(after he has been extemporizing upon the musical instrument of his invention)
Text and publication
First publ. DP, 28 May 1864; repr. 18642, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1864.
The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. It has a good deal of overwriting and some deletions and re-drafting, but is clearly a fair copy of an earlier draft. There are few variants between its text and that of 1864; the text is virtually unchanged in subsequent editions, with only a handful of changes in punctuation and the change (standard in 1868) to lower-case for the divine pronoun (‘He’, ‘Thee’, Thou’, etc.; note however that the ‘ineffable Name’ of ll. 7 and 65 remained in upper-case).
Composition and date
There is no direct evidence for the date of composition of the poem. The Musical World (18 Apr. 1863, p. 252) reported on a concert at Leipsic [Leipzig]: ‘The programme of the Eighteenth Subscription Concert, on the 19th of February, was a peculiar one. First part:—Symphony in C major, by the Abbé Vogler …’ See ll. 95–6n. and next section.
Sources and influences
B. prided himself on his musical knowledge and musicianship, which he refers to early in his correspondence with EBB.: ‘I know, I have always been jealous of my own musical faculty (I can write music.)’ (14 June 1845, Correspondence x 264). His own musical education was rooted in theory and practice current at the turn of the eighteenth century, including that of Abt [Abbot] Georg Joseph Vogler (1749–1814), more usually referred to as Abbé Vogler (as in B.’s letter to Furnivall of 22 Jan 1889: Trumpeter 153). Vogler’s system of harmony was certainly known to John Relfe, one of B.’s early music teachers; according to François-Joseph Fétis, who met Relfe in London in 1829, Relfe’s system ‘was taken from the books of … Vogler and Schicht’ (Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, 8 vols [Paris 1860–8] vii 225). Vogler performed several concerts in London between Jan. and Aug. 1790. The suggestion (DeVane Handbook 290) that Relfe studied under Vogler seems, however, to be without foundation. Some indication of B.’s knowledge of Vogler’s work is given in Frederick Wedmore’s account of a letter he received from B. shortly after the publication of the poem: ‘He answered [my question about Vogler] … very courteously and fully; saying, amongst other things, that Abt Vogler had taught Meyerbeer counterpoint’ (Memories [1912] 52). Performances of Vogler’s music were rare in England in the mid-nineteenth century, though they featured in the annual series of Concerts of Ancient Music; one account of such a concert in March 1846 has a suggestive ring: commenting on Vogler’s Graduale, ‘De Profundis’, the reviewer states that it ‘aims at more than it can reach. The author had some effect in view which he had not the power to attain’ (The Examiner, no. 1989, 14 Mar. 1846, p. 166). Cp. Andrea 96–7 (p. 395) and below, Parallels in B.
Vogler was famous in his lifetime as a composer and performer, and as a theorist and teacher of music. His interest in the technicalities of sound production led to a number of experiments with existing organs, and finally led him to develop his own simplified organ, or ‘orchestrion’, which he worked on during his time as Kappelmeister to the King of Sweden, and demonstrated in public in 1789. It consisted of four ‘manuals’ or keyboards, each containing several octaves, and a pedalboard of thirty-nine notes. According to contemporary testimony, the resulting instrument was ‘extraordinarily effective, as you are brought to believe that in it you hear all the instruments of a complete orchestra’ (cited Schweiger, p. 161). There are numerous testimonies to his brilliance as a virtuoso organ player: ‘Tempestuous power and an almost magical conquest of difficulties is a characteristic of Vogler’s playing’ (cited in Hertha Schweiger, ‘Abt Vogler’, The Musical Quarterly xxv [1939] 162). His contemporaries also agreed that he excelled above all in improvisation rather than composition, which allowed him to make use of ‘[his] vivid imagination, his stormy temperament, his willingness to experiment with sound, dynamics, rhythm, and his exact knowledge of musical effects’ (Schweiger, p. 162). Vogler frequently attempted descriptive compositions, in which he would claim to depict a particular event or landscape in music; one of his concert programmes, for example, lists a piece entitled ‘A pleasure trip on the Rhine, interrupted by a thunderstorm’ (ibid. 164). As a musical theorist, Vogler’s most significant achievement was his work on the theory of harmony (see ll. 91–6n.), which greatly influenced his two most illustrious pupils, Weber and Meyerbeer. Vogler was often mentioned in reviews of the work of Meyerbeer in particular, and usually characterized as the originator of a dry, pedantic style of composition which Meyerbeer ultimately rejected.
