This post is the contination of one from last June. I started out to write about Robert Browning’s poetry on the subject of music, intending to discuss four poems: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”, “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”, “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”. I managed to deal with only the first two of these. So, now I want to try to finish the job.
In the previous post, I wrote that the rhythm and metres of the two poems attempt to mimic the music they’re describing, a toccata and fugue respectively. “Abt Vogler”, too, is to some extent mimetic but because the form it’s imitating is less strict than the other two, it is less regular, containing more rhythmic variation, than they do. Vogler (born 1749) was an older near-contemporary of Beethoven. The two composers are said to have competed against each other in 1803 to determine which was the better extemporizer (Norton critical edition, p. 243, n. 1).
“Abt Vogler” is written in hexameters: each line has six stressed syllables, with a caesura in the middle. But where the metre of “Master Hugues” is predominantly dactylic, that of “Abt Vogler” is harder to pin down. The first line begins with a dactyl, followed by two trochees, then two more dactyls and a lone stressed syllable:
WOULD that the | STRUC-ture | BRAVE, the | MAN-i-fold | MUS-ic i | BUILD,
The second line begins with two dactyls, then there’s a single stressed syllable with a pause afterwards (“-bey, ”), then two more dactyls and another stressed syllable to end the line. The third line is comparatively regular: five dactyls (with a caesura after the first syllable of the third), ending again on a single stressed syllable. The fourth line follows the pattern of the second, but then we come to the fifth: a spondee, a trochee, a single stressed syllable before the caesura, the more usual two dactyls and a final stressed syllable after it.
As we read on, it becomes clear that the underlying metre is a line of five dactyls culminating in a single stressed syllable, but there’s a lot of variation on this pattern in individual lines. A regular line in this metre would have sixteen syllables, but many of these have either fourteen or fifteen, and line 5, already mentioned, has just twelve, and arguably an extra (seventh) stress:
MAN, BRUTE, | REP-tile, | FLY, — | AL-ien of | END and of | AIM,
A sixteen-syllable line with six stressed syllables would be fast, but not quite so fast as Galuppi’s toccata, which has four stressed syllables in a line of that length. So Vogler’s composition should probably be played allegro ma non troppo, and the metrical variations will slow it down further in certain passages.
The point, I’m suggesting, is that Vogler’s music is much more varied rhythmically, noticeably less regular than either Hugues’s or Galuppi’s, as Browning and his speakers conceive them. Browning imagines Vogler as an extemporizer, which is certainly one of the things he was. The poem opens with him caught in a paradox. He sees his music as a kind of architecture. The first line speaks of a “structure” that he is able to “build”, and two lines later he is comparing himself to Solomon, building the palace and temple at Jerusalem. But his improvisations are evanescent: once performed, they disappear into the air, leaving no evidence that they had ever existed.
If he were a painter or a poet, he would produce something tangible, but the artwork might reveal how it had been created:
For think, had I painted the whole,
Had I written the same, made verse — still, effect proceeds from cause,
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws … (ll. 43–7)
Effect could be traced back to its apparent cause, the operation of the laws would be discernable. But the will of God is “Existent behind all laws” (l. 50) and God is not constrained by his own laws:
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is nought;
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought:
But the price for this inspiration is that the improvisor’s creation doesn’t persist: the last notes die away leaving just the everyday noises that had been there before. The organist would like to produce something more lasting, but consoles himself with the reflection that his performance indeed continues to exist in one place: in what might be called the memory or the consciousness of God:
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
…
The recognition of this calms the musician’s agitation. His “failure” (l. 81) to create something lasting on this plane is merely evidence that eternity exists.
“Why rushed the discords in but that harmony should be prized?” he asks (l. 85). As we saw in the previous post, the speaker in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” believed that discords could be resolved only in death. But, for Vogler, death doesn’t mean simply “dust and ashes” but is the gateway to a realm where his inspired performances will (like his soul, presumably) exist eternally. In the meantime, he is content to play his more ordinary compositions in “The C Major of this life” (l. 96).
