Robert Browning's Poetry “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” (1855) Summary & Analysis

Summary

Published in the 1855 volume Men and Women, “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” gives the reflections of a man who is either playing or listening to a piece by the 18th-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi. A toccata is a short, showy piece meant to allow a musician to show off his skill. The music inspires in the speaker visions of Venice: he sees these images in rich detail, even though he has not left England. He envisions a masked ball at which Galuppi performs, and he invents a conversation between two lovers at the ball, who speak of love and happiness in trivial terms. The sense of corruption and decay hangs heavy over the scene, though, and the speaker imagines Galuppi berating Venice for its soullessness and wild ways. The combined melancholy and gaiety produce a powerful effect on the speaker.

Form

This poem is famous for its form. It is one of the few poems in English to be written in octameter: sixteen-syllable, or eight-stress, lines. Moreover, the stresses display a trochaic pattern (stressed followed by unstressed syllables), which can be difficult to sustain in English. Just as a toccata is a kind of virtuoso performance, so this poem represents a kind of metrical bravado: Browning shows off his technical skills. He performs yet another flourish by writing in rhyming triplets, another difficult poetic task in English, which has a vocabulary short on rhymes compared to that of many European languages. The poem’s language therefore attains a kind of flamboyant, musical effect, which, although it can obscure the poem’s content at times, constitutes an accomplishment in itself.

Analysis

This poem’s air of ruined decadence can be seen as a logical continuation of earlier poems such as “My Last Duchess,” which celebrate high Renaissance glory. The poem introduces science as an alternative to art: some critics theorize that the speaker of this poem is actually supposed to be a scientist himself (see stanza 13). However, whether we cling to science or art, ultimately neither has proven able to keep humanity from decay. (On the other hand, the power that Galuppi’s toccata possesses over the speaker seems to suggest that art and music may offer some residual immortality.)

Galuppi’s music most interests the speaker is its persistent motifs of discord followed by resolution: the struggle within the music seems to echo the struggles of life. Indeed, the triplet form of the poem itself mirrors this: the third rhyming line dangles and is only resolved when the next stanza introduces a new rhyme. Discord can find only temporary resolution, though—for each following stanza, like each following generation, contains its own, new conflicts.

Melancholy figures prominently in Victorian literature, and the speaker’s attitude at the end of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” evokes a decidedly melancholy mood. This poem suggests that the kind of art that evokes melancholy may best reflect the reality of life.

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