meeting the brownings || art, artist, and audience in "a toccata of galuppi's"

Art, Artist, and Audience in "A Toccata of Galuppi's"Author(s): W. Craig TurnerSource: Browning Institute Studies, Vol. 15, Meeting the Brownings (1987), pp. 123-129Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25057810 .

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ART, ARTIST, AND AUDIENCE IN "A TOCCATA OF GALUPPI'S"

By W. Craig Turner

Robert Browning's music poem "A Toccata of Galuppi's" is

built on a system of telescoping viewpoints that might best be

diagrammed as concentric circles with Galuppi's music at the core.1

The speaker of this monologue, a type of smug nineteenth-century

Englishman with a deep interest in science, uses the occasion of

Galuppi's clavichord touch-piece to muse on possible reactions of

the composer's eighteenth-century Venetian audience. As he does

so, the speaker becomes something of an artist or creator himself,

using his own imagination to recreate an evening at an eighteenth

century Venetian ball; but the speaker also is a critic, himself re

sponding to and interpreting not only Galuppi's music but also the

Venetians in their imagined responses to the music. In this best of

all Browning's music poems, he has given us something of an

analogue of his own method as artist and moralist, as well as an

ironic understanding of the efficacy of art and its ongoing treatment

by critical audiences.

The poem opens with the speaker's responding to Galuppi's music with great confidence in his ability to perceive its meaning:

"I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind"

(2). He then conjures up a ball with the Venetians of Galuppi's day

breaking off their frivolity to listen impatiently to the master's

music (17-18). They seem to choose not to understand - to prove themselves deaf and blind to its message

- though they ostensibly

appreciate Galuppi's music. Thinking their ball more important than his message of human mortality, they go back to their eating and drinking and chatting seemingly unaffected by what they have

123



124 BROWNING INSTITUTE STUDIES

heard. Ironically, the speaker considers his own activities - the

physics, geology, and mathematics - of utmost importance and

himself as beyond the Venetians, somehow as immortal: "'[I'll] not

die, it cannot be!'" (39) The method of the poem's speaker is to attribute to the Venetians

actions and responses - that is, to ascribe vicariously physical,

verbal, psychological, and emotional activity. After asserting his

own ability to respond to Galuppi's music, the nineteenth-century

speaker somewhat timidly projects leisure activities for the Vene

tians (10-12). Later, as he gets caught up in Galuppi's music, he

becomes more confident in his portrait of the fun-loving, frivolous

eighteenth-century Italians and attributes revealing conversation to

them (20-23). Similarly, as he moves still deeper into the touch

piece, the Englishman ascribes meaning to the music:

In you come with your cold music till I creep thro' every nerve.

Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house

was burned:

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what

Venice earned.

The soul, doubtless, is immortal -

where a soul can be

discerned.

"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!"

(33-39)

Galuppi's unsettling music, then, speaks -

always through the

attribution of meaning by the nineteenth-century English speaker not only of the light-hearted character of the soulless Venetians, but

also of their earned mortality in contrast with his own equally merited immortality.

The process of creatively attributing meaning here has inevitable

and important consequences for the one who does the imputing: such vicarious artistic attribution leads to a sympathetic identifica

tion. As the speaker-artist imaginatively recreates the actions,

words, thoughts, and feelings of his subjects, he gradually becomes

aware of and identifies with their basic humanity. Although the



art, artist, and audience 125

speaker readily creates frivolous, shallow, and thoughtless qualities for the Venetians (40-42), he ultimately reaches a point of sym

pathetic identification with their flesh-and-bloodness, or, to ap

propriate from "Fra Lippo Lippi, "

he is made to remember "there's

such a thing as flesh" (182):

Dear dead women, with such hair, too - what's become of

all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and

grown old.

(44-45)

Though they could not - or would not - understand the message of

Galuppi's music, their essential humanity arrests our speaker's creative imputation and leads him to a higher, or deeper, personal level of human emotional response.

"A Toccata of Galuppi's" enacts as well as illustrates the essence

of Browning's aesthetic ideal in the dramatic monologue form that

is most completely and most clearly delineated in his "Essay on

Shelley": that is, a dramatic and lyric poem that combines the ob

jectivity of the critic-dramatist with the subjectivity of the emotive

lyricist. From the analogue in "A Toccata of Galuppi's," we can see

something of Browning's artistic process in the monologue form

where his method is to impute subjective emotions and responses into an objective, or dramatic, entity. Just as the speaker interprets and attributes meanings to both the Venetians and Galuppi's music, so Browning attributes meanings to the entire poem

- the speaker, his attribution of meaning to the Venetians, and his interpretation of Galuppi's music.

