Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:21:39.841Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Art, Mortality, and the Drama of Subjective Responses in “A Toccata of Galuppi's”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Robert C. Schweik
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Exegi monumentum aere perennius.… non omnis moriar. From Horace onward, the relationship of art to human mortality has been a major theme in literature – and one which obviously interested Browning, if we may judge from some striking variations he worked on it. In “Cleon” and “Abt Vogler,” for example, his speakers address the subject from very different points of view: Cleon, the pagan, argues that the fact his art will survive after his death cannot in any meaningful way confer immortality on him and that, as an artist, he even more than others is painfully aware of his own limited life; Abt Vogler, on the other hand, confident of the changelessness of God's good, sees in his art a promise that both he and his improvisation will endure. Given Browning's penchant for pushing ideas to extremes and turning them in unusual directions, it is not surprising that he would treat the topic in other less predictable ways – as he did, for example, by making the inert changelessness of works of art in “The Statue and the Bust” comment ironically on human failure to act, or by endowing the worldly and sensuous Bishop at St. Praxed's with an appropriately literal faith in the kind of immortality a suitably artful tomb would confer upon him. It is not surprising, then, that similar topics would appear in “A Toccata of Galuppi's.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 15 , Spring 1987 , pp. 131 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Browning, Robert. “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Ed. King, Roma et al. , Vol. 5. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1981. 197–99.Google Scholar
Cook, Deryck. The Language of Music. London: Oxford UP, 1959.Google Scholar
Crowell, Norton B.A Reader's Guide to Robert Browning. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1972.Google Scholar
Drew, Phillip. The Poetry of Robert Browning: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen, 1970.Google Scholar
Harden, Edgar F. “A New Reading of Browning's ‘A Toccata of Galuppi's.’” VP II (1973): 330–36.Google Scholar
Honan, Park. “The Iron String in the Victorian Lyre: Browning's Lyric Versification.” Browning's Mind and Art. Ed. Tracy, Clarence. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1968. 82–99.Google Scholar
Johnson, Charles W. “Lost ‘Chord,’ Wrong ‘-Chord,’ and Other Musical Anomalies in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi's.’” SBHC 4.1 (1976): 30–40.Google Scholar
Joyce, John J. “The Music Poems and Robert Browning's Knowledge of Music.” SBHC 8.2 (1980): 75–87.Google Scholar
Loucks, James F., ed. Robert Browning's Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.Google Scholar
Slinn, E. Warwick. Browning and the Fictions of Identity. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar