"A Toccata of Galuppi's" is a poem by Robert Browning, originally published in the 1855 collection Men and Women. The title refers to the fact that the speaker is either playing or listening to a toccata by the 18th-century Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi. The poem consists of fifteen rhymed tercets; its prevailing meter is trochaic octameter catalectic.
It is not known whether Browning was thinking of any one piece by Galuppi; in Galuppi's time, the terms "toccata" and "sonata" were less clearly differentiated than they later became, and were used interchangeably. [1] A number of Galuppi's sonatas have been suggested as Browning's inspiration, but as Charles van den Borren wrote in The Musical Times, "every poet has the right to evade the prosaic minutiae of fact", and it is impossible to state with confidence that one Galuppi piece has more claim than another to be the inspiration for the poem. [1]
Commentators have remarked on the musicality of the poem. [2] Browning was trained extensively in music, both in composition and musical theory. [2] Professional musicians and musicologists have been dismissive of his use of musical terms, but the music scholar Deryck Cooke writes of the poet's precise grasp of fine musical detail in this work. [3] David Parkinson identifies "a link between each syllable of the poem and the musical notes of a scale." [4] Stephen H. Ford contends that the whole poem is constructed "on a double octave form". [5] Marc R. Plamondon argues that Browning's subjective interpretation produces "not just a commentary on music, but a complex portrait of the person attempting to interpret the music." [2] The critic Robert C. Schweik argues that the poem does not require the reader to know Galuppi's music, and that Browning does not provide any description of what the music is really like. [6]
The poem is written in the first person, but the voice is not that of Browning himself: the speaker, unlike the poet, has never been out of England, and is picturing life in 18th-century Venice through his response to Galuppi's music. [6] Schweik comments that the speaker's remarks on Venice include "typical bits and snatches of commonplace, second-hand information" and "misunderstandings that would be characteristic of an Englishman who really knows very little about Venice." [6] The speaker, more interested in science than the arts, [7] even gives Galuppi the wrong first name ("Baldassaro" for the correct "Baldassare", an error perpetuated by some literary critics). [7] [8]
After the speaker's fanciful and superficial evocation of old Venice, in stanzas I to IX, the voice goes on to muse on the nature of immortality, first of art and then of life itself. [6] In stanza X, the speaker ponders on the deaths of Galuppi's original audiences, and in the following stanzas he contemplates his own mortality. [6] By the final stanza, XV, the speaker has come so far from his original complacency as to have real empathy with the people of 18th-century Venice. [6]
The poem inspired a 1989 setting, in modern idiom but with musical quotations from Galuppi's works, by the composer Dominick Argento. [9] The singer-songwriter Kris Delmhorst based her song "Galuppi Baldassare", the first track of her 2006 album Strange Conversation on the poem, using many of the words and theme as a basis for her own lyrics. [10]
Domenico Cimarosa was an Italian composer of the Neapolitan school. He wrote more than eighty operas, the best known of which is Il matrimonio segreto (1792); most of his operas are comedies. He also wrote instrumental works and church music.
Gustav Mahler was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century. In 2016, a BBC Music Magazine survey of 151 conductors ranked three of his symphonies in the top ten symphonies of all time.
Toccata is a virtuoso piece of music typically for a keyboard or plucked string instrument featuring fast-moving, lightly fingered or otherwise virtuosic passages or sections, with or without imitative or fugal interludes, generally emphasizing the dexterity of the performer's fingers. Less frequently, the name is applied to works for multiple instruments.
Baldassare Galuppi was a Venetian composer, born on the island of Burano in the Venetian Republic. He belonged to a generation of composers, including Christoph Willibald Gluck, Domenico Scarlatti, and C. P. E. Bach, whose works are emblematic of the prevailing galant style that developed in Europe throughout the 18th century. He achieved international success, spending periods of his career in Vienna, London and Saint Petersburg, but his main base remained Venice, where he held a succession of leading appointments.
In music, texture is how the tempo, melodic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition, thus determining the overall quality of the sound in a piece. Texture is often described in regard to the density, or thickness, and range, or width, between lowest and highest pitches, in relative terms as well as more specifically distinguished according to the number of voices, or parts, and the relationship between these voices. For example, a thick texture contains many 'layers' of instruments. One of these layers could be a string section, or another brass. The thickness also is changed by the amount and the richness of the instruments playing the piece. The thickness varies from light to thick. A piece's texture may be changed by the number and character of parts playing at once, the timbre of the instruments or voices playing these parts and the harmony, tempo, and rhythms used. The types categorized by number and relationship of parts are analyzed and determined through the labeling of primary textural elements: primary melody (PM), secondary melody (SM), parallel supporting melody (PSM), static support (SS), harmonic support (HS), rhythmic support (RS), and harmonic and rhythmic support (HRS).
The Rialto Bridge is the oldest of the four bridges spanning the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. Connecting the sestieri (districts) of San Marco and San Polo, it has been rebuilt several times since its first construction as a pontoon bridge in 1173, and is now a significant tourist attraction in the city.
Dominick Argento was an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, The Masque of Angels, and The Aspern Papers. He also is known for the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf; the latter earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing, though none of Argento's music approaches the experimental avant-garde fashions of the post-World War II era.
L'Olimpiade is an opera libretto in three acts by Metastasio originally written for an operatic setting by Antonio Caldara of 1733. Metastasio’s plot vaguely draws upon the narrative of "The Trial of the Suitors" provided from Book 6 of The Histories of Herodotus, which had previously been the base for Apostolo Zeno's libretto Gli inganni felici (1695). The story, set in Ancient Greece at the time of the Olympic Games, is about amorous rivalry and characters' taking places to gain the loved one. The story ends with the announcement of two marriages.
Trochaic octameter is a poetic meter that has eight trochaic metrical feet per line. Each foot has one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Trochaic octameter is a rarely used meter.
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Peter Seivewright is a British pianist. After music studies at Oxford, he was a post-graduate student at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where he studied piano with Ryszard Bakst.
Strange Conversation is an album by singer/songwriter Kris Delmhorst, released in 2006.
The Teatro San Moisè was a theatre and opera house in Venice, active from 1620 to 1818. It was in a prominent location near the Palazzo Giustinian and the church of San Moisè at the entrance to the Grand Canal.
Andrea Adolfati was an Italian composer who is particularly remembered for his output of opera serias. His works are generally conventional and stylistically similar to the operas of his teacher Baldassare Galuppi. Although his music largely followed the fashion of his time, he did compose two tunes with unusual time signatures for his day: an air in 5
4 meter and another in 7
4 meter.
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Giuseppe Maria Buini was an Italian composer, organist, librettist and poet. He was a prolific composer of operas, primarily in the opera buffa genre, which were performed in Venice and his native Bologna. Unusually for the period, he also wrote many of the libretti himself. Several of his comic opera libretti were subsequently re-set by other composers. According to Edward Dent, their influence can also be seen in the libretti which Carlo Goldoni later wrote for Baldassare Galuppi. Very little of his music has survived, apart from a book of sonatas for violin and cello and a few individual arias and cantatas.
Anne "Annie" Elizabeth Nicholson Ireland pseud. Mrs Alexander Ireland was an English writer and biographer.
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