Like Fra Lippo Lippi (see headnote, p. 478), Vogler remained a clergyman throughout his career, having been ordained as a Jesuit priest in Rome during the early 1770s. According to one of the authorities cited by Cooke, Vogler liked to array himself in his ecclesiastical finery for his recitals, and was not above ostentatious displays of piety: ‘He would take his prayer-book with him into society, and often keep his visitors waiting while he finished his devotions’ (p. 3). Vogler’s religion features in accounts of him current in the 1860s: see, e.g., the report of a London concert in The Era (3 May 1863, p. 16), in which Vogler’s name is linked with that of two other composers who were also Catholic priests, Martini and Stadler, as ‘among the most dry and unrefreshing composers there have ever been. They clung to the rules with great pertinacity, and were so devoid of anything like freedom of ideas, that they could almost seem to have desired the introduction of dogmas into music with all the strictness of unyielding orthodoxy.’ Some aspects of the theory of music developed by B.’s Vogler, such as his comparison between his composition and a religious edifice, and his desire to transform a necessarily transient and time-bound art-form into a permanent structure, have been seen as typically Catholic: Berdoe (Cyclopedia 6) cites a passage on music in John Henry Newman’s sermon on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’ (1843), preached while Newman was contemplating the possibility of converting to the Roman Catholic church:
There are seven notes in the scale; make them thirteen; yet what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What science brings so much out of so little? Out of what poor elements does some great master in it create his new world! Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day, without reality, without meaning? […] Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some higher sphere; they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our Home; they are the voice of Angels, or the Magnificat of Saints, or the living laws of Divine Governance, or the Divine Attributes; something are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot utter,—though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them. (Newman, Sermons, Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, 2nd edn [Oxford 1844], pp. 348–50)
The significance of Vogler’s Catholicism is also suggested by the allusion to ‘Rome’s dome’ (St Peter’s); see l. 23. According to Rebecca W. Smith (MP xxix.2 [1931] 187–98) this building may have served as the prototype for Milton’s Pandæmonium, the palace constructed in hell by the fallen angels (PL i 692–717); Pandæmonium has in turn been seen as one of the sources for Vogler’s ‘palace of music’ (see ll. 13–16n.). Vogler’s attempt to reach up to heaven recalls (just as Milton’s Pandæmonium anticipates) the story of Babel; see l. 28n. For the iconography of the imagined ‘palace’, cp. the account of the construction of the New Jerusalem in Revelation xxi 10–21 (see l. 19n.). Gal Manor gives an account of B.’s use of Talmudic and Kabbalistic sources in ‘The Allure of Supernatural Language: The Ineffable Name in Robert Browning’s Poems’, BSN xxv (Dec. 1998) 6–18.
Vogler’s insistence on the providential mechanism whereby evil only gives rise to ‘so much good more’ (l. 71) has a more orthodox lineage, going back to Augustine and Plato; its most famous literary exponent in English is Milton in PL. However, Vogler’s analogy of evil as ‘silence implying sound’ (l. 70) may have a more contemporary point, as a rebuttal of Carlyle’s well-known (and paradoxical) praise of silence as a supreme spiritual and aesthetic value: ‘Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time’ (‘Sir Walter Scott’, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays [1838]). Vogler’s praise of music as peculiarly close to divine creativity, and privileged above painting and poetry (ll. 43–50), belongs to a long tradition of debate between the different arts; cp. B.’s mischievous ‘hope’ that the great Renaissance painters have all ‘attained to be poets’ in heaven, where they ‘see God face to face’ (Old Pictures 49–55, p. 413).
Parallels in B.
