Mrs. Ireland says of this poem: "The Toccata as a form of composition is
not the measured, deliberate working-out of some central musical theme
as is the Sonata or _sound_-piece. The _Toccata_, in its early and pure
form, possessed no decided subject, made such by repetition, but bore
rather the form of a capricious Improvisation, or 'Impromptu.'" ("A
Toccata of Galuppi's" by Mrs. Alexander Ireland, published in _London
Browning Society Papers_.)
1. _Galuppi._ Baldassare Galuppi (1706-1784) was an Italian composer
born near Venice. He spent many years in England and Russia. In 1768 he
became organist at St. Mark's, Venice.
4. _Your old music._ At the sound of the music Browning imaginatively
re-creates the Venetian social life of the eighteenth century.
6. _St. Mark's._ The great cathedral. The Doge of Venice used to throw a
ring into the sea from the ship _Bucentaur_ to "denote that the Adriatic
was subject to the republic of Venice as a wife is subject to her
husband."
8. _Shylock's bridge._ The Rialto, a bridge over the Grand Canal. It has
two rows of shops under arcades.
18. _Clavichord._ An instrument with keys and strings, something like a
piano.
19-30. The musical terms in these lines show Browning's knowledge of the
technicalities of the art. To one without such expert knowledge the
exact musical connotation is doubtless obscure. But the epithets and
phrases are in themselves sufficient to suggest the varying moods of
the Venetian merrymakers. The plaintiveness, the sighs, the sense of
death, the trembling hope that life may last, the renewed love-making,
the new round of futile pleasures or evil deeds, the end of it all in
the grave, are clearly brought forth. An elaborate explanation of the
musical terms is given in the notes to the Camberwell edition of
Browning's poems.
31. _But when I sit down to reason._ The first thirty lines of the poem
have recorded the effect of the music in re-creating in the poet's
imagination the gay, careless life of eighteenth century Venice, and its
close in death. Now when the poet endeavors to turn from that picture of
death lurking under smiles, he finds that the cold music has filled his
mind with an inescapable sense of the futility of life, and even his own
chosen mental activities seem to him, along with the rest, hardly more
than dust and ashes. Ambition and enthusiasm fade before the spell of
the music.