superb abundance where a man might base his head?
6
Well (and it was graceful of them) they’d break talk off and afford
—She, to bite her mask’s black velvet, he to finger on his sword,
While you sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord?
7
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
20 Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—“Must we die?”
Those commiserating sevenths—“Life might last! we can but try!”
8
“Were you happy?”—“Yes.”—“And are you still as happy?”—“Yes—And you?”
—“Then more kisses”—“Did I stop them, when a million seemed so few?”
Hark—the dominant’s persistence, till it must be answered to!
9
25 So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
“Brave Galuppi! that was music! good alike at grave and gay!
I can always leave off talking, when I hear a master play.”
10
Then they left you for their pleasure: till in due time, one by one,
Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,
30 Death came tacitly and took them where they never see the sun.
11
But when I sit down to reason,—think to take my stand nor swerve
Till I triumph o’er a secret wrung from nature’s close reserve,
In you come with your cold music, till I creep thro’ every nerve,
12
Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned—
35 “Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned!
The soul, doubtless, is immortal—where a soul can be discerned.
13
“Yours for instance, you know physics, something of geology,
Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
Butterflies may dread extinction,—you’ll not die, it cannot be!
14
40 “As for Venice and its people, merely born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
45 Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
1. Oh,] Oh! (H proof, but not H proof 2). Galuppi, Baldassaro: note the slight misspelling of the composer’s Christian name.
2. misconceive: combining the senses of ‘misunderstand you’ and ‘imagine you wrongly’. it would] that would (H proof, but not H proof 2, 18632). See l. 11 for another example of this rare agreement between H proof and 18632.
3. although I] if I must (H proof, but not H proof 2). give you credit] take your meaning (1863–88).
5–9. The speaker, who was ‘never out of England’ (l. 9), constructs an imaginary Venice from the emotional atmosphere of Galuppi’s music and his imperfect recollection of literary representations of the city; cp. Byron, Childe Harold iv 154–9: ‘I lov’d her from my boyhood— she to me / Was as a fairy-city of the heart, / Rising like water-columns from the sea, / Of joy the sojourn, and of wealth the mart; / And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare’s art, / Had stamp’d her image in me’.
5. Alluding both to the great commercial power of Venice in former times, and to its method of government, according to which the city’s ruling council (one of whose members was elected Doge) was drawn mainly from the merchant class.
6. The Basilica of St Mark is the cathedral church of Venice; for the annual ceremony in which the Doge threw a golden ring into the sea to symbolize the ‘marriage’ of the city to the source of its wealth and power, see Byron, Childe Harold iv 91–4: ‘The spouseless Adriatic mourns her lord; / And, annual marriage now no more renewed, / The Bucentaur lies rotting unrestored, / Neglected garment of her widowhood!’ St. Mark’s] Saint Mark’s (1888).
7–9. Cp. EBB.’s comment in a letter to Thomas Westwood of 12 Dec. 1850: ‘You know it’s a more than doubtful point whether Shakespeare ever saw Italy out of a vision, yet he and a crowd of inferior writers have written about Venice and vineyards as if born to the manner of them’ (Letters of EBB i 470).
8. Shylock’s bridge: the Rialto, ‘where merchants most do congregate’ (Merchant of Venice I iii 49). The Rialto bridge spans the Grand Canal; its arcades still contain shops, but not houses. carnival:] emended in agreement with H proof, 1863–88 from ‘carnival!’ in 1855; the exclamation mark was probably ‘borrowed’ by the printer from the end of the next line.
9. saw it all!] saw it all. (1868–88).
11. masks: either masked balls (for which Venice was famous) or masques, i.e. musical entertainments; cp. Byron’s description of Venice as ‘[the] revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!’ (Childe Harold iv 27). begun] began (H proof, but not H proof 2, 18632).
12. When] Then (H proof, but not H proof 2).
14. bell-flower: the campanula; cp. Pippa i 164 (p. 108).
16. graceful: ‘gracious’ (in that the revellers are taking time to listen to Galuppi’s music); also in the sense that their attitudes and gestures are ‘graceful’ in themselves. afford: ‘time’ is understood.
18. clavichord: an early (fifteenth century) keyboard instrument which produces a (small) sound by striking a string with a thin piece of metal when a key is depressed. It was in common use, mainly as an instrument to practise on, until the early nineteenth century, but had never been much used for public music, being too quiet.
19–25. Those lesser thirds … answer: in these lines the speaker uses a number of technical terms to describe the structure of the music he is listening to, prompting debate amongst B.’s critics about their accuracy. ‘Lesser thirds’ are minor thirds; Stefan Hawlin notes that B.’s music teacher, John Relfe, published a book in which he ‘described the different effects of major and minor in these terms: the major keys were “Masculine, Majestic or Sprightly”, and the minor keys “Effeminate, Plaintive or Pathetic” ’ (from Relfe’s The Elements of Harmony [1801]; cited RES n.s. xli [1990] 504).