Abt Vogler takes its place alongside other poems in which B. represents or reflects on the act of musical creation: see esp. Master Hugues (III 388), A Toccata (p. 367), Charles Avison (Parleyings, 1887) and the episode of Fifine at the Fair (1872) 1588ff., in which Don Juan plays Schumann’s ‘Carnaval’ and conjures up a vision of Venice. The biblical imagery of the poem, and the trajectory from ecstatic vision to a more sober ending, suggest an analogy with David’s song in Saul (III 491), confirmed by B.’s pairing of the two poems (see below); cp. also the song ‘Thamuris marching’, originally composed as a separate piece and then incorporated into Aristophanes’ Apology (1875) 5182–258. Thamuris’ song brings heaven and earth together in the same way that Vogler describes; note, however, that his story is a tragedy, since he challenges the Muses and is blinded for his presumption, whereas Vogler, at ll. 87–8, claims an intimate commission from God. Manor (see above) notes other poems in which B. invokes the figure of Solomon as one of glory and power, e.g. Popularity 41–50 (pp. 453–4) and the late poem Solomon and Balkis (Jocoseria, 1883). Vogler’s religious aesthetics has many parallels: line 72, for example, sums up the ‘doctrine of imperfection’ which is one of B.’s most constant principles: cp., e.g., Old Pictures, esp. ll. 113–36 (pp. 418–20), and Dîs Aliter Visum 116–42 (pp. 697–8); with line 76, cp. Sordello’s misguided ambition to ‘[thrust] in time eternity’s concern’ (i 566, I 432) and B.’s statement to Ruskin that poetry represents an impossible ‘putting the infinite within the finite’ (Appendix B, p. 881); contrast the ‘moment, one and infinite’ of the lovers in By the Fire-Side 181 (p. 471), in which the attainment of perfect bliss bears fruit in an earthly marriage.
Reception
When asked by Edmund Gosse in 1885 to nominate ‘Four poems, of moderate length, which represent their writer fairly’, B. selected Abt Vogler (alongside Saul) in the ‘Lyrical’ category (LH 235). Besides the thematic link between the two poems (see above) he may have been responding to the fact that, like Saul, Abt Vogler had become one of his most popular poems.
1
Would that the structure brave, the manifold music
I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when
Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
5 Man, brute, reptile, fly,—alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,—
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name,
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the princess he loved!
2
Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine,
10 This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to raise!
Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now combine,
Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise!
And one would bury his brow with a blind plunge down to hell,
Burrow awhile and build, broad on the roots of things,
15 Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well,
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs.
3
And another would mount and march, like the excellent minion he was,
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a crest,
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass,
20 Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest:
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire,
When a great illumination surprises a festal night—
Outlining round and round Rome’s dome from space to spire)
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul was in sight.
4
25 In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, to match man’s birth,
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I;
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach the earth,
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the sky:
Novel splendours burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine,
30 Not a point nor peak but found and fixed its wandering star;
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale nor pine,
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near nor far.
5
Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and glow,
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the Protoplast,
35 Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow,
Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last;
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the body and gone,
But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth their new:
What never had been, was now; what was, as it shall be anon;
40 And what is,—shall I say, matched both? for I was made perfect too.
6
All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my soul,
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly forth,
All through music and me! For think, had I painted the whole,
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder-worth:
45 Had I written the same, made verse—still, effect proceeds from cause,
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told;
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws,
Painter and poet are proud in the artist-list enrolled:—
7
But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
50 Existent behind all laws, that made them and, lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
It is everywhere in the world—loud, soft, and all is said:
55 Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought;
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider and bow the head!
8
Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared;
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slow;
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared,
60 That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go.
Never to be again! But many more of the kind
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me?
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind
To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay, what was, shall be.
9
65 Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name?
Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
70 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
10
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
75 Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
80 Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
And what is our failure here but a triumph’s evidence
For the fulness of the days? Have we withered or agonized?
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue thence?
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony should be prized?
85 Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear,
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe:
But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason and welcome: ’tis we musicians know.
12
Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign:
90 I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce.
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again,
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor,—yes,
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
95 Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found,
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.
Subtitle. after he has been extemporizing] after extemporizing (MS): the ‘musical instrument of his invention’ is the ‘orchestrion’; see below, Sources. As with Caliban, the subtitle appears on the separate title page which precedes each poem in 1864, but not on the first page of the text itself, which has the title Abt Vogler on its own.