In contrast with the unusual metres of the poems discussed so far, “With Charles Avison” from Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day is in iambic pentameter. In choosing this metre, Browning implies that his subject avoided rhythmic complexity. Avison, a church organist and composer from Newcastle, was roughly contemporary with Galuppi. Browning, fairly or not, presents Avison as a plainer, less sophisticated composer than either Galuppi or Vogler. It appears from Wikipedia that Avison was best known for concerti and sonatas, including concerti grossi “after Scarlatti”, but Browning is interested in his “Grand March” (which is not mentioned in the Wikipedia entry). Browning presents this composition as a “well, thinnish air” (III) in C Major, steady and unvarying in both key and rhythm, the only surprise being found in the time signature.
Of novel modulation pricked the flat
Forthright, persisting melody, — no hint
That discord, sound asleep beneath the flint, — Struck — might spring spark-like, claim due tit-for-tat,
Quenched in a concord. (III)
The time signature is three-four, “Three crotchets to a bar” (IV), unusual for a march (which would typically be in two-two or four-four) but not unknown. Browning puzzles over the fact that a piece of music that was rousing and stimulating in its time (as he had found Avison’s march in his youth), can lose its effectiveness and come to seem inert.
How can completion grow still more complete?
Hear Avison! He tenders evidence
That music in his day as much absorbed
Heart and soul then as Wagner’s music now.
…
And yet — and yet — whence comes it that “O Thou” —
Sighed by the soul at eve to Hesperus —
Will not again take wing and fly away
(Since fatal Wagner fixed it fast for us)
In some unmodulated minor? Nay,
Even by Handel’s help! (V)
Like Vogler in his poem, the poet here compares music with the arts of painting and poetry and finds that music comes closest to achieving, “yet fails of touching” (VIII) the artist’s aim.
Could Music rescue thus from Soul’s profound,
Give feeling immortality by sound,
Then, were she queenliest of Arts! Alas —
As well expect the rainbow not to pass! (VIII)
He imagines how he would go about artificially reanimating Avison’s march, introducing modulation, discords and their resolutions; but immediately abandons the idea: “Fear | No such irreverent innovation!” (X). He accepts it as inevitable that one style or approach will be superseded by something newer. Yet, it disturbs the poet that the discovery of new techniques may not lead to the development and improvement of earlier knowledge, but instead entirely displace it, showing it to have been misconceived all along.
Of all the lamentable debts incurred
By Man through buying knowledge, this were worst:
That he should find his last gain prove his first
Was futile — merely nescience absolute,
Not knowledge in the bud which holds a fruit
Haply undreamed of in the soul’s Spring-tide,
Pursed in the petals Summer opens wide,
And Autumn, withering, rounds to perfect ripe, —
Not this, — but ignorance, a blur to wipe
From human records, late it graced so much. (XII)
The poem’s ending is quite strange and I’m not sure I’ve understood it properly. Having failed to find a way to revitalize Avison’s old music for his own time, the poet turns in the other direction, asking “Or suppose | Back, and not forward, transformation goes?” (XV). The eighteenth-century march would surely seem lively and encouraging to the parliamentarians of the 1640s. The poet imagines it as the musical background to Charles I’s attempt to arrest Holles, Haselrig, Hampden, Strode and Pym, “The famous Five” (XVI) in 1642.
I suppose that if music loses its power with the forward passage of time, it could be expected to gain more power if it were possible to send it backwards. Or to put it slightly differently, a work that appears outdated in the century after it was written could be expected to seem ahead of its time in the century before. The result is that a poem which begins as guarded, equivocal praise of a piece of music from the eighteenth century, ends in celebration of parliamentary heroes who opposed absolute monarchy.
Next time, I intend to write about Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones.
Edition: “Abt Vogler”, like the two poems in the previous post, is cited from Robert Browning’s Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks, Norton Critical Edition, 1979. The Norton edition doesn’t include “With Charles Avison”, so I’ve used a copy I found on the internet some time ago. That copy doesn’t include line numbers, so in the case of each quoted passage, I’ve referred only to the section number.