In his landmark work, The Poetry of Experience, Robert

Langbaum stresses that the dramatic monologue is a "poetry of

sympathy" whose end is "to establish the reader's sympathetic relation to the poem, to give him Tacts from within'" (78-79). As

Langbaum has noted, Browning seldom renders a uniformly nega tive portrait. Thus, Browning in this poem creates a type of smug

provincial Victorian - never out of England but confident of his

imputations of the Venetians - who himself is a scientific materialist

just as bound to the earthly and trivial as the Venetians are mired in

their sensual materialism. Nevertheless, the poet ultimately re

sponds sympathetically - or perhaps even empathetically

- toward

him even as the speaker responds to the Venetians: Browning is




conscious of the humanity and mortality of his creation even as the

speaker becomes conscious of those same qualities in the Venetians.

The method of sympathetic identification here is typical of Brown

ing, especially in his historical monologues: he begins with an

historical type that both he and his readers initially recoil from - the

Duke in "My Last Duchess," the Bishop in "The Bishop Orders

His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church," and characters in The Ring and

the Book such as Tertium Quid and the lawyers. Browning the

moralist sees their failings, even their pernicious vices, but Brown

ing the poet also recognizes the inhibitions and limitations of their

personal and historical contexts and is moved by a sympathetic identification during the process of creating an individual personal

ity with thoughts, feelings, and human frailties - including mortal

ity. He begins with a skeletal type, frequently unappealing; he

fleshes it out with humanizing details; and he and his audience are

led to at least a modicum of sympathetic identification. As we have

come to expect from Browning, it is from imperfection that one

most learns: in "A Toccata" the speaker's meditation on the limita

tions and failings of the Venetians leads him to begin to sense his

own limitations and to identify with the eighteenth-century revel

lers he has created. In "A Toccata" then, Browning pictures for us

the very process of creative sympathetic identification at work.

The catalyst is the music of Baldassaro Galuppi: it speaks to the

Venetians of their mortality, and it speaks to the nineteenth-century scientist of his mortality. It also, I would infer, must have spoken to Browning of mortality as well. Here the poet demonstrates the

efficacy of art that he enunciates in "Fra Lippo Lippi" : "we're made so that we love / First when we see them painted, things we have

passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see" (300-02).

Galuppi's music inspires our speaker to his reveries on the Vene

tians, leads him to impute the message of death and dying for those

Venetians, and finally makes him feel "chilly and grown old." The

message of human mortality conveyed in Galuppi's art leads the

speaker to create his Venetian audience, which in turn leads him to

a genuine feeling of a universal truism that he has until now only

intellectually acknowledged. In "A Toccata" Browning employs both closure and disclosure:2 the very process of disclosure here -

the speaker's moving to an understanding of his own mortality -

ironically points toward the future and the ultimate human closure



ART, ARTIST, AND AUDIENCE 127

- death. Or, to move from Herbert Tucker to Clyde de L. Ryals,

Browning combines and adapts Friedrich Schlegel's philosophical

irony with Hegelian dialectics so that his thesis and antithesis result

not in sending up a new synthesis, but in sending out a broader

circle of understanding.3 In the poem's second line, the speaker ironically warns that he

will not prove deaf and blind: as the poem progresses, he first hears

(Galuppi's music), then sees (the Venetians and their ball as he

creates them imaginatively), and finally, and most importantly for

Browning, feels as the poem ends. Again to invoke "Fra Lippo

Lippi," he takes "breath" (the inspiration of Galuppi's music), tries

"to add life's flash" (the Venetians that he creates and to whom he

attributes meaning), and finds "the soul" within them (213) - and

in the process feels the soul within himself. Though this poem takes

it perhaps a step beyond the usual, the method is typical of Brown

ing's monologues: it is a telescoping process in which the poet attributes meaning to the speaker who attributes meaning to the

Venetians who are attributing meaning to Galuppi. We, of course, are on the ever-broadening end of the telescope imputing Brown

ing. At the focal point of it all, however, is art - Galuppi's music.

Browning here recognizes the ongoing process of imputation, or

critical response, that art initiates and sustains through succeeding

generations. Himself a relatively unknown and unsuccessful poet at

the time of the poem's composition, Browning sees and ironically

portrays the vagaries of audience response. Philip Drew has de

scribed "A Toccata" as "a dialogue between a composer [Galuppi] and his audience [the nineteenth-century scientist]" (170). Simi

larly, Browning must have recognized that his poems were, in a

sense, just such dialogues between himself and his readers. And just as Galuppi's music is witty and ironic and liable to being misinter

preted by his audiences, so Browning's poetry is witty and ironic

and easily subject to being misread.