1–10. The first sentence appears to finish at l. 8 and to have no main verb; the main clause (‘Would that the structure brave’) is interrupted by a series of subordinate clauses, then resumed and eventually ‘resolved’ in ll. 9–10.
1. brave: ‘magnificent, grand’ (J.); cp. Bishop Blougram 426 (p. 308). manifold: see An Epistle 294n. (p. 527).
3–8. Another illustration of B.’s detailed knowledge of Jewish tradition: ‘A well-known passage in Gittin 68a (part of the Talmud) tells of King Solomon that he ruled not only over men but also over demons. He was desirous of obtaining the mythical shamir, that by its aid the stones for the building of the Temple might be cut without the employment of iron. So he ordered Ashmedai, the king of the Demons, to be brought before him’ (Armand Kaminka, ‘The Origin of the Ashmedai Legend in the Babylonian Talmud’, Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s. xiii [1922], 221).
3. slave of the sound: cp. Ruskin’s category of ‘Servile Ornament’ in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (1853), in which he argues that the workman, forced to subordinate his individuality entirely to the overall plan of the building, was ‘a slave’ in both the Greek and the Assyrian traditions of architecture.
5. Man, brute, reptile, fly: another Rabbinical tradition claimed that King Solomon had the power to talk to animals.
7. ineffable Name: King Solomon was reputed to have possessed a magical ring with the name of God (‘the ineffable name’) engraved on it, which he used in conjuring spirits. See Mr. Sludge 1074n. (p. 830). Cp. also Aurora Leigh ii 1149–51.
8. pleasure: this verb did not necessarily have sexual connotations in the mid-nineteenth century, but B.’s usage does not exclude this possibility. the princess he loved: cp. 1 Kings iii 1: ‘And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took Pharaoh’s daughter, and brought her into the city of David, until he had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the LORD, and the wall of Jerusalem round about.’
10. my keys] the keys (MS). See also l. 41n.
11. dispart: see A Death 242n. (p. 736), noting the musical context of the Sordello quotation.
12. heighten their master his praise! ‘Enhance the praise which their master received.’
13–16. Continuing the comparison between the notes with which Vogler raises his ‘palace’ of sound, and the demons employed by King Solomon. Thomas (20–1) suggests a possible reminiscence of the description of Pandæmonium in PL i 705–13: ‘A third as soon had formed within the ground / A various mould, and from the boiling cells / By strange conveyance filled each hollow nook, / As in an organ from one blast of wind / To many a row of pipes the sound-board breathes. / Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, / Built like a temple[.]
16. the nether springs: cp. Judges i 15: ‘And she said unto him, Give me a blessing: for thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.’
17. minion: ‘A favourite; a darling; a low dependant’ (J). See Love Among the Ruins 47n. (p. 536).
19. rampired: J. defines ‘to rampire’ as ‘to fortify with ramparts’; first of three uses by B. of this archaism; cp., e.g., Red Cotton Night-Cap Country 1381. transparent as glass: cp. the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation xxi 21: ‘the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass’.
20. to do and die: cp. the stock phrase ‘to do or die’; Vogler’s modification emphasizes the temporal dimension of the art of music (in which the notes ‘die’ after having performed their task).
21–3. The Brownings spent the winter of 1853–4 in Rome; they themselves witnessed an evening event at St Peter’s on Easter Day 1854, which involved ‘torch-lighted sculpture’ (EBB. to Anne Braun, 16 Apr. 1854 [ABL MS]). On the significance of St Peter’s in the poem, see headnote, Sources and influences.
24. pinnacled glory: the adjective ‘pinnacled’ was usually associated with Gothic or ‘pointed’ architecture; on the possible influence of Ruskin’s aesthetics on the poem, see l. 3n. the pride of my soul was in sight: either ‘I was close to what my soul desired’, or ‘I had made the pride of my soul apparent to everyone’.
25. Not half! ‘A long way from the due amount’ (OED), rather than the demotic sense ‘certainly!’ The poet’s efforts are to be ‘matched’ by those of heaven (see next note). to match man’s birth: ‘to match that which a man had given birth to’, i.e. Vogler’s music.