19. sixths diminished: ‘All intervals, perfect or imperfect, major or minor, may also be “augmented” or “diminished” … any minor or perfect interval reduced chromatically by a semitone at either end becomes diminished … C to Ab, a minor sixth, becomes a diminished sixth in either of the forms C to Abb or C# to Ab’ (New Oxford Companion to Music). Charles van den Borren (headnote, Sources) points out that ‘this interval [was] of a purely theoretic nature in the system of harpsichord tempering … in practice from the second quarter of the 18th century’ (‘Round About “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” ’, p. 315).
20. Those suspensions, those solutions: a suspension is ‘[a] form of discord arising from the holding over of a note in one chord as a momentary part of the chord which follows, it then resolving by falling a degree to a note which forms a real part of the second chord’. ‘Solution’ is a way of describing the second part of this process (New Oxford Companion to Music).
20–3. The question of who is speaking at this point in the poem was put to B. by his friend Domett: ‘He repeated the passage; said the words were the lovers’, uttered at the time, as the music was going on. I said I thought, “Must I stop them” would perhaps have been clearer in that case, as the kisses were, or had been presumably going on just as the exclamation was made. But he maintained that the expression was best as written’ (Diary 48).
21. commiserating sevenths: a seventh has traditionally been regarded as a mildly discordant interval; the speaker is trying to give an impression of the emotion evoked by it in his choice of adjective.
22. are you still as happy?”] are you happy?” (H proof ).
23. more kisses”] more kisses!” (1863–88).
24. the dominant’s persistence: the ‘dominant’ chord is based on the fifth note of the octave in any particular key; it is often sounded as a prelude to the tonic (forming a ‘perfect cadence’). B.’s speaker here puns on the term to refer not just to the musical ‘dominant’, but also to the dominant atmosphere of the piece (which must be ‘answered to’ by the listeners).
25. an octave struck the answer: resolving the tension created by the sounding of the ‘dominant’ and enabling the listeners to resume their normal life.
26. grave and gay: on this and similar pairings in B. see Love Among the Ruins 7n. (p. 534).
30. Death came tacitly] Death stepped tacitly (1868–88). Death is silent in itself, and (by a transferred epithet) silences its victims.
31–2. Cp. Paracelsus’s description of the painful process of his scientific discoveries, e.g. i 804–6 (I 150).
31. think to take] say I’ll take (H proof ).
31–2. nor swerve / Till I triumph] nor swerve, / When I triumph (H proof, but not H proof 2); nor swerve, / While I triumph (1863–88).
35–9. Galuppi’s music has conjured up the sensuous, exotic world of Venice; now, however, the speaker finds in it a message of disenchantment, which also undermines his belief that he, with his earnest scientific bent, is different in kind from the frivolous, pleasure-seeking Venetians.
35. Dust and ashes: this phrase occurs in Genesis xviii 27 and in Job xxx 19; cp. also ‘The Order for the Burial of the Dead’ from the Book of Common Prayer: ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. dead and done with: a cliché used by B. on a few occasions; cp. Pippa Passes i 334 (p. 119) and Master Hugues 8 (III 390).
36. where a soul] if a soul (H proof ).
38–9. souls … cannot be! the primary sense is of a hierarchy of human souls, some of whom resemble butterflies and are therefore doomed to ‘extinction’, others of whom have a more earnest nature and higher expectations; Galuppi’s music seems to urge this upon the speaker (when presumably it is his own thought), while simultaneously mocking it and him. Ironically, in view of the contrast being drawn here, the butterfly is a traditional emblem of the soul; cp. the lines which B. added to one of Jules’s speeches in Pippa ii 216^217 (p. 137). There may also be an allusion to the larger hierarchy of creation, beginning with inorganic nature and rising through organic and animal life to man, which Paracelsus expounds in his deathbed speech (see v 668–706n., I 298–9) and which Cleon also articulates (see l. 202n., p. 578).
39. extinction: individual death; B. may, however, also have had in mind the sense of the extinction of whole species, esp. given the mention of ‘geology’ in l. 37. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–3) and Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation (1844) had both drawn attention to the fossil record of extinct species. Cp. Saul 110n. (III 505).
40. its people] her people (1868–88). bloom] blow (H proof ).
41. mirth and folly: both terms are used frequently in the Bible; see e.g. Proverbs xiv 13: ‘Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness’ and xv 21: ‘Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom: but a man of understanding walketh uprightly.’
43–5. The last stanza is the only one in the poem which remained unchanged from the proof stage to the final state of the text in 1888.
43. I want the heart to scold: either ‘I want (lack) the heart to criticise you (Galuppi) for your cynicism’, or ‘I lack the heart to criticise the doomed Venetians for their misguided lifestyle’.
44–5. all the gold … bosoms: yellow hair, esp. when it is let down, has strong erotic connotations in B.: cp., among others, the description of Palma in Sordello i 948–51 (I 456), Porphyria 18–20 (p. 72), and Love Among the Ruins 55 (p. 537).