As George Ridenour has pointed out, though Galuppi's music in

many ways deprecates the age in which he composed it, it is also

supremely ofthat age and is rightly enjoyed by the frivolous Vene

tians (369-77): both his music and his audience are stylish, aristo

cratic, and, at first contact at least, slight. Unlike Galuppi's music,

however, Browning's poetry moves beyond the witty and ironic

portrait of the deprecated scientist: it creates persons of several




historical epochs and imputes for them appropriate feelings and

emotions. As the speaker in this poem discovers, such creation

tempers wit and irony with flesh and blood.

"A Toccata of Galuppi's," then, reflects Browning's intense

historical consciousness - his ability to create, or perhaps recre

ate, representative types from an historical era. Among others, for

example, Drew has discussed this poem as "powerfully evoking the spirit of eighteenth-century Venice" (120); similarly, W.

David Shaw has pointed out that "his sermonizing speech . . . fixes

the speaker as a man of his generation, of the age that produced Thomas Arnold and his resolution to 'abolish levity'" (136).

Browning superimposes one historical period over another - ren

dering both faithfully and vividly. While "A Toccata" emphasizes human mortality, Browning's avowed interest in the dramatic

monologue form is in "the soul in action." As E. Warwick Slinn

observes, "A Toccata of Galuppi's" is, finally, "a dispelling of

illusion rather than a release into revelation, the representation of a

condition of mind rather than a discovery of truth" (73). Brown

ing's achievement is the recreation of an historical type discoursing on a question of universal meaning, thus discovering his individual

soul-in-action. In the "Essay on Shelley," Browning describes the

whole poet as the ideal artist who combines the objective with the

subjective: Browning's own attempts to realize this ideal may be

seen analogously in "A Toccata of Galuppi's," where both he and

his speaker begin with objective historical types and then develop

subjective individualized human beings. In the course of vicariously attributing and ascribing actions,

words, thoughts, and feelings, these two whole poets both indi

rectly touch their own souls. The method here illustrates the move

ment of Browning's poetic career: the step from subjective self

absorption as the speaker begins, to an historical consideration, to

a sympathetic understanding in which the speaker learns something of himself. He moves outside himself to a dramatic consideration of

others and thus learns something of himself. The speaker advances

to find the soul that he has missed within himself as he stumbles

onto the humanity - and thus the beauty

- of those frivolous, and

dead, eighteenth-century Venetians.

Inevitably, there are historical and philosophical contexts in

which the art, the artist, and the audience must operate, thereby

coloring all responses and imputations: the Venetians are bound by their perspective in responding to Galuppi's music; the speaker is



ART, ARTIST, AND AUDIENCE I29

bound by his perspective in creating and responding to the Vene

tians and responding to Galuppi; and even Browning is limited by his perspective in creating the entire poem. We, too, as audience are

victims of our own perspective with our own responses and attribu

tions of meaning to it. But changing historical and philosophical

perspectives are freeing as well as limiting: the nineteenth-century scientist is free of the sensuous frivolity of the eighteenth-century

Venetians; Browning is free of the scientific materialism of the

speaker; and we, perhaps, are free of some of Browning's Victorian

limitations.

Browning recognizes the inherent capacity of art - both Ga

luppi's and, by implication, his own- to transcend such limitations

as audience response and historical perspective and to convey felt

universal truths and faithful human portraits: there is a core of

meaning that does transcend historical identifications and limita

tions. Through layering, the poet has faithfully and ironically por

trayed both the ability of the artist to convey universal truth and the

difficulties that all audiences have in feeling and accepting even the

most fundamental truths: the mortality of people in all historical

contexts and from all philosophical perspectives. Galuppi is dead, the Venetians are dead, the Victorian scientist is dead, Browning is

dead, and even his contemporary audience is dead. And we, too, shall be dead. Galuppi's art, however, remains efficacious.

NOTES

i. For the image of concentric circles

I am indebted to Jack W. Herring. 2. See Tucker for an extended dis

cussion of disclosure in Browning's

poetry.

3. See Ryals (4-5) for a discussion of

Browning's relationship with Schlegel and Hegel.

WORKS CITED

Browning, Robert. The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Ed. Roma

A. King, Jr., et al. Athens and Waco:

Ohio up and Baylor up, 1969-.

Drew, Philip. The Poetry of Browning. London: Methuen, 1970.

Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Ex

perience. 1957. New York: Norton,

1963.

Ridenour, George. "Browning's Music

Poems: Fancy and Fact." PMLA 78

(1963)1369-77. Ryals, Clyde de L. Becoming Browning.

Columbus: Ohio State up, 1983.

Shaw, W. David. The Dialectical

Temper. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1968.

Slinn, E. Warwick. Browning and the

Fictions of Identity. London: MacMil

lan, 1982.

Tucker, Herbert F., Jr. Browning's Be

ginnings. Minneapolis: u of Min

nesota p, 1980.



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