27–8. Vogler’s benign vision of earth and heaven reciprocally reaching towards each other inverts the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis xi 1–9) in which the builders aspired to build ‘a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven’ in order to ‘make us a name’, and in which God ‘came down to see the city and the tower’ only to prevent its accomplishment.
30. fixed its wandering star: cp. Jude i 13: ‘wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever’. Cp. also Two in the Campagna 55n. (p. 562). 31. they: i.e. the ‘meteor moons’ fixed to earth by Vogler’s music.
32. Cp. ‘Thamuris marching’, the song B. incorporated into Aristophanes’ Apology (see headnote, Parallels in B.): ‘Such earth’s community of purpose, such / The ease of earth’s fulfilled imaginings,—/ So did the near and far appear to touch / I’ the moment’s transport,—that an interchange / Of function, far with near, seemed scarce too much …’ (ll. 5224–6).
33–8. Vogler imagines his music as conjuring up ‘presences’, who are either the spirits of the as-yet-unborn, or those of the ‘wonderful Dead’ returned to their ‘old world’. The sense is a little obscured by B.’s use of the Gallicism ‘or … or’ for ‘either … or’.
33. wanted: ‘lacked’.
34. Protoplast: ‘The first creator or shaper of a thing’ (OED); usually (as here) God.
35. Furnished for ages to come: provided for future ages.
39–40. what was … what is] what is … what was (MS, canc.).
40. I was made perfect too: the question of perfection is debated in a number of Paul’s Epistles; the most relevant parallel is probably provided by Galatians iii 3: ‘Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?’
41. my keys] these keys (MS).
42. All through my soul that praised] And through my soul that praised (MS, redrafting an earlier version: ‘And my soul that praised the while’).
44. to see: ‘to be seen’.
45–6. still … told: ‘The pleasure you experience is directly traceable to its origins in the things the painter shows you, or the things you are told by the poet.’
48. Painter] Poet (MS, canc.); perhaps the draft from which B. was copying originally read ‘Poet and painter’ and he changed his mind in the course of transcribing.
49. the finger of God: cp. Exodus xxxi 18; bearing in mind the earlier reference to St Peter’s in the poem, see ll. 21–3n; Vogler may also have in mind Michelangelo’s famous depiction of the moment of creation in the Sistine Chapel, in which God imparts life to Adam through his outstretched finger. the will that can: it is very unusual to find ‘can’ without an object; the sense is an absolute one, and suitable to omnipotence. Cp. the supremacy of the ‘Quiet’ in Caliban 137 (p. 632).
50. and, lo, they are!] and there they are! (MS, canc.).
52. frame] frames (MS, written over a word which may be ‘forms’). three sounds: the three notes which make up a chord; see l. 91n. a star: the association of music with heavenly bodies goes back to Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic speculation in antiquity. B. characteristically inverts the usual image of the ‘harmony of the spheres’ (e.g. The Merchant of Venice V i 60–1: ‘There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an angel sings’); here, the effect of musical creation is itself figured as a star.
60.] That he even gave it thought that the gone thing was to go: (MS).
61. Never to be again! As Vogler’s music is improvised, there is no lasting record of the ‘palace of music’.
63. must] shall (MS, written above ‘hope to’, canc.)
64. ay, what was] for what was (MS, revising an earlier draft: ‘what was once’).
65. the ineffable Name: see l. 7n.
66. houses not made with hands: 2 Corinthians v 1; cp. By the Fire-Side 135 (p. 468).
69. shall live] shall (MS).
70.] The evil is nought—defect—the silence implying sound (MS, canc.). For a possible allusion to Carlyle’s praise of silence, see headnote, Sources and influences.
71. for evil: ‘in place of evil’.
72. Cp. Tennyson, ‘Will Waterproof ’s Lyrical Monologue’ (1842) 65–72: ‘This earth is rich in man and maid; / With fair horizons bound: / This whole wide earth of light and shade / Comes out a perfect round. / High over roaring Temple-bar, / And set in Heaven’s third story, / I look at all things as they are, / But through a kind of glory.’ EBB. quoted a phrase from this poem in a letter she wrote marking the anniversary of B.’s first visit to Wimpole Street: ‘And now as the year has rounded itself to “the perfect round” …’ (19 May 1846, Correspondence xii 340).
73. willed or hoped] hoped or willed (MS).
74. semblance] likeness (MS); this reading does not appear in 1864 proof and was therefore a very late change. nor power] emended in agreement with MS and all other eds from ‘power’ in 1864.
75. each survives] still survives (MS, altering earlier draft: ‘still shall survive’).
77. for earth] on earth (MS, canc.).
79. Are music] Are the music (MS, canc.).
80. it … it] them … them (MS, canc.).
81. a triumph’s evidence: i.e. the evidence of a (future) triumph.
82. For] In (MS). the fulness of the days: this expression is not used in the King James version of the Bible, but appears five times in Robert Young’s The Holy Bible … literally and idiomatically translated out of the original languages (usually known as Young’s Literal Translation), Edinburgh, 1863. There are no uses of it in B. before Abt Vogler, but the expression appears frequently in his work thereafter; see, e.g., Ring viii 716; Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) 349. agonized: intransitively (as here), the verb means ‘To feel agonies; to be in excessive pain’ (J.).
83. Why else was] Well, why was (MS, canc.).
86. says] has (MS, canc.). weal and woe: prosperity and misfortune.
88. ’tis we musicians know: cp. Charles Avison (Parleyings, 1887) 138–9: ‘There is no truer truth obtainable / By Man than comes of music’.
91–6. A number of critics have questioned this description of a chromatic cadence resolving to C major; Charles Stanford suggests that ‘[sliding] by semi-tones till I sink to the minor’ is ‘the refuge of the destitute amateur improviser’, while W. Wright Roberts asks whether ‘any musician [has] made sense of it’ (both cited in Nachum Schoffman, There is no Truer Truth: The Musical Aspect of Browning’s Poetry [New York, 1991] 78–9). Schoffman himself, however, defends B.’s description as a technically accurate account: ‘The description of the cadence is not only poetically and dramatically valid but musically valid as well. There is nothing awkward or amateurish about sliding down by semitones. The conclusion of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy provides a masterful example of such a cadence, sliding down by semitones and pausing on a minor ninth chord before resolving to the tonic’ (p. 79).
91. the common chord: ‘the basic triad made up of the first, third, and fifth notes of the scale, probably in the key of C major’; James E. Neufeld, ‘Some Notes on Browning’s Musical Poems’, SBC vi.1 (1978) 51.
92. Sliding] Striking (MS, canc.).
93. I blunt it into a ninth: Neufeld (see l. 91n.) points out that the ‘fundamental principle’ of Vogler’s system of harmony was ‘that not only the triad (common chord), but also the discords of the seventh, ninth and eleventh could be introduced on any degree of the scale without involving modulation’. Vogler’s use of a ninth in the poem is not, therefore, ‘purely capricious’, but indicates B.’s knowledge of his subject: ‘It is an interval Vogler might have used in such circumstances and for which he might have gained some notoriety’ (‘Some Notes’, p. 52).
94. a while] awhile (MS, 1868–88), a rare example of printed eds. returning to a reading in MS.
95–6. Nachum Schoffman (see ll. 91–6n.) notes that ‘the key of C major, devoid of sharps and flats, is Browning’s symbol for the ultimate simplicity, the ultimate truth’ (p. 75), and compares Charles Avison (Parleyings, 1887) 361–4. For a contemporary performance of Vogler’s symphony in C major, see headnote, Composition and date.
95. Which, hark] Which, see (MS). dared and done: a favourite phrase of B.’s, deriving from the final line of Christopher Smart’s Song to David (1765): ‘And now the matchless deed’s achiev’d, / DETERMIN’D, DAR’D, and DONE!’ B. uses it in many different contexts: cp., e.g., Ring i 801–2, where it alludes to Guido’s murder of Pompilia, and the opening line of B.’s elegy La Saisiaz (1872): ‘Dared and done: at last I stand upon the summit, Dear and True!’